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To say that the Trump administration has a couple of vacancies is an understatement. To put it in perspective, by this point in his first term, President Obama had confirmed 151 appointees, whereas Trump only has 43. And it's not because they're not trying or that these are not lucrative positions. It's that, amid the investigations, the low approval rating numbers and notoriously capricious nature of the president, it's been challenging to lure takers. So removing this from the political realm and looking at this from an HR perspective, the question is, how does an organization entice top-tier talent when it's embroiled in chaos?

I've had a problem with snoring for many years and I've hit upon something that works for me, and that is a set of exercises that I do after brushing my teeth and before going to bed at night. I do an exaggerated yawn. I work the muscles at the back of my throat and the base of my tongue. And I, you know, my wife tells me that when I do those exercises regularly I don't snore. When I, you know, forget to do them, go without doing them for several days, then things go lax and I start snoring again. Is there any studies done on the effect of exercises such as that?

In my opinion, yes. From the research I did - and again, I'm not an expert and I'm not a medical scientist, but I looked at my velocity, two to four to 5.8, pre-PSA, less than five percent. There is no good test to differentiate between, you know, aggressive prostate cancer and indolent prostate cancer. It doesn't exist. But in my opinion - and then while - here's the bottom line, I had a Gleason of six at biopsy, and I had two biopsies; because of course prostate cancer are like little mushrooms, they're throughout the prostate. And you're handling them with 12 needles, your probability of hitting them is not 100 percent. So the first biopsy came back negative, although I was pretty sure I had prostate cancer.

So we started to see it right after the Christmas holiday. And mostly we're seeing a drop in the students who are the most recent arrivals in the school system, so the students who have gotten here within the last year. So we have about 120 of the newcomer students, so those students are coming at a rate of about 50 percent. Those students who have gotten to know the school and the school - the United States and the United States system, they actually know that there are rules and that the police actually have to follow the rules. People who are the newest arrivals still carry the trauma from their country that there are no rules, that the police have ultimate power and they can do anything they want to do. So there's still that trauma.

I got hooked on this absurd project several years ago when a friend induced me to make a pudding for a Christmas raffle. I got the recipe from a neighbor who got it from a friend in England, which made me feel that it was especially authentic. The recipe makes two puddings, each with the heft of a bowling ball. I happily sent one of the puddings off to be raffled. Years later, a stranger came up to me to tell me how burdened she had been to be the winner. `I had no idea I'd have to feed it,' she said, still sounding horrified. `It drank all my liquor.' I kept the second pudding for our annual caroling party. When the time came, I artfully arranged the pudding on a bed of greens, poured more brandy on top and set it on fire; the bed of greens, that is. I was aiming to set the brandy alight, but somehow the branches caught. Needless to say, my guests weren't impressed.

Well, I think that it'll be a much easier transition, because if the military is already rolling out the change process well in advance of any rapid shifts in doctrine, and the other issue, it's much like the difference in race back in the mid-'50s or late '40s for Korean War. They had to use mixed units, and slowly, as differing races were mixed in unit, then people said, oh. He's not such a bad guy. Oh, he's not such a bad guy or lady, using men between blacks and whites and other mixed units. So I think in the same way there's many people who apparently are serving now who they already trust and count on as other members of the team who might or might not eventually come out. It's their choice. And then they go, oh, well, he's gay or lesbian? Oh, well, he's not such a bad guy. What's the big deal? And I think that's going to be the difference, as opposed to, oh, here's a court case. You must change tomorrow.

The commonalities would be (unintelligible) scale disaster like this one, that a lot of people are - just need the basics to survive the early days. And, again, that is food and water and shelter. (unintelligible) This is the poorest country in the hemisphere. People were living on the edge before the disaster. Eighty percent of the population lives under the poverty line, lots of very poor, vulnerable children, especially. So you have a very large disaster on top of this really sort of a long-term, simmering humanitarian disaster. So, you know, the vulnerability of people has really increased. The need - the (unintelligible) issues for children are very serious. The country's still recovering from the hurricanes from late 2008.

Well, the Justice Department says while she was studying at American University, she was actually spending a lot of time cozying up to influential people, attending events like that, a National Rifle Association conference - actually several of them. She was a member of that group. She set up meals between Russians and Americans here in D.C. She wrote at least one op-ed piece arguing for an improvement of relations with Russia. And, Noel, of course, as you mentioned, she even turned up at events on the campaign trail. There, she met Donald Trump Jr. and took a photo with him, even though we're told it may have just been a brief encounter. Lots of those photos have been circulating online since her arrest.

Oh, definitely. One of the things that we offer to couples are marriage education classes. Because today, so many people want to get together, but they don't know how to stay together. And so we offer marriage education classes, which go along with the marriage development accounts to help couples be successful. Because it's one thing to be able to save money. But if your relationship is not stable, then the money that you've saved you're not going to benefit from. So we have classes. We use a curriculum called "Basic Training for Couples." And we work with couples over an eight-week period of time to give them the skills to understand why marriage matters, what's the importance of marriage, what does it do for the man, what does it do for the woman, what does it do for children, what does it do to a community when you have strong marriages. We also talk about communication. How do you improve the communication that goes along in a relationship? And the conflict, the conflict which is sure to come. How can this conflict be managed?

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. Camilla is a 300-pound female gorilla in her 30s who lives in the San Diego Zoo. Now, what sets Camilla apart from the rest of the troop is that she became the first gorilla to have its entire genome sequenced. It took an international dream team of more than 60 researchers four years to decipher Camilla's DNA. The genes of other great apes - humans, chimpanzees, orangutans - have all been decoded. So she is the last. And here's the surprising thing: Scientists say that when they matched up genetic data from the four great apes, they found that we humans have more in common with gorillas than we think.

I think we'd all agree on that, that the biggest mystery in particle physics and cosmology is why empty space appears to weigh something. That's literally the case. Most of the energy in the universe - you get rid of stars, you get rid of galaxies, you get rid of all the radiation, you get rid of dust. Empty space appears to have energy, and that's just crazy. It's crazy if you think about it in a general sense, but from a physics perspective, it's kind of crazy except when you apply the laws of quantum and special relativity together, empty space isn't so empty.

Well, they say that they're surprised. Regulators who had offered her some guidance had earlier said, you know, these are real concerns and yet seemed faint in terms of what it means for Sky. And they say, look; we took a lot of pains after the hacking and corruption scandal in the U.K. to make reforms that not only affected those properties but went company-wide in how we ran things and oversaw things. We put safeguards in place after the accusations came forward about Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly and others at Fox News to ensure that this would be a welcoming workplace for women - in fact for all employees. These are problems in our past. They - you know, we have a huge property. It doesn't amount to that much. I've got to say. These are instances of scandal that in many cases implicate the top executives they've named to run some of their most important properties, their British tabloids which give them - what's not only the root of their fortune for many years but ultimately became a great source of political influence there - Fox News really the economic engine driving the Murdoch empire. It's impossible to evaluate the Murdochs and their governance without acknowledging these major episodes.

We know that Dominicans and Puerto Ricans are baseball crazed, but the Dutch, not so much. You can look at the Netherlands baseball team or the Nederlands hunkball(ph) team in the local language as a darling underdog. The Dominican team they defeated twice was made up of players who will be paid over $80 million this year for major league clubs. Only one Dutch player who gets the league minimum is even on a major league roster. So, the Dutch are heading the count. But wait. Considering the Netherlands is at a disadvantage to the Dominican Republic is pretty warped. Per capita income in the Netherlands is the equivalent of over U.S. $41,000 and it's under 9,000 in the Dominican. The population of the Netherlands is almost 16 million. It's only 9.5 million in the Dominican. So, the larger, much wealthier nation won.

Well, what he was doing in his decision was saying, A, the Supreme Court has already said that things like this button could be impermissible factors, and then he relied on 9th Circuit case laws to sort of refine that test. And essentially what was argued today was, you know, he can go ahead and use the 9th Circuit law to redefine what the Supreme Court test was. And so that was really the issue today, is whether you get to sort of mess with the test a little bit using lower court law or if you just have to defer to the Supreme Court law. And that's essentially, as I said, it looked like that was what the Supreme Court was buying today.

Meantime, in downtown Brussels, scores of people filled Place de la Bourse as they have since the bombings. It's a makeshift memorial that honors the victims with flowers, candles and posters. But today police were concerned about protests across the city and ordered people not to congregate. Hundreds of police entered the plaza in vans, on foot and on horseback. Last Sunday, protesters described as right-wing nationalists stormed the memorial and disrupted what had been a peaceful vigil. On that occasion, police used water cannons but made few arrests. Today was very different. They detained people for simply standing and watching. The even took several journalist and a noted human rights advocate into custody. Nadia Boomuhzoh was in the crowd.

Sure, and it's a very complicated issue that we're going to be unraveling for a long time. I'll tell you what strikes me about this just as a matter of sort of public decision-making and what it shows about this president and what's ahead for him. You can think of public issues, there are some of them that while they're very controversial are essentially simple. For example, tax cuts or most social issues, people know what they're about even if they're divisive. There's another category of issue where the issues themselves are complicated, but they're presented as if they were simple. Health care or climate issues are extremely complex, but people tend to take very sort of strong and decisive stands, pro or con. Then there's the category of issue that is complicated and very complex and presented that way, and that's relatively rare in public discourse but I think that's what the president presented in his speech, and the whole months-long decision-making process, where he said this will depend on whether dealing with this issue in Afghanistan will have an effect on a sort of worldwide dispersed terrorist threat and whether sending more foreign troops will do more good than sort of than it creates friction or irritation.

The rusting remnants of Americas first great amusement park provide the setting of a new graphic novel that has its start in Coney Island, but comes to range over continents and centuries. Luna Park tells the story of a deserter from the Russian army who washes ashore in Brooklyn and how his experiences in Chechnya find echoes in America. The writer is Kevin Baker, best known for Dreamland and other novels about New York City. If youve read Luna Park or if youd like to talk with him about novels and graphic novels, our phone number is 800-989-8255. Email is talk@npr.org. You can also see some images from the novel on our Web site. Thats at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION.

From what I understand, there were probably less than 20. A few of them lived down outside of the - on the outside outskirts of town towards Merrimack, which is just to the north, lived down near a lumber yard. But for the most part, it was pretty much a melting pot. There were Greeks and Italians and Irish and French - a lot of French, obviously, being a big, strong community there. But it's funny how the fit in so seamlessly and were welcomed so easily, because there really hadn't been much exposure up there for many people that lived in the city.

If the rule is upheld, then you get the double Olympic champion and the best 800-meter runner in the world at the moment being forced to take medication for the rest of her career. It's that simple. If she wins the challenge, then she runs free, as they say. So a significant part of this debate falls on the women who don't have these high levels of testosterone. Some of them feel that these athletes with high levels of testosterone are unbeatable no matter how hard you train. Caster says it's discrimination. This is me. I'm running naturally. I've not done anything that you said I shouldn't do. And yet you still say that it's not good enough.

And they, in a way, try and isolate themselves from what maybe the rest of society - or some part of that society that doesn't agree with this war - feels. So they just dig in and they create their own value system. And it might not be one that the rest of us like very much. I mean, urinating on the bodies of dead soldiers maybe would repel most of us. And I'm sure it is repellent. But some - I think that they have rituals and the support, their group cohesion. And that's very important for them - very important for them to be able to carry on doing the work that they have to do, whether we agree with it or not. But it's the work that they are told to do.

And the parents actually had us over a year later for just a cookout, just to thank us, and, you know, it strikes to your heart because these are people that you work with. And then we, in turn, go to our day jobs and just have this, you know, this emotional stuff, baggage that we just need to deal with. And our department's pretty good about it. And I certainly - I make a point to, you know, deal with it and not bottle it up, because there are certainly guys that do that, and I just know that it comes back to get them in different ways, and I don't - yeah.

One institution that has garnered a lot of criticism for doing so is Penn State, which some activists accuse of acting as a cheerleader for Marcellus Shale drilling. Michael Arthur is a professor of geoscience at Penn State and the head of the Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research. Arthur says he does take industry money for some of his own research because it helps buy updated equipment for his students. But he says he's careful not to take industry money for research that looks at controversial gas drilling practices, like his work on how methane may leak into private water wells.

This is Talk Of The Nation. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Howard Engel is, by his own admission, a word addict. As a boy, he read voraciously. As a man, he learned how to turn that skill into a career, first as a broadcaster for the CBC then as the popular and award-winning author of a dozen crime novels featuring detective Benny Cooperman. And then one sunny summer morning, he picked up his newspaper to find the words incomprehensible. As soon as he figured out that it wasn't a joke, he realized he'd had a stroke that left him with a rare condition sometimes called "word blindness." The writer and word addict could no longer read, but he could still write. His new memoir about his stroke and his struggles with his disability about memory and vision and life is called "The Man Who Forgot How to Read." Later in the program, we'll listen to excerpts of Senator Obama's speech in Berlin earlier today and talk about his two audiences, but first, if you'd like to talk with Howard Engel about his stroke, what it changed and what it didn't, or about Benny Cooperman, our phone number here in Washington is 800-989-8255. The email address is talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our blog at npr.org/blogofthenation.

No. He's - he is finishing out his sentence. He should be released, you know, shortly, everything else like that. You know, this is one of those things. (Laughing) You know, if you release these people, what happens to them? And you look at somebody like David Hicks, who was the first one that was released, the first one who went through the court proceedings, too. He's now released. He's walking the streets. He's apparently going to write a book and that type of thing as well, but they just - you know, there hasn't - you know, they've just gone to try to get back to their own lives and pick up the pieces of their lives.

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan, in Washington. After Newtown, the president promised to do everything in his power to reduce gun violence. He assigned Vice President Joe Biden to come up with a list of proposals which he received earlier this week. Today, the president took action. This morning at the Eisenhower executive office building, President Obama and Vice President Biden joined victims of the Newtown shooting, as well as children who wrote letters to the president about gun violence in the weeks following the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary. The president read from some of those letters and pointed out that gun violence continues.

Mike Daisey is our guest. He's with us here in Studio 3A. "American Utopias" is his new show. It's showing at Woolly Mammoth here in Washington, D.C. Right now, you're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And I do have to ask you a question. A lot of the listeners will remember your previous show on Steve Jobs and China and Apple, and your appearances on THIS AMERICAN LIFE and the fallout from those appearances. I was struck in your bio by the description of your - you write it was a meteoric career, a brief and meteoric career on THIS AMERICAN LIFE. After a few minutes, meteoric struck me as perfectly apt. It shined very brightly and then did a lot of damage when it crashed and burned.

And we're going to read some emails. Now this is from Kara in Denver, Colorado. "Little Miss Sunshine," not just one underdog, a whole family of losers. They don't even win in the end, but they do win in the sense they discover the importance and strength of family. Karen writes: One of my favorite movies is the celebration of the common man is Preston Sturges' "Sullivan's Travels." Great picture. Second is "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." Let's see. This is from Bill in Radford, Virginia. I've use two films by King Vidor in my political science classes, "American Romance" and "Our Daily Bread." A student, Murray.

And he accused me of being a coward, and he was just getting really worked up about it, and, at one point, I just had to take the kids upstairs because they were just wandering around the house. This was in the evening, and we all sat in the bathroom. We closed the door, and we were just huddling, and I had to say, you know, your dad is not thinking right, and I want you to be careful around him. I know that now he can't move around very fast because of his leg, and I know you could get away if he ever tried to hurt you, but you know, I want you to know that this is not him. It's just the brain tumor, and I remember Noah saying, God, how can you let him talk to you like that? How can you let him treat you like that? And I said, it's just not him.

Well, not many U.S. representatives to the United Nations are policymakers, but she was a member of the Cabinet. She was very close to Ronald Reagan, highly regarded by him. And the fact is, her public diplomacy or lack thereof, some may suggest, I think really had a powerful effect. The Republican Party before Ronald Reagan was not as aggressive on the foreign policy front. That became one of the defining characteristics of the Reagan Republican Party, along with tax cuts. A strong national defense that I think Jean in her own way contributed to it. She was a formidable individual, a powerful speaker quite articulate and forceful and I think she did make a difference in that regard.

It's a dousing rod. It waggles about from side to side on the hinge, as you would expect a car aerial attached to a plastic hinge to do. They may, themselves, have for a period at the beginning thought that it really genuinely did work because of a psychological phenomenon called the Ideomotor effect, which is the same principle that convinces people that ouija boards work, apparently, which is that in response to suggestion or expectation, you can make tiny muscular movements entirely involuntary that can cause something that's free swinging or moving to move from side to side in the direction of something that if you were using a divining rod you're looking for.

Yates appealed his conviction, contending that the Sarbanes-Oxley law, enacted in the wake of the Enron scandal, was intended to bar only the destruction of documents and records, not fish. The federal government countered by noting that the law covered destruction as well of any, quote, "tangible object in a federal investigation." And a tangible object includes fish. But on Wednesday, the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, shot down that argument. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg announced the judgment of the court. The same words sometimes mean different things in different contexts, she said. In the Sarbanes-Oxley law, Congress trained its attention on deception in financial recordkeeping. And we conclude that the tangible object caught by the law's net is one used to record or preserve information and does not include any and every object found on land or in the sea. Joining Ginsburg, Justice Samuel Alito concurred, writing the government's expansive reading of the term tangible object would make little sense. Who wouldn't raise an eyebrow, he said, if a neighbor when asked to identify something similar to a record or document said crocodile?

No, I don't think it's undeserved. I think having villains are great. And I think the only people that it's really unfair to is the Patriots fans only because, you know, it's just weird to suddenly see your team turn into a villain especially during a season that is like a dream season. But at the same time, I think a lot of people, including me, have kind of embraced them. They're, like, all right, we're the villains. Screw it. Let's - I hope we win every game 50 to nothing, you know? But I do think that all that stuff has kind of obscured the fact that this offense is probably the greatest offense ever. And eventually, I think people will start talking about that.

I went to Iraq with the 3rd Battalion 7th Marines. And then I was in Ramadi until I got hurt. It was like a lot of guys - IED blasts. It was a large IED buried under some trash alongside the road. It was at night, actually, so there was no way at all we were actually going to see it. I was on foot. The blast came under the truck that were standing next to and caught me in the legs. There were seven of us injured. Five of us are amputees. We have one leg in between the five of us. The others were just burn injuries and one KIA. He was one of my Marines. And I knew from the time of the blast that my legs were in trouble. If I lived there was going to be some serious problems.

You know, other things - you know, Clay Masters was on this morning, MORNING EDITION, had a nice piece talking about the way that just, you know, the lawn care business has been affected. I mean it does start to reach in, and you have municipalities right here in Kansas City, where we have a pretty healthy water supply called the Missouri River, and also the Kaw River coming out of Kansas - these suburban communities where people water their lawns to a brilliant emerald green are being told that they can only water every other day. And so there's a little grumbling about that.

You know, it's so interesting being a black man in America writing anything. Because for so long, we've been kept out of so much that almost anything I enter - it's not the first time, it's one of the first times. Anybody, you know, black has ever written this kind of work. And so that's kind of very interesting to me. You know, in a country that's so unbelievably dominated by the concept of capitalism where people, you know, just - they really like - I specialize. I put the left front tire on the Pinto. Okay fine. If you're building cars, maybe you need somebody that does that. But in my life, you know, as a writer, I can go anywhere. I can do anything. And if I want to say something that's different, I may have to find a different genre to say it.

There's an old joke about a cop who's walking his beat in the middle of the night, and he comes across a guy under a street lamp who's looking at the ground and moving from side to side, and the cop asks him what he's doing. The guys says he's looking for his keys. So the cop takes his time and looks over and kind of makes a little matrix and looks for about two, three minutes. No keys. The cop says, "Are you sure? Hey buddy, are you sure you lost your keys here?" And the guy says, "No, actually I lost them down at the other end of the street, but the light is better here." (Laughter) There's a concept that people talk about nowadays called "big data." And what they're talking about is all of the information that we're generating through our interaction with and over the Internet, everything from Facebook and Twitter to music downloads, movies, streaming, all this kind of stuff, the live streaming of TED. And the folks who work with big data, for them, they talk about that their biggest problem is we have so much information. The biggest problem is: how do we organize all that information? I can tell you that, working in global health, that is not our biggest problem. Because for us, even though the light is better on the Internet, the data that would help us solve the problems we're trying to solve is not actually present on the Internet. So we don't know, for example, how many people right now are being affected by disasters or by conflict situations. We don't know for, really, basically, any of the clinics in the developing world, which ones have medicines and which ones don't. We have no idea of what the supply chain is for those clinics. We don't know — and this is really amazing to me — we don't know how many children were born — or how many children there are — in Bolivia or Botswana or Bhutan. We don't know how many kids died last week in any of those countries. We don't know the needs of the elderly, the mentally ill. For all of these different critically important problems or critically important areas that we want to solve problems in, we basically know nothing at all. And part of the reason why we don't know anything at all is that the information technology systems that we use in global health to find the data to solve these problems is what you see here. This is about a 5,000-year-old technology. Some of you may have used it before. It's kind of on its way out now, but we still use it for 99 percent of our stuff. This is a paper form. And what you're looking at is a paper form in the hand of a Ministry of Health nurse in Indonesia, who is tramping out across the countryside in Indonesia on, I'm sure, a very hot and humid day, and she is going to be knocking on thousands of doors over a period of weeks or months, knocking on the doors and saying, "Excuse me, we'd like to ask you some questions. Do you have any children? Were your children vaccinated?" Because the only way we can actually find out how many children were vaccinated in the country of Indonesia, what percentage were vaccinated, is actually not on the Internet, but by going out and knocking on doors, sometimes tens of thousands of doors. Sometimes it takes months to even years to do something like this. You know, a census of Indonesia would probably take two years to accomplish. And the problem, of course, with all of this is that, with all those paper forms — and I'm telling you, we have paper forms for every possible thing: We have paper forms for vaccination surveys. We have paper forms to track people who come into clinics. We have paper forms to track drug supplies, blood supplies — all these different paper forms for many different topics, they all have a single, common endpoint, and the common endpoint looks something like this. And what we're looking at here is a truckful of data. This is the data from a single vaccination coverage survey in a single district in the country of Zambia from a few years ago, that I participated in. The only thing anyone was trying to find out is what percentage of Zambian children are vaccinated, and this is the data, collected on paper over weeks, from a single district, which is something like a county in the United States. You can imagine that, for the entire country of Zambia, answering just that single question ... looks something like this. Truck after truck after truck, filled with stack after stack after stack of data. And what makes it even worse is that's just the beginning. Because once you've collected all that data, of course, someone — some unfortunate person — is going to have to type that into a computer. When I was a graduate student, I actually was that unfortunate person sometimes. I can tell you, I often wasn't really paying attention. I probably made a lot of mistakes when I did it that no one ever discovered, so data quality goes down. But eventually that data, hopefully, gets typed into a computer, and someone can begin to analyze it, and once they have an analysis and a report, hopefully, then you can take the results of that data collection and use it to vaccinate children better. Because if there's anything worse in the field of global public health — I don't know what's worse than allowing children on this planet to die of vaccine-preventable diseases — diseases for which the vaccine costs a dollar. And millions of children die of these diseases every year. And the fact is, millions is a gross estimate, because we don't really know how many kids die each year of this. What makes it even more frustrating is that the data-entry part, the part that I used to do as a grad student, can take sometimes six months. Sometimes it can take two years to type that information into a computer, And sometimes, actually not infrequently, it actually never happens. Now try and wrap your head around that for a second. You just had teams of hundreds of people. They went out into the field to answer a particular question. You probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on fuel and photocopying and per diem. And then for some reason, momentum is lost or there's no money left, and all of that comes to nothing, because no one actually types it into the computer at all. The process just stops. Happens all the time. This is what we base our decisions on in global health: little data, old data, no data. So back in 1995, I began to think about ways in which we could improve this process. Now 1995 — obviously, that was quite a long time ago. It kind of frightens me to think of how long ago that was. The top movie of the year was "Die Hard with a Vengeance." As you can see, Bruce Willis had a lot more hair back then. I was working in the Centers for Disease Control and I had a lot more hair back then as well. But to me, the most significant thing that I saw in 1995 was this. Hard for us to imagine, but in 1995, this was the ultimate elite mobile device. It wasn't an iPhone. It wasn't a Galaxy phone. It was a PalmPilot. And when I saw the PalmPilot for the first time, I thought, "Why can't we put the forms on these PalmPilots? And go out into the field just carrying one PalmPilot, which can hold the capacity of tens of thousands of paper forms? Why don't we try to do that? Because if we can do that, if we can actually just collect the data electronically, digitally, from the very beginning, we can just put a shortcut right through that whole process of typing, of having somebody type that stuff into the computer. We can skip straight to the analysis and then straight to the use of the data to actually save lives." So that's what I began to do. Working at CDC, I began to travel to different programs around the world and to train them in using PalmPilots to do data collection, instead of using paper. And it actually worked great. It worked exactly as well as anybody would have predicted. What do you know? Digital data collection is actually more efficient than collecting on paper. While I was doing it, my business partner, Rose, who's here with her husband, Matthew, here in the audience, Rose was out doing similar stuff for the American Red Cross. The problem was, after a few years of doing that, I realized — I had been to maybe six or seven programs — and I thought, you know, if I keep this up at this pace, over my whole career, maybe I'm going to go to maybe 20 or 30 programs. But the problem is, 20 or 30 programs, like, training 20 or 30 programs to use this technology, that is a tiny drop in the bucket. The demand for this, the need for data to run better programs just within health — not to mention all of the other fields in developing countries — is enormous. There are millions and millions and millions of programs, millions of clinics that need to track drugs, millions of vaccine programs. There are schools that need to track attendance. There are all these different things for us to get the data that we need to do. And I realized if I kept up the way that I was doing, I was basically hardly going to make any impact by the end of my career. And so I began to rack my brain, trying to think about, what was the process that I was doing? How was I training folks, and what were the bottlenecks and what were the obstacles to doing it faster and to doing it more efficiently? And, unfortunately, after thinking about this for some time, I identified the main obstacle. And the main obstacle, it turned out — and this is a sad realization — the main obstacle was me. So what do I mean by that? I had developed a process whereby I was the center of the universe of this technology. If you wanted to use this technology, you had to get in touch with me. That means you had to know I existed. Then you had to find the money to pay for me to fly out to your country and the money to pay for my hotel and my per diem and my daily rate. So you could be talking about 10- or 20- or 30,000 dollars, if I actually had the time or it fit my schedule and I wasn't on vacation. The point is that anything, any system that depends on a single human being or two or three or five human beings — it just doesn't scale. And this is a problem for which we need to scale this technology, and we need to scale it now. And so I began to think of ways in which I could basically take myself out of the picture. And, you know, I was thinking, "How could I take myself out of the picture?" for quite some time. I'd been trained that the way you distribute technology within international development is always consultant-based. It's always guys that look pretty much like me, flying from countries that look pretty much like this to other countries with people with darker skin. And you go out there, and you spend money on airfare and you spend time and you spend per diem and you spend for a hotel and all that stuff. As far as I knew, that was the only way you could distribute technology, and I couldn't figure out a way around it. But the miracle that happened — I'm going to call it Hotmail for short. You may not think of Hotmail as being miraculous, but for me it was miraculous, because I noticed, just as I was wrestling with this problem — I was working in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly, at the time — I noticed that every sub-Saharan African health worker that I was working with had a Hotmail account. And it struck me, "Wait a minute — I know the Hotmail people surely didn't fly to the Ministry of Health in Kenya to train people in how to use Hotmail. So these guys are distributing technology, getting software capacity out there, but they're not actually flying around the world. I need to think about this more." While I was thinking about it, people started using even more things like this, just as we were. They started using LinkedIn and Flickr and Gmail and Google Maps — all these things. Of course, all of these things are cloud based and don't require any training. They don't require any programmers. They don't require consultants. Because the business model for all these businesses requires that something be so simple we can use it ourselves, with little or no training. You just have to hear about it and go to the website. And so I thought, what would happen if we built software to do what I'd been consulting in? Instead of training people how to put forms onto mobile devices, let's create software that lets them do it themselves with no training and without me being involved. And that's exactly what we did. So we created software called Magpi, which has an online form creator. No one has to speak to me, you just have to hear about it and go to the website. You can create forms, and once you've created the forms, you push them to a variety of common mobile phones. Obviously, nowadays, we've moved past PalmPilots to mobile phones. And it doesn't have to be a smartphone, it can be a basic phone, like the phone on the right, the basic Symbian phone that's very common in developing countries. And the great part about this is it's just like Hotmail. It's cloud based, and it doesn't require any training, programming, consultants. But there are some additional benefits as well. Now we knew when we built this system, the whole point of it, just like with the PalmPilots, was that you'd be able to collect the data and immediately upload the data and get your data set. But what we found, of course, since it's already on a computer, we can deliver instant maps and analysis and graphing. We can take a process that took two years and compress that down to the space of five minutes. Unbelievable improvements in efficiency. Cloud based, no training, no consultants, no me. And I told you that in the first few years of trying to do this the old-fashioned way, going out to each country, we probably trained about 1,000 people. What happened after we did this? In the second three years, we had 14,000 people find the website, sign up and start using it to collect data: data for disaster response, Canadian pig farmers tracking pig disease and pig herds, people tracking drug supplies. One of my favorite examples, the IRC, International Rescue Committee, they have a program where semi-literate midwives, using $10 mobile phones, send a text message using our software, once a week, with the number of births and the number of deaths, which gives IRC something that no one in global health has ever had: a near-real-time system of counting babies, of knowing how many kids are born, of knowing how many children there are in Sierra Leone, which is the country where this is happening, and knowing how many children die. Physicians for Human Rights — this is moving a little bit outside the health field — they're basically training people to do rape exams in Congo, where this is an epidemic, a horrible epidemic, and they're using our software to document the evidence they find, including photographically, so that they can bring the perpetrators to justice. Camfed, another charity based out of the UK — Camfed pays girls' families to keep them in school. They understand this is the most significant intervention they can make. They used to track the disbursements, the attendance, the grades, on paper. The turnaround time between a teacher writing down grades or attendance and getting that into a report was about two to three years. Now it's real time. And because this is such a low-cost system and based in the cloud, it costs, for the entire five countries that Camfed runs this in, with tens of thousands of girls, the whole cost combined is 10,000 dollars a year. That's less than I used to get just traveling out for two weeks to do a consultation. So I told you before that when we were doing it the old-fashioned way, I realized all of our work was really adding up to just a drop in the bucket — 10, 20, 30 different programs. We've made a lot of progress, but I recognize that right now, even the work that we've done with 14,000 people using this is still a drop in the bucket. But something's changed, and I think it should be obvious. What's changed now is, instead of having a program in which we're scaling at such a slow rate that we can never reach all the people who need us, we've made it unnecessary for people to get reached by us. We've created a tool that lets programs keep kids in school, track the number of babies that are born and the number of babies that die, catch criminals and successfully prosecute them — to do all these different things to learn more about what's going on, to understand more, to see more ... and to save lives and improve lives. Thank you. (Applause)

Well, a yes vote is going to mean 18 changes to Turkey's Constitution, pretty big ones. And I've been out talking to voters out on the streets, lots of yes signs. Pretty quiet on the no side, I have to say. But the one thing that really struck me is how many voters I talked to who don't really understand what's in these changes. So for you, here are the highlights. Up until now, Erdogan has been pretty much nonpartisan. But under this new system, that's going to end. He can rejoin his party. And he gets all the powers that the prime minister has now. He's going to get more influence over judges, selection of judges and legislative oversight gets limited. He's been both prime minister and president, Erdogan has. And now he's on the brink of basically turning him into a single power center for governing the country.

(Reading) A few minutes later, I heard the shower running upstairs. I wiped my hands on the kitchen towel and headed up. The bathroom was shrouded in steam. John's clothes were in a pile on the floor: shirt, pants, shoes, socks, underwear, and a light blue Members Only jacket I'd gotten for him a couple of weeks before. I really liked how it brought out the color of his eyes. I don't think I'm psychic or anything - and it wasn't like there was any kind of visual aura or energy field around John - but I knew that he'd killed somebody. I could just tell. I didn't have to ask, and he didn't have to tell me what he did. I picked up the rest of his clothes and took them into the bedroom. The smell of gunpowder pricked my nose. I found a plastic garbage bag under the sink in the linen closet and back in the bedroom, I stuffed everything into it. I sat on the edge of the bed and waited. John came out a few minutes later wrapped in a towel. I asked the obvious, you going out? Yeah, I'm going into the city.

But first, in Washington, as the cliché goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, more than a thousand words have been spilled recently over a few photos that few people have seen. They're photos of President Bush meeting with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The President has refused to make them public, and he explained why at his news conference yesterday. President GEORGE W. BUSH: I had my picture taken with him, evidently. Uh, I've had my picture taken with a lot of people. Having my picture taken with someone doesn't mean that, you know, I'm, I'm a friend with him, or know him very well. Uh, I've had my picture taken with you.

Yes, of course, we all did in those days. And the owners didn't really respond to that question as you have framed it, which is absolutely right, I think, you know, right on the money. They talked about the game, how the game would splinter and fall apart if there was this - not this kind of control. And they kind of envisioned a future in which there would be just kind of wild free agent thing and trading back and forth. In a sense, what did happen - but Marvin Miller, you know, really made an effort to control that. He limited the amount of free agency that there could be. You had to be six years with a team before you could declare. I mean, he was a visionary in every sense. I think he loved baseball. He wanted baseball to prosper as it did, and he saw that the owners were not necessarily operating in the best interest of the game. They were acting in the best interest of the 1 percent.

Katrina took a toll on the creative process, but magically every gallery reopened and new ones were added. For the first time, artists received grants from national foundations like the Joan Mitchell and Pollock/Krasner Foundation. But lately, the big picture is not created with paint but with blood, artists' blood. The art community has been gathering for rallies, marches, meetings, memorials and jazz funerals because of violence and crime. Just before the New Year, one of our most prominent artists was robbed and vandalized even though the studio had already been devastated by broken levees from Katrina. The thieves wanted the metal from the sculptures and were very skilled with their tools as they sliced up the elegant artwork into pieces.

Well, it's just - I mean, I think it's kind of a mob mentality in a way or kind of a groupthink. But it's really just about - it's just kind of an extreme sport, in a way, and especially that since you can't go to a bar and just have, like, one drink and have a nice chat, which I do now as 21, when you're underage, it's really - there's just pressure to really kind of do it fast and get loaded fast, so then you can go out and be in public. And there's this kind of - I guess there's some pressure involved.

"All That Is," the novel is Salter's version of a contemporary American "War and Peace," with the war, World War II, in this instance, coming first. Day was rising, we hear in the opening pages. A pale Pacific dawn that had no real horizon, with the tops of the early clouds gathering light. The sea was empty. Slowly, the sun appeared flooding across the water and turning it white. A lieutenant JG named Bowman had come on deck and was standing at the railing looking out. And so we meet Philip Bowman, Manhattan-born. After the immediate post-war years as a Harvard student and then after taking a job with a publishing company in his native city, Bowman meets a beautiful woman from horse country Virginia at a bar in New York and falls hard for her. They marry. I was stricken, he describes this years later. I was blinded by it. I didn't know anything.

Yeah, Becky, you bring up a great point here, which is that there's two things that get conflated in the immigration debate - right? - which is illegal immigration, people crossing the border when they don't have permission, and then legal immigration. And we've seen that the Trump administration would also like to restrict legal immigration. And there are industries that are having a hard time functioning without immigrant labor - restaurants, farming. So, David, I'm going to put it to you. What should our legal immigration system look like? The Trump administration would like to see a merit-based system. What's your view?

Yes, Gray Davis and Dianne Feinstein. Gray Davis, of course, was only the second governor in American history to be recalled. That was in 2003. At the time, Feinstein made a very - since become famous statement saying, look, this guy was elected a couple of months ago, re-elected in fact, and his opponents didn't like the outcome of the election, so they're trying to, you know, have another one. And it's interesting that Feinstein herself, when she was the mayor of San Francisco, was actually also the target of a recall campaign. Interestingly, after she signed into effect one of the most restrictive handgun laws - handgun control laws, an anti-gun control, a pro-gun group started collecting petitions to recall her. And I find that really important and also scary because, well, I'm an advocate of gun control and of abortion rights and of many of the other things that many Democrats hold sacred. And I'm terrified at the idea that somebody that I elected holds those views could be a target of a recall campaign, like Feinstein was, simply because they hold those views.

Well, it was a point I was trying to figure out how I was going to weave into this conversation this afternoon, the whole question about the limitations on our ability to engage in nation-building. And I've really had an opportunity to watch that over a 50-year period in Vietnam and Iraq and elsewhere. And I think it's just very, very hard to do. I think that if you look at America's experience going all the way back to our occupation of the Philippines, back at the turn of the last century, our efforts in Central America in the 1910s and 1920s, where we sent these expeditions there that governed these countries, and then immediately their political systems lapsed back into disrepair once we left. So I think we just need to approach that side of things with a little bit of humility as to the limits as to what we can accomplish. And I think that we - when we go into these kinds of situations, I think we should focus on enhancing local security capabilities, and perhaps some of the macro economic issues, help them set those things up. But the idea that we can start helping them devise their political system in some kind of a detail, I think, is very hard indeed.

Hi. We're going to do something that might sound kind of crazy, but I figure it can't hurt to try. We're going to put a garden in the backyard. We have lots of sunshine, we can grow stuff year round here, and if push comes to shove, we're also going to buy chickens because it takes three months for chickens to grow up, and we'll start a little chicken yard. And we have friends who did it recreationally, and save a ton of money, and money is what's hurting us. We have a small business that's probably going to dry up, and I'm finishing law school, so we're mostly in debt, not a lot of assets, but that's how we're going to try save money.

Well, that's what somebody said to me the other day. I said but I don't understand, you know, who's buying it? I mean, people have said - nobody's jumping up and saying, oh, I'm buying some of this stuff because there is a reputational risk of dealing with any of this illicit oil. But there has been a network of smuggling. It's not new. And they're not doing it directly. They're doing it through brokers. And then the brokers take it and sell it on. So if you wanted to make a quick buck, you don't really care where it comes from. I mean, Iran was doing it during sanctions. Iraq was doing it when they were under U.N. sanctions. And somehow they found buyers. So it's nothing new that there is a network of smuggling. It's historic. It's been there for a long time. And yes, they will fight each other on the ground, but at the same time, do business together. It's something that we don't comprehend, but it is going on.

The Trump administration's bold talk of a big border tax on imports from Mexico has deepened a growing rift between the U.S. and its neighbor to the south. A meeting between President Trump and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto scheduled for next week was canceled, but the two leaders talked by phone this morning. Donald Trump has said the border tax would be one way to make Mexico pay for his border wall. The Mexican president rejects that. NPR's John Ydstie joins us now to talk about just what form the tax might take and how it might affect American and Mexican consumers and producers. Hi, John.

Well, that happened to one scientist at MIT, and he didn't just complain about It. He got to thinking, what if instead of having to remember to plug in my cell phone every night, I could charge it wirelessly just by sitting in the same room as the power source? Well, that day may not be too far off because some physicists and electrical engineers at MIT have just announced that they can light up a 60-watt lightbulb from seven feet away. And what's amazing about this? They don't use any wires. There are no wires connected to the bulb. They use magnets. How does that happen?

Oh my goodness, I cannot believe that I am speaking to Elton John right now. I adore your music, sir, and I really, really appreciate your activism. I have a family member who I love very much who is HIV-positive, and I've not been able to, I guess, breach the subject with her. I believe that she knows that I'm aware, and I've been aware for a few years. And you know, when I found out that she was positive, it really upset me, and I wrote research papers on it, and I really tried to talk to other people about the stigmatization. And I just realized recently that I've never spoken to her about it directly. And I guess my question is: Is there an eloquent way to go about discussing this with somebody, because it is so personal and so stigmatized?

Well, I think there are people who are a little bit uncomfortable. Many people - not just African-Americans - believe there still needs to be forthright, honest conversations about race, obviously. In Black History Month's speech that the attorney general, Eric Holder, gave, Eric Holder said, in things racial we always have been and continue to be in too many ways - here I'm quoting, "essentially a nation of cowards." Now, that sparked a large debate, because how can you be a nation of cowards when you just elected the first black president? But when The New York Times asked President Obama about this in an interview, here's what he said, and here I'm quoting, "I'm not somebody who believes that constantly talking about race somehow solves racial tensions," end quote.

Well, that's what's conventionally thought. I respectfully dissent from that. I have a book coming out in September called "America's Unwritten Constitution," and I have a whole chapter on how political parties are part of our Constitution from start to finish. First of all, very strictly speaking, textually, the poll tax amendment refers to primary elections. That's the 24th Amendment, and so that's referenced. The 12th Amendment revises the presidential election system, and it does so quite emphatically to support an emerging two-party presidential system that was aborting, with Jefferson leading one party, and Adams and - leading the other party, Adams and Hamilton and Marshall.

Well, good afternoon, everybody. I remember when I was a child during that time period, and I had been raised on an old plantation that had been in the family many, many generations. And at the time of the boycott I was in Montgomery, and I remember getting on the bus with my family. And it's when - before the boycott, you know, as a child I always liked sitting in the back of the bus but wasn't allowed to. You know, mom and dad say no, no, no, you sit up here with us, and that's where the black people sit. And - but I remember during the boycott, getting on the bus, and all of a sudden there were no - then for about a year there were no black people on the bus and I just got a big thrill out of being able to sit in the back.

Well, this is a really classic blame the victim strategy, so instead of blaming the people who actually have the power to make these decisions, you're blaming the victims of the fallout of this. And I think one of the key issues, to me, is the lack of visibility of stories of people of color in the media. I mean, when we talk about who's affected by this economic crisis, we hear about Wall Street and Main Street. You know, we see the Lehman Brothers bankers leaving their offices with, you know, their stuff in cardboard boxes, we hear about, sort of, the white suburban homeowner who's being put in jeopardy, but rarely do you actually see the stories of people of color who are affected by this crisis. And I think that, you know, arguably, in any kind of tough economic time it's often people of color who are disproportionately affected by that. And yet those stories are rendered completely invisible by the media.

Renee, when I came here, you know, a lot of people had talked to me about a culture of dependency in Afghanistan and said that as long as we provided Afghanistan support they would take it and they would never grow their capabilities. I have seen exactly the opposite. When I first came here, there wasn't much of a connection between the Afghan forces and the Afghan people. And today, there is an extraordinary sense of ownership by the Afghan people and the Afghan security forces, it is an extraordinary sense of pride that the people had, that they actually had their own young men and in women providing security for Afghanistan. So at least today, the things that have struck me most is that sense of accountability and responsibility and leadership and the sense of ownership that the Afghan people have for their security forces.

But nonetheless, it's the Speaker's responsibility to take care of them as he would his own children. And he's done his job wonderfully in Congress for decades. But he lapsed. And I don't think he can oversee the investigation. I don't think Republicans should continue to consider him their Speaker. They should ask for a new one, even though it's only 35 days before the election. And I understand the politics of it all. And I understand and I suspect the Democrats probably leaked the stuff out just at the right time. I mean, it came out the last day of the legislative session of the year before the election.

The complaints were filed with the Department of Education, which will decide whether to investigate. A spokesman for Columbia declined to comment, but in a statement he said reforms at the school will continue. Columbia is just the latest among dozens of schools that are facing charges for allegedly mishandling sexual assaults under Title IX and the Cleary Act. That's in part because of a change in the way the laws are enforced, but it's also because students from different schools are building networks to teach each other how to file complaints and to support each other. S. Daniel Carter(ph) directs the 32 National Campus Safety Initiative.

Well, you know, that's for, you know, President Obama to, you know, to flesh out for the country. I don't begrudge anyone for, you know, talking about the policy lessons from a tragedy like this, you know, whether it's conversation about gun control or mental health treatment or school safety. But for those of us that are sort of living this, that are on the ground just trying to make sure that people are safe and family members are notified, you know, we're just not thinking about this right now - and we will. You know, I think that myself and Senator Blumenthal and Governor Malloy, we are going to, you know, take a serious look at the lessons that can be learned here and whether there are calls to action, which I imagine there are. You know, but for those of us that are sort of living this right now in the town of Newtown, you know, we'll leave it to others to talk about policy right now. We just got to make sure that we're giving people the resources that they need.

I think many of the protesters out here in Tahrir Square, below me, see that as really unacceptable. I mean, the majority see Omar Suleiman as sort of Mubarak the Second, someone who's entrenched in what they see as an oppressive regime. They don't want to just see Omar Suleiman in place for six months or a year. But I have to say, influential elites and some opposition parties, Linda, increasingly see this option as the only real way out of the crisis. They, you know, they point out that moving from dictatorship to democracy is obviously going to take time. There needs to be constitutional and judicial reforms, and a lot of work needs to be done to create viable parties and set the conditions to hold free elections.

The raid caused intense arguments in Utah. Did the agents give Matthew Stewart enough time to answer the door? Did he know that the intruders were police? Those questions were never answered in court because Stewart died in jail, apparently a suicide. But deeper questions - questions about how often the police use these tactics and why - those questions maybe could be answered. So last year, Utah's legislature told police agencies to start tracking their deployment of tactical groups. The first numbers came out a couple of weeks ago. State Sen. Mark Madsen is in his office at the Capitol, and he's looking at the breakdown of the reasons for tactical operations.

He had time to talk to both of them but no time to talk to the Congress. And what he's done is a clear violation of both the Constitution and the War Powers Act. The Constitution says that the Congress commits our military to war. He is just the commander-in-chief. This is not the king's army. And the War Powers Act says that he can only commit our troops, our military, to combat under three circumstances. One, a declaration of war. We didn't do that. Secondly, specific authorization by the Congress. I guess if we gave him money, that would be tantamount to specific authorization. We didn't do that. The third says that he can commit our troops if there's an immediate threat against the United States. There is no way that you could argue that what's happening over in Libya is an immediate threat against the United States.

We think broadly it's somewhere around the third millennium BC but we haven't got any precise dates. The only monument that is now precisely dated within the Avery complex is Silvery Hill, and that was built within a decade either side of 2400 BC. It's a fantastic monument. It's one of the most pointless kind of labor anyone can think of. Haul up as much soil as you can and leave a flat platform at the top. I think one of the really interesting things though, is it seems to be the very last of these great super monuments, of which Stonehenge is obviously the classic example. And after that, nobody can be bothered to get together in large numbers to do this kind of public labor anymore. So it's a really interesting point.

...and tackle, you know, difficult, complex adult issues that it seemed we're going over the narrator's head. About - when my son was a couple of years old, I decided to drop her a note, and I just addressed it to her name and her town, and I sent her a copy of my own book. And I just said that - I sent a picture of my son, as well. Well, she wrote back, to my surprise. And it was such a gracious note. It was just lovely. And she mentioned she'd have trouble reading my book because her eyesight is bad, but she said that my son was very handsome and looked like he could bear the name, which, of course, came from a Greek general and politician.

This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan. Nearly 11 years after the terror attacks on 9/11, America's attitudes have shifted. In the latest survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a majority of Americans continue to want the country to play a strong role in the world. They are, in the words of the survey, increasingly selective about how and where to engage in the world. You can find a link to that survey at or website, npr.org. If your mind's been changed about America's role in the world since 9/11, call and tell us why. Phone number, 800-989-8255. Email talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Our guests are Jane Harman, who served nine terms in Congress representing California's 36th District, now director, president and CEO of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and just off a panel this afternoon on the result of the Chicago Council survey.

As a child, Karen's mother had this romantic notion of China, after being introduced to Chinese culture in the third grade. She always dreamed of seeing the country and now, though it's less romantic what she had envisioned, she still approaches it like an adventure. Karen's Mother: I was in a bus station. I couldn't find any sign that said where the toilet was. I went and asked one of the women, I went to a security guard, I tried to say what I wanted, nobody understood. Finally, I squatted and they said, oh. They understood I meant looking for the squat toilet.

I don't think there were any big surprises. The big question going in was, would the president really do what he needed to do? Would we see - maybe the best way to put it is, would we see both President Obamas? Would we see the one who has been delivering very tough, very blunt, very direct talk about the crisis in the economy, too tough, some people say? Or would we see the one that we saw from the campaign who lifted people up with his soaring rhetoric? Would we see that message of hope, for lack of a better word, come through? And I think we really did see a president balancing both of those things, starting with the tougher stuff, providing the conviction that the U.S. will pull through this and has the resources to do it.

Yeah. Well, you know they're different if you look at the different words. One saying linguistitions have said is that - well, let me just mention pig noise. They say that pig noise - that the words are not - but the relationship between words and their meaning is arbitrary because pig noise is in English is oink and in Norway it goes something like niff niff or so or something and in Russian, Steven Pinker says in Russian pigs go chrju or something. Who knows how how that's pronounced? So, you know what? I Googled Russian pigs go, and I found out that in Russian pigs go hroo, hroo. Note that these are rolled R's and the H is more of a HK sound like when you try to build a loogey.

Well, it is a human right to them. They also, you know, they deny that they actually assist in suicide. They say, I mean, you've heard the tape earlier on the show, they say they hold a person's hands and direct them to literature. That they're not actively involved in committing the suicide. They also deny - there are charges of racketeering, in this case. The three charges are assisting in a suicide, tampering with evidence and racketeering. And the tampering with evidence, obviously, goes to moving the equipment out once it's over. And the racketeering goes to, basically, that they're a group involved in this activity. And they say this is a ridiculous charge that the state of Georgia is bringing against them.

That's Fatah lawmaker and Abbas advisor, Abdullah Abdullah. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, he says, seems unwilling or unable to make good on recent, relatively minor pledges aimed at confidence building. After Olmert and Abbas's first formal meeting in late December, Olmert promised to lift some roadblocks in the occupied West Bank and transfer some of the Palestinian tax revenue Israel has withheld since Hamas's election win one year ago. Instead of progress, Abdullah fumes, Palestinians got a deadly Israeli military raid into Ramallah, the seat of Fattah's power, just as Olmert was meeting with Egypt's president to try to advance the peace process.

Hi. I was pretty compellingly convinced by President Obama's contention that our actions have consequences because, to a large degree, the question now is even if, you know, President Bush's policies were correct, what is the impact of Guantanamo in the future? And it seems to me that Vice President Cheney's belief is that if anyone questions what they did or questions the possibility that having that prison open, you know, could harm us, they're just blaming America, which I find, frankly, ridiculous. There's lots of people out there who don't like us. And it's very possible that the actions over the past eight years did keep us safe. But those same people in prisons right now are, you know, people who don't like us. Frankly, without bringing those, you know, those prisoners over to America could be compelled to attack us simply out of a belief that we are inconsistent in our values.

The reason I believe it is, this is a unique situation. We have, on the one hand, a wide array of outside interest groups who support this bill that spans the political spectrum. We had the AFL-CIO and U.S. Chamber of Commerce negotiating an agreement on what we call future flow of workers to come in in the future. We have the farm growers and the farm workers. We have the high-tech companies who want highly skilled workers to come into the country. So, we have, again, an unprecedented coalition of interest. Secondly, we have political motivation on both sides. The Democrats want to support groups that have been faithful to us in recent elections and Republicans wants to make inroads with those groups. And finally, unlike almost any situation I can think of, there is no heavily financed opposition to comprehensive reform. The only people who are opposed that we've been able to determine to this comprehensive package are basically Tea Party Americans. So, I think all the odds are, and all the interest groups and the power in the country, are in alignment in passing comprehensive reform. And ultimately I think that will prevail.

Well, depends who you ask, but yeah, I mean, we haven't had a crisis until the last few months, for sure. I think where people have been very unhappy is that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did not just - now, they didn't directly issue loans, they were like - basically, you could think of them as mortgage wholesalers who provided the financing for private banks to issue mortgages. But basically, what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did is, they didn't just get loans for the poorest people or the highest risk people, or the people who couldn't afford homes. They got - they arranged for homes for a lot of people, more than half of the homes in America. They became so big, I am pretty sure, and I checked this with a bunch of people today, they are the largest companies ever in the history of the world by a long shot. In fact, together...

Well, he seems to have accomplished one thing. He has calmed down the tone. And he's quieted some of these tensions and conspiracy theories and rumors that have just been rising here among the public and fueled by a pro-government media and some officials, we must say. And one suspicion, of course, has been that the U.S. might have known in advance about the coup, if not had a role in it. Biden today denied that very emphatically. At one point, he was saying that this first news of the coup attempt took both him and President Obama completely by surprise. Here's how he put it.

The Value of Nothing: Out of Nothing Comes Something. That was an essay I wrote when I was 11 years old and I got a B+. (Laughter) What I'm going to talk about: nothing out of something, and how we create. And I'm gonna try and do that within the 18-minute time span that we were told to stay within, and to follow the TED commandments: that is, actually, something that creates a near-death experience, but near-death is good for creativity. (Laughter) OK. So, I also want to explain, because Dave Eggers said he was going to heckle me if I said anything that was a lie, or not true to universal creativity. And I've done it this way for half the audience, who is scientific. When I say we, I don't mean you, necessarily; I mean me, and my right brain, my left brain and the one that's in between that is the censor and tells me what I'm saying is wrong. And I'm going do that also by looking at what I think is part of my creative process, which includes a number of things that happened, actually — the nothing started even earlier than the moment in which I'm creating something new. And that includes nature, and nurture, and what I refer to as nightmares. Now in the nature area, we look at whether or not we are innately equipped with something, perhaps in our brains, some abnormal chromosome that causes this muse-like effect. And some people would say that we're born with it in some other means. And others, like my mother, would say that I get my material from past lives. Some people would also say that creativity may be a function of some other neurological quirk — van Gogh syndrome — that you have a little bit of, you know, psychosis, or depression. I do have to say, somebody — I read recently that van Gogh wasn't really necessarily psychotic, that he might have had temporal lobe seizures, and that might have caused his spurt of creativity, and I don't — I suppose it does something in some part of your brain. And I will mention that I actually developed temporal lobe seizures a number of years ago, but it was during the time I was writing my last book, and some people say that book is quite different. I think that part of it also begins with a sense of identity crisis: you know, who am I, why am I this particular person, why am I not black like everybody else? And sometimes you're equipped with skills, but they may not be the kind of skills that enable creativity. I used to draw. I thought I would be an artist. And I had a miniature poodle. And it wasn't bad, but it wasn't really creative. Because all I could really do was represent in a very one-on-one way. And I have a sense that I probably copied this from a book. And then, I also wasn't really shining in a certain area that I wanted to be, and you know, you look at those scores, and it wasn't bad, but it was not certainly predictive that I would one day make my living out of the artful arrangement of words. Also, one of the principles of creativity is to have a little childhood trauma. And I had the usual kind that I think a lot of people had, and that is that, you know, I had expectations placed on me. That figure right there, by the way, figure right there was a toy given to me when I was but nine years old, and it was to help me become a doctor from a very early age. I have some ones that were long lasting: from the age of five to 15, this was supposed to be my side occupation, and it led to a sense of failure. But actually, there was something quite real in my life that happened when I was about 14. And it was discovered that my brother, in 1967, and then my father, six months later, had brain tumors. And my mother believed that something had gone wrong, and she was gonna find out what it was, and she was gonna fix it. My father was a Baptist minister, and he believed in miracles, and that God's will would take care of that. But, of course, they ended up dying, six months apart. And after that, my mother believed that it was fate, or curses — she went looking through all the reasons in the universe why this would have happened. Everything except randomness. She did not believe in randomness. There was a reason for everything. And one of the reasons, she thought, was that her mother, who had died when she was very young, was angry at her. And so, I had this notion of death all around me, because my mother also believed that I would be next, and she would be next. And when you are faced with the prospect of death very soon, you begin to think very much about everything. You become very creative, in a survival sense. And this, then, led to my big questions. And they're the same ones that I have today. And they are: why do things happen, and how do things happen? And the one my mother asked: how do I make things happen? It's a wonderful way to look at these questions, when you write a story. Because, after all, in that framework, between page one and 300, you have to answer this question of why things happen, how things happen, in what order they happen. What are the influences? How do I, as the narrator, as the writer, also influence that? And it's also one that, I think, many of our scientists have been asking. It's a kind of cosmology, and I have to develop a cosmology of my own universe, as the creator of that universe. And you see, there's a lot of back and forth in trying to make that happen, trying to figure it out — years and years, oftentimes. So, when I look at creativity, I also think that it is this sense or this inability to repress, my looking at associations in practically anything in life. And I got a lot of them during what's been going on throughout this conference, almost everything that's been going on. And so I'm going to use, as the metaphor, this association: quantum mechanics, which I really don't understand, but I'm still gonna use it as the process for explaining how it is the metaphor. So, in quantum mechanics, of course, you have dark energy and dark matter. And it's the same thing in looking at these questions of how things happen. There's a lot of unknown, and you often don't know what it is except by its absence. But when you make those associations, you want them to come together in a kind of synergy in the story, and what you're finding is what matters. The meaning. And that's what I look for in my work, a personal meaning. There is also the uncertainty principle, which is part of quantum mechanics, as I understand it. (Laughter) And this happens constantly in the writing. And there's the terrible and dreaded observer effect, in which you're looking for something, and you know, things are happening simultaneously, and you're looking at it in a different way, and you're trying to really look for the about-ness, or what is this story about. And if you try too hard, then you will only write the about. You won't discover anything. And what you were supposed to find, what you hoped to find in some serendipitous way, is no longer there. Now, I don't want to ignore the other side of what happens in our universe, like many of our scientists have. And so, I am going to just throw in string theory here, and just say that creative people are multidimensional, and there are 11 levels, I think, of anxiety. (Laughter) And they all operate at the same time. There is also a big question of ambiguity. And I would link that to something called the cosmological constant. And you don't know what is operating, but something is operating there. And ambiguity, to me, is very uncomfortable in my life, and I have it. Moral ambiguity. It is constantly there. And, just as an example, this is one that recently came to me. It was something I read in an editorial by a woman who was talking about the war in Iraq. And she said, "Save a man from drowning, you are responsible to him for life." A very famous Chinese saying, she said. And that means because we went into Iraq, we should stay there until things were solved. You know, maybe even 100 years. So, there was another one that I came across, and it's "saving fish from drowning." And it's what Buddhist fishermen say, because they're not supposed to kill anything. And they also have to make a living, and people need to be fed. So their way of rationalizing that is they are saving the fish from drowning, and unfortunately, in the process the fish die. Now, what's encapsulated in both these drowning metaphors — actually, one of them is my mother's interpretation, and it is a famous Chinese saying, because she said it to me: "save a man from drowning, you are responsible to him for life." And it was a warning — don't get involved in other people's business, or you're going to get stuck. OK. I think if somebody really was drowning, she'd save them. But, both of these sayings — saving a fish from drowning, or saving a man from drowning — to me they had to do with intentions. And all of us in life, when we see a situation, we have a response. And then we have intentions. There's an ambiguity of what that should be that we should do, and then we do something. And the results of that may not match what our intentions had been. Maybe things go wrong. And so, after that, what are our responsibilities? What are we supposed to do? Do we stay in for life, or do we do something else and justify and say, well, my intentions were good, and therefore I cannot be held responsible for all of it? That is the ambiguity in my life that really disturbed me, and led me to write a book called "Saving Fish From Drowning." I saw examples of that. Once I identified this question, it was all over the place. I got these hints everywhere. And then, in a way, I knew that they had always been there. And then writing, that's what happens. I get these hints, these clues, and I realize that they've been obvious, and yet they have not been. And what I need, in effect, is a focus. And when I have the question, it is a focus. And all these things that seem to be flotsam and jetsam in life actually go through that question, and what happens is those particular things become relevant. And it seems like it's happening all the time. You think there's a sort of coincidence going on, a serendipity, in which you're getting all this help from the universe. And it may also be explained that now you have a focus. And you are noticing it more often. But you apply this. You begin to look at things having to do with your tensions. Your brother, who's fallen in trouble, do you take care of him? Why or why not? It may be something that is perhaps more serious — as I said, human rights in Burma. I was thinking that I shouldn't go because somebody said, if I did, it would show that I approved of the military regime there. And then, after a while, I had to ask myself, "Why do we take on knowledge, why do we take on assumptions that other people have given us?" And it was the same thing that I felt when I was growing up, and was hearing these rules of moral conduct from my father, who was a Baptist minister. So I decided that I would go to Burma for my own intentions, and still didn't know that if I went there, what the result of that would be, if I wrote a book — and I just would have to face that later, when the time came. We are all concerned with things that we see in the world that we are aware of. We come to this point and say, what do I as an individual do? Not all of us can go to Africa, or work at hospitals, so what do we do, if we have this moral response, this feeling? Also, I think one of the biggest things we are all looking at, and we talked about today, is genocide. This leads to this question. When I look at all these things that are morally ambiguous and uncomfortable, and I consider what my intentions should be, I realize it goes back to this identity question that I had when I was a child — and why am I here, and what is the meaning of my life, and what is my place in the universe? It seems so obvious, and yet it is not. We all hate moral ambiguity in some sense, and yet it is also absolutely necessary. In writing a story, it is the place where I begin. Sometimes I get help from the universe, it seems. My mother would say it was the ghost of my grandmother from the very first book, because it seemed I knew things I was not supposed to know. Instead of writing that the grandmother died accidentally, from an overdose of opium, while having too much of a good time, I actually put down in the story that the woman killed herself, and that actually was the way it happened. And my mother decided that that information must have come from my grandmother. There are also things, quite uncanny, which bring me information that will help me in the writing of the book. In this case, I was writing a story that included some kind of detail, period of history, a certain location. And I needed to find something historically that would match that. And I took down this book, and I — first page that I flipped it to was exactly the setting, and the time period, and the kind of character I needed — was the Taiping rebellion, happening in the area near Guilin, outside of that, and a character who thought he was the son of God. You wonder, are these things random chance? Well, what is random? What is chance? What is luck? What are things that you get from the universe that you can't really explain? And that goes into the story, too. These are the things I constantly think about from day to day. Especially when good things happen, and, in particular, when bad things happen. But I do think there's a kind of serendipity, and I do want to know what those elements are, so I can thank them, and also try to find them in my life. Because, again, I think that when I am aware of them, more of them happen. Another chance encounter is when I went to a place — I just was with some friends, and we drove randomly to a different place, and we ended up in this non-tourist location, a beautiful village, pristine. And we walked three valleys beyond, and the third valley, there was something quite mysterious and ominous, a discomfort I felt. And then I knew that had to be [the] setting of my book. And in writing one of the scenes, it happened in that third valley. For some reason I wrote about cairns — stacks of rocks — that a man was building. And I didn't know exactly why I had it, but it was so vivid. I got stuck, and a friend, when she asked if I would go for a walk with her dogs, that I said, sure. And about 45 minutes later, walking along the beach, I came across this. And it was a man, a Chinese man, and he was stacking these things, not with glue, not with anything. And I asked him, "How is it possible to do this?" And he said, "Well, I guess with everything in life, there's a place of balance." And this was exactly the meaning of my story at that point. I had so many examples — I have so many instances like this, when I'm writing a story, and I cannot explain it. Is it because I had the filter that I have such a strong coincidence in writing about these things? Or is it a kind of serendipity that we cannot explain, like the cosmological constant? A big thing that I also think about is accidents. And as I said, my mother did not believe in randomness. What is the nature of accidents? And how are we going to assign what the responsibility and the causes are, outside of a court of law? I was able to see that in a firsthand way, when I went to beautiful Dong village, in Guizhou, the poorest province of China. And I saw this beautiful place. I knew I wanted to come back. And I had a chance to do that, when National Geographic asked me if I wanted to write anything about China. And I said yes, about this village of singing people, singing minority. And they agreed, and between the time I saw this place and the next time I went, there was a terrible accident. A man, an old man, fell asleep, and his quilt dropped in a pan of fire that kept him warm. 60 homes were destroyed, and 40 were damaged. Responsibility was assigned to the family. The man's sons were banished to live three kilometers away, in a cowshed. And, of course, as Westerners, we say, "Well, it was an accident. That's not fair. It's the son, not the father." When I go on a story, I have to let go of those kinds of beliefs. It takes a while, but I have to let go of them and just go there, and be there. And so I was there on three occasions, different seasons. And I began to sense something different about the history, and what had happened before, and the nature of life in a very poor village, and what you find as your joys, and your rituals, your traditions, your links with other families. And I saw how this had a kind of justice, in its responsibility. I was able to find out also about the ceremony that they were using, a ceremony they hadn't used in about 29 years. And it was to send some men — a Feng Shui master sent men down to the underworld on ghost horses. Now you, as Westerners, and I, as Westerners, would say well, that's superstition. But after being there for a while, and seeing the amazing things that happened, you begin to wonder whose beliefs are those that are in operation in the world, determining how things happen. So I remained with them, and the more I wrote that story, the more I got into those beliefs, and I think that's important for me — to take on the beliefs, because that is where the story is real, and that is where I'm gonna find the answers to how I feel about certain questions that I have in life. Years go by, of course, and the writing, it doesn't happen instantly, as I'm trying to convey it to you here at TED. The book comes and it goes. When it arrives, it is no longer my book. It is in the hands of readers, and they interpret it differently. But I go back to this question of, how do I create something out of nothing? And how do I create my own life? And I think it is by questioning, and saying to myself that there are no absolute truths. I believe in specifics, the specifics of story, and the past, the specifics of that past, and what is happening in the story at that point. I also believe that in thinking about things — my thinking about luck, and fate, and coincidences and accidents, God's will, and the synchrony of mysterious forces — I will come to some notion of what that is, how we create. I have to think of my role. Where I am in the universe, and did somebody intend for me to be that way, or is it just something I came up with? And I also can find that by imagining fully, and becoming what is imagined — and yet is in that real world, the fictional world. And that is how I find particles of truth, not the absolute truth, or the whole truth. And they have to be in all possibilities, including those I never considered before. So, there are never complete answers. Or rather, if there is an answer, it is to remind myself that there is uncertainty in everything, and that is good, because then I will discover something new. And if there is a partial answer, a more complete answer from me, it is to simply imagine. And to imagine is to put myself in that story, until there was only — there is a transparency between me and the story that I am creating. And that's how I've discovered that if I feel what is in the story — in one story — then I come the closest, I think, to knowing what compassion is, to feeling that compassion. Because for everything, in that question of how things happen, it has to do with the feeling. I have to become the story in order to understand a lot of that. We've come to the end of the talk, and I will reveal what is in the bag, and it is the muse, and it is the things that transform in our lives, that are wonderful and stay with us. There she is. Thank you very much! (Applause)

What happened was, in May of 1827, in a village called Polstead, in Suffolk, there was a 20-year-old woman, Maria Marten. She had had three children out of wedlock by three different men, and the latest of whom was a local fellow from a farming family called William Corder. Corder was being pressured by her family to marry her, and he had been really resisting this. One day he suddenly said, okay, I'll do it. Let's elope. All of a sudden, she gathered up her things and she was never seen again. Almost a year after Maria Marten had left, they were getting letters from William Corder saying that they had gotten married, and that she was too busy to write to them, and so forth. And her father, while digging in a barn at the edge of their own property, found her body. And there was really no question who did it.

Well, I was actually driving parallel to the plane on a road, a public access road, in the airport, and I just happened to be watching it. As, you know, we drive into the airport, we always just seem to watch the planes as they land and take off while we're driving in. And I was--the weather was really bad. It was raining hard. And I was just one--thinking to myself, `Wow, that plane's out in this weather?' And I was just sort of watching it, watching the road, watching the plane. It wasn't really taking off--because I actually thought it was taking off, so I didn't know what it was doing. It just kept going and going, and I was watching it. There was lightning strikes around and all of a sudden, lightning hit the plane off in the distance, I saw. Then there was some smoke, and it just continued on and just disappeared right down the hill from my view.

Well, we don't know very much because The New York Times, in an attempt to be transparent about the story, said that they had the story a year ago and that the government had asked them to not publish it. They had agreed at that time to do so and that they had spent the intervening year doing additional reporting. Not much more than that was said by The Times. We do know that they had the story before the election. It's not unusual for news organizations within about a two-week zone before an Election Day to say, `Let's not drop a bomb on an election,' within that tight time period because when a story like this breaks, there's a sorting out-period that often has to occur, and that's what we're engaged in now.

Following a conversation with the Branch Davidian isn't easy. They preach a mixture of interpretations from the Book of Revelations and conspiracy theory. Pace says the government attacked Mount Carmel because Koresh's followers had discovered a secret plan - to arm the gangs in the nation's prisons so they could be used to enforce martial law. Pace said the government wanted to cover up their plot. With that in mind, it isn't too surprising that when the Texas Department of Transportation announced that it would build a super highway that might run right through Mount Carmel, the Branch Davidians saw conspiracy written all over it.

Yes, the clear winner is Under Armour. They developed a winter ad campaign that features Lindsay Vonn throughout the advertisement. And they're going to be able to keep that advertisement up and running during the Olympics, when Lindsey is still going to be a topic of conversation, and still going to be a top of mind for a lot of viewers of the Olympics - even though she's not participating. So in a funny twist here, you actually see a sponsor who's going to be able to use an Olympic athlete during the games, in a way that they wouldn't have been otherwise.

I had a really positive response, actually. One of the biggest things I kept hearing was kind of almost like a thank you, because at the time there was all of this discourse around the idea that Senator Obama was a rock star politician, all style, no substance. And people were implying that young voters were drawn to the mystique around him as opposed to his actual policies. And this kind of worked towards dispelling that myth that a new generation of voters didn't know what was going on. I think the other thing that was really cool for me to hear back from people is that they felt that they understood the issue, in that case health care, better after watching the clip. So all in all I feel like it was a positive moment as far as my support of the candidate and as far as like, just representing a different analysis of the role of youth and understanding of youth about what is going on in the campaign.

PAUL S. RYAN: There are some big fish on the IRS's plate now - groups like Crossroads GPS, American Action Network; and on the Democratic-leaning side, League of Conservation Voters; groups that collectively spent hundreds of millions of dollars in 2012 to influence the elections. They're the types of groups that we've been urging the IRS to look at. And we've been given no indication by the IRS that they have been dedicating resources to scrutinizing these bigger fish. The IRS sent long and complex questionnaires to the targeted groups, asking for information on everything from their social media presence to its donors. It's not clear how high up the IRS chain the decision to focus on the applications from conservative groups went. Then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman appeared before a House hearing back in March 2012. He denied such groups were being singled out.

We didn't hear anything, just that they blocked all the streets. So it's about walking distance, two minutes away from us, from our restaurant. And then finally, we have the military and the police in the whole area. They blocked the whole area, so there's no way to enter this area by car. And yeah, so now the traffic is more or less, there's no traffic anymore for the moment. And the police and the military are in front of the houses, walking around, helping people who walk around to our block. They're also with their cars, so - and that's what we see in front of our house for the moment.

My name is Bonnie Smith(ph), and I'm a textile artist. But in the late '80s, a great friend of mine, Gary Schumacher(ph), who lived in Houston, Texas, where I was living at the time, passed away with AIDS. And each time I would go visit him, I would always take him some fresh acorns from the tree because he was locked into this AIDS hospital. And after he passed away, they gave me a poem and a glassed acorn that he had had somebody buy to give me. It took me almost 20 years to get through this poem he wrote. And what it was about was him as an artist painting his room because he had many things to accomplish before he died of AIDS. And then when he was finished painting the room, then he would go.

On the path that American children travel to adulthood, two institutions oversee the journey. The first is the one we hear a lot about: college. Some of you may remember the excitement that you felt when you first set off for college. Some of you may be in college right now and you're feeling this excitement at this very moment. College has some shortcomings. It's expensive; it leaves young people in debt. But all in all, it's a pretty good path. Young people emerge from college with pride and with great friends and with a lot of knowledge about the world. And perhaps most importantly, a better chance in the labor market than they had before they got there. Today I want to talk about the second institution overseeing the journey from childhood to adulthood in the United States. And that institution is prison. Young people on this journey are meeting with probation officers instead of with teachers. They're going to court dates instead of to class. Their junior year abroad is instead a trip to a state correctional facility. And they're emerging from their 20s not with degrees in business and English, but with criminal records. This institution is also costing us a lot, about 40,000 dollars a year to send a young person to prison in New Jersey. But here, taxpayers are footing the bill and what kids are getting is a cold prison cell and a permanent mark against them when they come home and apply for work. There are more and more kids on this journey to adulthood than ever before in the United States and that's because in the past 40 years, our incarceration rate has grown by 700 percent. I have one slide for this talk. Here it is. Here's our incarceration rate, about 716 people per 100,000 in the population. Here's the OECD countries. What's more, it's poor kids that we're sending to prison, too many drawn from African-American and Latino communities so that prison now stands firmly between the young people trying to make it and the fulfillment of the American Dream. The problem's actually a bit worse than this 'cause we're not just sending poor kids to prison, we're saddling poor kids with court fees, with probation and parole restrictions, with low-level warrants, we're asking them to live in halfway houses and on house arrest, and we're asking them to negotiate a police force that is entering poor communities of color, not for the purposes of promoting public safety, but to make arrest counts, to line city coffers. This is the hidden underside to our historic experiment in punishment: young people worried that at any moment, they will be stopped, searched and seized. Not just in the streets, but in their homes, at school and at work. I got interested in this other path to adulthood when I was myself a college student attending the University of Pennsylvania in the early 2000s. Penn sits within a historic African-American neighborhood. So you've got these two parallel journeys going on simultaneously: the kids attending this elite, private university, and the kids from the adjacent neighborhood, some of whom are making it to college, and many of whom are being shipped to prison. In my sophomore year, I started tutoring a young woman who was in high school who lived about 10 minutes away from the university. Soon, her cousin came home from a juvenile detention center. He was 15, a freshman in high school. I began to get to know him and his friends and family, and I asked him what he thought about me writing about his life for my senior thesis in college. This senior thesis became a dissertation at Princeton and now a book. By the end of my sophomore year, I moved into the neighborhood and I spent the next six years trying to understand what young people were facing as they came of age. The first week I spent in this neighborhood, I saw two boys, five and seven years old, play this game of chase, where the older boy ran after the other boy. He played the cop. When the cop caught up to the younger boy, he pushed him down, handcuffed him with imaginary handcuffs, took a quarter out of the other child's pocket, saying, "I'm seizing that." He asked the child if he was carrying any drugs or if he had a warrant. Many times, I saw this game repeated, sometimes children would simply give up running, and stick their bodies flat against the ground with their hands above their heads, or flat up against a wall. Children would yell at each other, "I'm going to lock you up, I'm going to lock you up and you're never coming home!" Once I saw a six-year-old child pull another child's pants down and try to do a cavity search. In the first 18 months that I lived in this neighborhood, I wrote down every time I saw any contact between police and people that were my neighbors. So in the first 18 months, I watched the police stop pedestrians or people in cars, search people, run people's names, chase people through the streets, pull people in for questioning, or make an arrest every single day, with five exceptions. Fifty-two times, I watched the police break down doors, chase people through houses or make an arrest of someone in their home. Fourteen times in this first year and a half, I watched the police punch, choke, kick, stomp on or beat young men after they had caught them. Bit by bit, I got to know two brothers, Chuck and Tim. Chuck was 18 when we met, a senior in high school. He was playing on the basketball team and making C's and B's. His younger brother, Tim, was 10. And Tim loved Chuck; he followed him around a lot, looked to Chuck to be a mentor. They lived with their mom and grandfather in a two-story row home with a front lawn and a back porch. Their mom was struggling with addiction all while the boys were growing up. She never really was able to hold down a job for very long. It was their grandfather's pension that supported the family, not really enough to pay for food and clothes and school supplies for growing boys. The family was really struggling. So when we met, Chuck was a senior in high school. He had just turned 18. That winter, a kid in the schoolyard called Chuck's mom a crack whore. Chuck pushed the kid's face into the snow and the school cops charged him with aggravated assault. The other kid was fine the next day, I think it was his pride that was injured more than anything. But anyway, since Chuck was 18, this agg. assault case sent him to adult county jail on State Road in northeast Philadelphia, where he sat, unable to pay the bail — he couldn't afford it — while the trial dates dragged on and on and on through almost his entire senior year. Finally, near the end of this season, the judge on this assault case threw out most of the charges and Chuck came home with only a few hundred dollars' worth of court fees hanging over his head. Tim was pretty happy that day. The next fall, Chuck tried to re-enroll as a senior, but the school secretary told him that he was then 19 and too old to be readmitted. Then the judge on his assault case issued him a warrant for his arrest because he couldn't pay the 225 dollars in court fees that came due a few weeks after the case ended. Then he was a high school dropout living on the run. Tim's first arrest came later that year after he turned 11. Chuck had managed to get his warrant lifted and he was on a payment plan for the court fees and he was driving Tim to school in his girlfriend's car. So a cop pulls them over, runs the car, and the car comes up as stolen in California. Chuck had no idea where in the history of this car it had been stolen. His girlfriend's uncle bought it from a used car auction in northeast Philly. Chuck and Tim had never been outside of the tri-state, let alone to California. But anyway, the cops down at the precinct charged Chuck with receiving stolen property. And then a juvenile judge, a few days later, charged Tim, age 11, with accessory to receiving a stolen property and then he was placed on three years of probation. With this probation sentence hanging over his head, Chuck sat his little brother down and began teaching him how to run from the police. They would sit side by side on their back porch looking out into the shared alleyway and Chuck would coach Tim how to spot undercover cars, how to negotiate a late-night police raid, how and where to hide. I want you to imagine for a second what Chuck and Tim's lives would be like if they were living in a neighborhood where kids were going to college, not prison. A neighborhood like the one I got to grow up in. Okay, you might say. But Chuck and Tim, kids like them, they're committing crimes! Don't they deserve to be in prison? Don't they deserve to be living in fear of arrest? Well, my answer would be no. They don't. And certainly not for the same things that other young people with more privilege are doing with impunity. If Chuck had gone to my high school, that schoolyard fight would have ended there, as a schoolyard fight. It never would have become an aggravated assault case. Not a single kid that I went to college with has a criminal record right now. Not a single one. But can you imagine how many might have if the police had stopped those kids and searched their pockets for drugs as they walked to class? Or had raided their frat parties in the middle of the night? Okay, you might say. But doesn't this high incarceration rate partly account for our really low crime rate? Crime is down. That's a good thing. Totally, that is a good thing. Crime is down. It dropped precipitously in the '90s and through the 2000s. But according to a committee of academics convened by the National Academy of Sciences last year, the relationship between our historically high incarceration rates and our low crime rate is pretty shaky. It turns out that the crime rate goes up and down irrespective of how many young people we send to prison. We tend to think about justice in a pretty narrow way: good and bad, innocent and guilty. Injustice is about being wrongfully convicted. So if you're convicted of something you did do, you should be punished for it. There are innocent and guilty people, there are victims and there are perpetrators. Maybe we could think a little bit more broadly than that. Right now, we're asking kids who live in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, who have the least amount of family resources, who are attending the country's worst schools, who are facing the toughest time in the labor market, who are living in neighborhoods where violence is an everyday problem, we're asking these kids to walk the thinnest possible line — to basically never do anything wrong. Why are we not providing support to young kids facing these challenges? Why are we offering only handcuffs, jail time and this fugitive existence? Can we imagine something better? Can we imagine a criminal justice system that prioritizes recovery, prevention, civic inclusion, rather than punishment? (Applause) A criminal justice system that acknowledges the legacy of exclusion that poor people of color in the U.S. have faced and that does not promote and perpetuate those exclusions. (Applause) And finally, a criminal justice system that believes in black young people, rather than treating black young people as the enemy to be rounded up. (Applause) The good news is that we already are. A few years ago, Michelle Alexander wrote "The New Jim Crow," which got Americans to see incarceration as a civil rights issue of historic proportions in a way they had not seen it before. President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have come out very strongly on sentencing reform, on the need to address racial disparity in incarceration. We're seeing states throw out Stop and Frisk as the civil rights violation that it is. We're seeing cities and states decriminalize possession of marijuana. New York, New Jersey and California have been dropping their prison populations, closing prisons, while also seeing a big drop in crime. Texas has gotten into the game now, also closing prisons, investing in education. This curious coalition is building from the right and the left, made up of former prisoners and fiscal conservatives, of civil rights activists and libertarians, of young people taking to the streets to protest police violence against unarmed black teenagers, and older, wealthier people — some of you are here in the audience — pumping big money into decarceration initiatives In a deeply divided Congress, the work of reforming our criminal justice system is just about the only thing that the right and the left are coming together on. I did not think I would see this political moment in my lifetime. I think many of the people who have been working tirelessly to write about the causes and consequences of our historically high incarceration rates did not think we would see this moment in our lifetime. The question for us now is, how much can we make of it? How much can we change? I want to end with a call to young people, the young people attending college and the young people struggling to stay out of prison or to make it through prison and return home. It may seem like these paths to adulthood are worlds apart, but the young people participating in these two institutions conveying us to adulthood, they have one thing in common: Both can be leaders in the work of reforming our criminal justice system. Young people have always been leaders in the fight for equal rights, the fight for more people to be granted dignity and a fighting chance at freedom. The mission for the generation of young people coming of age in this, a sea-change moment, potentially, is to end mass incarceration and build a new criminal justice system, emphasis on the word justice. Thanks. (Applause)

That is correct. We were very nervous about it and the fact that she chose these products was great. We then had to put that in gift form for the members of the audience because we didn't have them pre-packaged in gift forms, so we made a nice gift packaging up over at our warehouse and we ended up over there, everybody including myself, wrapping the packages and everyone was there wrapping up soaps and we're all very excited about it. And at this point, we still - we weren't actually sure that those soaps would be chosen, so it was a little nerve-wracking, but it was great and...

Well, I don't think he seems that worried at all and - though, I don't want to say he's not worried. I mean, any time there are protests in this country, it can be unpredictable. You've got this segment of society that's really upset about corruption and also Vladimir Putin's disregard for human rights. And the government - it looks like they're giving permits for many of these protests. And so Putin it looks like is trying to manage this. But if the numbers swell, if there are arrests, if there are clashes with police, you just don't know where this is going to go. So, you know, this is a country that for anyone to actually go out on the streets and protest their government, it's courageous. It's significant. But few think, at this point, that this is any sort of major threat to Putin.

Absolutely. And one thing that we've talked about in our book is the fact that in a lot of ways the egalitarian family form that African-Americans have been basically leading the charge, so to speak, is something that a lot of other communities are looking at as well. You think about 1960s, where a lot of families were in the mainstream - or sorry, not in the mainstream - but in the majority may have been, you know, father-led or male-dominated. Black families are much more egalitarian, much more voice given to women in the family structure. So at that point, it seems like decisions were being made involving both partners. And I think that's happening across many different communities.

That's right. And so if they can't discriminate the language change, what happens is they see these same three women reciting yet new sentences in a new language, but it's the same women. And if they haven't pulled out something about the language, they'll continue to get bored, and their looking time will continue to be lower and lower. However, if they can tell the difference between the two languages -hey, she's doing something different than she was before - then they will be interested again, just like all of us are interested in novelty, and their looking time, their attention gets longer.

The monitors, in any case, have neither the authority nor the capacity to stop what they're witnessing. The question now is what will they report to their superiors and how will that we treat their observations? What were hearing at the moment - and this won't happen for a couple of days yet - but we're hearing that the league is prepared to deliver a fairly cautious report that won't come down to harshly on the regime, perhaps may speak to levels of violence on both sides. And this is a reflection of the fact that they're caught in between the activists, which includes a now free Syrian army, which is made up of defectors which is shooting back - sometimes in defense, sometimes on attack - and the regime itself which says it's fighting armed gangs. So they're really caught in between the violence that they can't control. And it's possible that the Arab League report will reflect that.

One of the things the previous lack of options on Facebook forced was actual communication with words that you write. You can be clear about what you mean. But already, I've seen a confusing array of reactions to posts. Why did five people love the cat video but one person make an angry face? If everyone loves something, is it rude to just like it? And how will these new emojis be interpreted by bosses with their strict social media rules? Does empathy equal endorsement? Wondering about that has ended up occupying a lot of my time this week. So please, if you follow me on Facebook, send me a note, like my post, but save your empathy and your emojis for someone else.

Well, Madeleine, this is one of those bills that nobody is really crazy about. But this is the agreement that was worked out over the weekend between the administration, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the Republican and Democratic leaders in the House and Senate. So there were a lot of different parties at the table and this is what they came up with. It provides $700 billion to bail out the financial services industry. So what you're hearing are the backers of the bill saying, you know, we may not like this, it's not the perfect solution, but there's no other choice. Barney Frank of Massachusetts is the House chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and he led off today's debate. Here's a little bit of what he said.

Yeah. (unintelligible) I get there from other media who want to do it, too, you know. We've been doing it for eight years but for some reason that's just taken off this particular year. You know, I just think people want a little bit more in political coverage and that even includes the media, you know. Matt Taibbi had that article in Rolling Stone this week in which he railed against the way political coverage happens in this country and results in what he'd called mind-numbing trivia. And I think the response that we've had, we had like 100,000 a day taking this shows that people really do want something besides mind-numbing trivia in political coverage.

Hi. I think I have an interesting perspective on this because, although my grandmother is Korean, she was married to white man who was raised in China by a Chinese family. He was orphaned and adopted by a Chinese family. So because he was the man, the culture in the family was Chinese, not Korean. So my dad grew up eating Chinese food, even though he's not Chinese. And this was very confusing to me when I was little because I grew up in Virginia, anything other than white, you know, it must be one category. Are you Chinese or Japanese? That's what people would ask me. I didn't really understand it. I didn't know what it meant. As I've grown older, my features have softened. People don't notice it anymore. They perceive me as white. So I guess you can perceive yourself as anything you want, but people are still going to label you as whatever. As I become more white-looking, people…

N. ELLERBE: You know, I hope that the product that I'm putting out on the field and off the field is something that people can be inspired by. That people can, you know, just say that that guy's doing things the right way. I just really want to be a role model for whoever feels like they need one. So if I can, you know, do positive things and help other people, you know, see the game of football in a positive light then I consider that a success. I've been speaking with Nahshon Ellerbe, senior and star running back at Trinity Christian Academy, and his mother, Roshounda Ellerbe, third-grade teacher at Folsom Elementary School. That is in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas. Thank you both so much for speaking with us.

What would you do if you woke up one day and found out that all your cash was worth nothing? That's what happened in India last November, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave people six weeks to go to the bank and change their suddenly worthless bills out for new ones. There was also a strict daily limit. Modi said the currency change was necessary in order to fight corruption and help bridge the country's economic divide. It has been six months since that change happened, so Stacey Vanek Smith of the Planet Money podcast went to India to see if it's been working.

I mean, everybody is going to have a different answer to that question, because this is such a broad field. I would take it in two different directions. One is - and take this conversation maybe in this direction - is thinking about life outside our solar system. There's a lot of interest now in the likelihood that there are Earth-like planets around other stars. And the Kepler telescope that was launched just a couple of weeks ago is supposed to at least tell us if they exist. The next step beyond that would be to try to characterize their atmospheres, to try to look for signs of life. That requires a whole another generation of very expensive space hardware. So that's one direction I'd go in.

ISIS is trying to take advantage of the sectarian tensions that exists in Sri Lanka, and that sectarian tension is not only in Sri Lanka. It's in South Asia in general. And as you're familiar, you know, Sri Lanka is an incredibly diverse country, ethnically and religiously. And it was engulfed in decades of war with the Tamil Tiger and still have significant tension along cultural and religious lines between the majority Buddhist population and the Christians and Hindu and Muslim populations. So ISIS is trying to create divisions and capitalize on these divisions to recruit more people and to find other areas to operate in after they lost Iraq and Syria.

It's been very tough to try to work this out, and there's still a lot of ongoing studies that will hopefully point to the reason for this very unexpected result. And it's important that we find out, because the next planned trial is broadly similar trial conducted by the NIH of a similar but not identical adenovirus vector with an addition of a DNA boost, and there's now major debates going on about whether that should take place, whether and if so, in what format. Because there's no point in reinforcing failure unless we're pretty sure that we're going to be able to do better. And those decisions are not yet taken. They're being actively discussed. There are committee meetings coming up later this month, because that's an important decision for the next several years of the field. Do we, do we try another virus factor, or do we hold our horses for a couple of years, and try and come up with something better? It's an important decision.

What I will support in Washington, D.C. is the ability for the local school system to decide what is taught in their classrooms. And what I was talking about on that show was a classroom that was not allowed to teach creationism as an equal theory as evolution. That is against their constitutional rights, and that is an overreaching arm of the government. But please allow me at least the full minute to respond to what he said, because he said these statements that we made should be taken into consideration when casting your vote. So then, I would be remiss not to bring up the fact that my opponent has recently said that it was studying under a Marxist professor that made him become a Democrat. So, when you look at his position on raising taxes, which is one of the tenets of Marxism, not supporting eliminating the death tax, which is a tenet of Marxism, I would argue that there are more people who support my Catholic faith than his Marxist beliefs. And I'm...