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What's it like there in Dallas now? What's the atmosphere? You know, it is a city in mourning. I've been out here for about a day now, and there was a large rally Friday afternoon in downtown Dallas. The mayor, Mike Rawlings, said this whole city needs to enter a period of healing and work to have some very hard conversations about race. Lots of folks that I've seen really don't know what to do and what to think. I've seen lots of folks at the crime scene just sitting and looking and praying and thinking. I talked to a teacher here, Nora Woolpert. She was outside the police tape yesterday, just sitting, and she told me that she was just really confused.
It just so happened that we looked at marketing in part because some of the examples that we use in our report and understanding the marketing industry is very salient. But - ultimately, culture is key to building a brand identity. As I mentioned before, the way we understand businesses build brands is they first identify a core message. Now, the military could've identified at a positive core message to begin with - and we did attempted to do that. But ultimately, if the culture of your organization is not attuned to manifesting that message on a very real level, you're going to have a hard time with success. So the idea that we could all of a sudden change our military force that was otherwise prepared for conventional military operations on a whim's notice to interact with civilian population is a tall order.
Of course not. And I was on my way to Nigeria to do a story on rebranding Nigeria or to Sierra Leone or Liberia, talking about post-war countries. But look what happened in Guinea. At least 150 people killed, women raped in public by the presidential guard, the Red Berets, as they call them. I mean, you cant say I am going off to do a story on rebranding Africa when just next door, this is happening. It was a truly pitiful, sorrowful assignment. I have to tell you, Neal. A lot of the women were just like me, professional women. Theyd gone to hear their opposition leaders talk about - you know, challenge, the new military government in Guinea. They were going to a rally. Nobody was going because they thought they would have been killed or raped. Look what happened, so unfortunately.
Well, I don't think it's a very good idea. We would recommend the people to stay home. I study seasonal influenza, and this is one of the ways that influenza gets transmitted in the workplace. And we have developed a culture where it's not acceptable to stay home except if you're so sick that you can't get out of bed. Eighty percent or so of influenza cases are not that sick and people with influenza go into work and they do spread the infection. So we've got a problem here in terms of spread of seasonal influenza. One of the things that we have to remember is that when we focus on pandemic influenza we need to think that everything we do for pandemic influenza will also pay off in terms of controlling the seasonal influenza.
Alejandro Escovedo has had a long career in the Texas music scene. His work traverses Americana, rock 'n' roll, Latino music and punk. The Mexican-American singer-songwriter is now 67 years old and has never shied away from making noise with his music and his message. But his latest album packs an even bigger punch in today's divided political landscape. Sometimes blunt and other times thoughtfully reflective, the tracks in "The Crossing" come together to tell a cinematic road trip across the American Southwest. Two characters, Diego and Salvo, both recent immigrants, meet in Texas and decide to explore their new country in search of a mythic America that no longer really exists. Alejandro Escovedo spoke with me from Dallas, Texas, about "The Crossing" and its central characters.
Despite falling cotton prices, U.S. cotton production rose 40 percent between 1998 and 2001. Lamine says this extra cotton is being dumped on the global market at below the cost of production. Last year, the World Trade Organization upheld a ruling against the U.S., stating that American cotton subsidies are illegal. U.S. has moved to eliminate export subsidies, but under the Farm Bill, which expires in 2007, the vast majority of payments to U.S. growers continue. Back in Mozambique, cotton producers say it's not just agricultural subsidies that are stacked against them. They say the West also dumps secondhand clothes into Africa at prices that stifle local textile production.
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan with part of The National Conversation, a joint project with NPR and the Woodrow Wilson Center here in Washington. We're at the center's Joseph H. and Claire Flom Auditorium with a conversation about the lessons of history. What can we learn from the Cold War? In a world where at least nine countries have nuclear weapons now, and China's projected to become the world's largest economy, the analogy to the old bipolar world of the Cold War may seem limited, but it's the only template we have on how to manage the competition over resources and markets and the crises that seem certain to arise.
Well, the fact of the matter is, whether they lost money or didn't lose money - and I don't know whether Mr. Shafer is right on this - the news divisions, as he acknowledges, always maintained that they were losing money. What they clearly did do in these in those days, with whatever money they were earning, was to maintain somewhere between 12 and 20 fully staffed, overseas bureaus. If you watched the evening news in those days and I'm talking now about the 1960s and into the 1970s foreign news was very much a part of the nightly diet of what was being reported. And one of my contentions that Mr. Olbermann did not address is that in this day and age, precisely because everyone is in such a competitive struggle trying to make money, what the major networks have done is effectively close down all but a tiny handful of those bureaus. And in fact, for the most part, they operate out of one bureau, London, and then they ship correspondents wherever they need them to go.
Well, I have a feeling that ESPN has something in cahoots with CBS. I found it very odd that ESPN was pushing Kimbo Slice, had him on the cover of their magazine, did specials with him, E60 segments with him and promoted him for CBS. So I have a feeling that ESPN is about to hop in to this feet first, money - or should I say, pockets first and dump a lot of money into MMA. And I think in the near future, that's where we're going to see it most. I don't like MMA. I don't think it's mixed martial arts. It looks like boxing, kickboxing and Greco-Roman wrestling more than anything else, at least at the minor league level. And I found it odd that CBS would put on the most minor league fighter in the most minor league MMA league to promote their sport to the 18- to 34-year-old internet crowd.
What came into mind was the fact that I lived in Washington, D.C. That was one of the most segregated cities in the United States of America. The schools were segregated. You couldn't ride in certain taxicabs. They wouldn't stop for you. If you wanted a job and you looked in the paper, it would say for white only. They had advertisements for whites and blacks, but it would state for whites only and for blacks only. And of course, same thing for the theaters downtown. We only went to the theaters along U Street, the Booker T, the Lincoln Theater, which is still there. But if you wanted to go to the theaters downtown, you would not be admitted.
Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, even though I'm sitting here saying, stick wax in your ears, don't listen till February. If everyone starts to think this way, if everyone believes that it can no longer - you know, it can only go down because of these dislocations, because of economic news, you know, there's an adage that says the stock market trades to inflict the maximum amount of pain. And I think that's what's going to happen here. As soon as everyone's convinced it can only go down, then it can only go up. That's how the stock market works.
Well, I think Libya is a good example where sanctions work, but it's also an example that they don't work quickly. It takes a long time for sanctions to have an effect. In the case of Libya you had sanctions adopted after Pan Am 103, and you basically go through the rest of the first Bush administration, all of the Clinton administration, and it takes until this Bush administration before you actually see it work. I say that whole period, because it's clear that we had Khadafi's attention relatively early on. We had President Mubarak trying to intervene on his behalf to get the sanctions lifted in the first Bush administration. And throughout the Clinton administration, we had several efforts on the part of Khadafi to work through others - a few times through the Palestinians, I know, because I was directly the recipient of it - again, to get out from under sanctions -always offering something but never prepared to meet all of the conditions. So, his mind was clearly concentrated by the costs that he saw himself paying. He wanted to see whether there was a way to avoid paying all the price as we defined it, if he was going to get out from under. And eventually he realized he couldn't and he made the decision.
Well, Dave, I think that I'm not quite sure about the kind of policy you have right now. What I can tell you is that in 2014, with the new state-based exchanges, we will have some new insurance options, more affordable coverage. Lots of folks - I don't know if Dave's in this situation - but if you're a small-business owner, if you're an individual purchasing a policy, if you're part of a farm family, you right now have very few choices. And you pay 20 to 25 percent more than the folks who are working for a big employer, who's got some negotiating power. That's what will change.
Well, the companies, of course, would like to pass those increases - those cost increases on to consumers, but that would be a double-edged sword. You just look at the conundrum facing General Motors. It uses Dow Chemical products in nearly every part that goes into its cars and trucks, but plummeting demand has forced it to offer deep discounts to get rid of all those unsold cars, especially the gasoline SUVs. Yesterday, GM, of course, announced another set of aggressive incentives. It also said prices would jump about three and a half percent next year. That's obviously not enough to offset the rising cost of materials, and this goes across the board. You just look at the huge gap between what consumers pay and the cost of all the things that go into those products. Commodities are up 20 to 30 percent year to day, while consumer prices are up only four percent. Now, somebody's eating that cost and it's not consumers, at least for now.
Yes, the mother of Norway. Yeah, that was - she was scheduled to be at this camp basically from breakfast through dinner. And there was a photographer, a newspaper photographer named Sara Johannessen who had been sent to document this, to hang out with Gro for the day. Breivik had planned to kidnap her. Expecting her to be there all day, he had planned to kidnap her and videotape himself beheading her. Now - he says this now. Whether or not that's true, it's - who can really say. But Gro was supposed to be there. The only reason she wasn't is it was a terribly, terribly rainy day. The island was muddy and sloppy, and she decided to leave early. And Sara, who had been shooting some landscapes - I mean, it's beautiful, beautiful country there - Sara almost missed it. She didn't know that Gro was leaving. And she had to sprint down the hill to catch the ferry, which turned out to be the last ferry off the island that day. And then Sara got back. When she left Utoya, she drove back to Oslo and was parking her car when the bomb went off a block away.
But painting was not a path that was made for Murray. She had to find her way. Murray was born in Chicago in 1940 to a working-class family. Her father had a condition that made it difficult for him to keep a job. The family struggled to make ends meet. Murray started drawing when she was a kid and loved comics. A teacher encouraged her to go to art school, and she wound up with degrees from the Art Institute of Chicago and Mills College in Oakland, California. But she faced prejudice because of her class and her gender. And that comes out in her work, says Robert Storr, the dean of the Yale School of Art who curated Murray's retrospective at the MoMA.
It's funny, when I started writing the play, I sent it to a couple of directors who I held on high, I put on a pedestal, and these people were like: How dare you do this? Who do you think you are, little black girl? Yes, he may have indulged a little bit. Maybe he did dabble with other women, but how dare you? He is the only thing that we have. And for me, I think a warts-and-all portrayal of Dr. King is important because there's this extraordinary human being who is actually quite ordinary. And I feel as though by portraying him with his flaws and foibles, we, too, can see, as human beings who have these flaws, that we, too, can be Kings; we, too, can carry on that baton that he has passed down to us.
I think the answer is yes. The FBI reported that in 2017 and 2018, they arrested more domestic terrorism suspects than those inspired by Islamic extremism. And Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, a Democrat who's chair of the Homeland Security Committee, wrote to law enforcement to ask him for an account of this domestic terrorism. This is also a real challenge to social media, as your story earlier suggested. The Washington Post media critic Margaret Sullivan wrote something very powerful today. She said, yes, there are tough issues involving free speech and the free flow of information. But she added that as violence grows more and more viral, tech companies need to deal with the crisis that they have helped create. And she added they must figure out ways to be responsible global citizens, as well as profit-making machines. I think it's very scary, and we've got to take account of it.
Hillary Clinton is talking about the future for our country. She is talking about, first of all, looking at how our companies operate. And so many of them operate for the short term. She is talking about the long term in terms of changing the tax code so there's incentives, whether it's profit sharing for employees and other things because a lot of that has been driving these short-term decisions. And to me that is new, and that is fresh. You look at what she's been saying about immigration reform and how it's going to be a top priority when she gets in. We haven't had someone talking about guns and willing to have the courage to talk out about guns long before the massacre in Orlando.
Yes. So I wrote this column a couple of weeks ago saying, you know, that these rules don't make sense for the devices that we use on a daily basis today. And I got, you know, several people, reporters that I work with and from other organizations that said that they, you know, were on Air Force One, and they were never asked to turn off any device. And people were actually on their cell phones during takeoff and landing, and the Secret Service never required anyone to do that. And so if, you know, the plane and the Secret Service that carries the president is - the people are allowed to use these devices, well, why can't passengers on regular airlines? And people that I've spoken to, you know, pilots, have said that, you know, they don't even actually understand why the rules exist when it comes to devices that can be turned into airplane mode.
I think there is sadness, judging by the statements other European leaders have made. But there's also understanding that this was a thoroughly democratic process. So I think there is acceptance, and I don't think ideas of punishment are part of that. I think we will now, I hope, in a sober and realistic and careful way, negotiate a new relationship. And on Monday morning, when we all go back into work again, the U.K. is in the same place in terms of participation in European meetings, in terms of participation in European votes, as we were today or yesterday. In that sense, nothing has changed.
Yeah, well, I hear from a lot of men who are upset about the way that the divorce culture has worked out for them. I mean, they have seen uncles or fathers or brothers or friends who have been kicked out of the house, lost contact with their children, and lost a lot of money because of having gotten married. I should say, though, about cohabitation, that those relationships tend to be much, much more unstable. There's an awful lot of social science on this, and I think that people who are cohabiting are less likely to be together after, let's say, 10, 20 years than those who are married.
No, actually he found after five years of this defensive warfare that warfare has an awful momentum of its own and that, as we found in our own time, that when you go for war to make peace, very soon both sides are committing appalling atrocities that go against the principles for which they were fighting. Mohammad found this, too. And so in 628 he started a campaign of nonviolence. He announced to his followers that he was going to make the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, during which a pilgrim is not allowed to carry a weapon. So, 1000 Muslims went unarmed right into the lion's den, right into enemy territory.
Well, I mean, first off, you know, they've couched this as a humanitarian crisis. And I think it certainly is. The journey across Mexico is fraught with all kinds of dangers and hardships. And I think they feel - at least, my impression from workers there and observation is - they feel that they've made it. They get what they call a really a permiso. It's really a notice to appear in immigration court and that allows them to get past the checkpoint that's 50 miles away from here, to go to their destination. And so, you know, I think that's fueling the rumor down in Central America that if you get across and the Border Patrol picks you up, you've made it. And whether or not they're going to get deported or not is another story. That's up to the immigration process. So I'm not here to debate the immigration process. We're just here to make sure that if there's a humanitarian need, we're going to try to meet it.
Well, what I'm saying is we're not focusing on payments, but we are focusing on solutions. And obviously, many of the things that I've said takes money. But we believe that it can be done in a way that goes into these institutions. And we don't know if one of the solutions that will come forth from this commission, we don't know whether it will involve payments. But what we do know is that it has the ability through the federal government to be able to address all of the ills that unfortunately have plagued the community for a very, very long time.
The pressure's increasing. There's a preliminary investigation already launched by the Senate Ethics Committee, and you have two legislators in Illinois calling for him to resign. You know, Senator Dick Durbin, who is the senior senator from Illinois, said that he will not support Burris now for reelection in 2010. But the thing is that Burris, the testimony that was released this week has Burris essentially committing perjury, in which he does not reveal to the people who were investigating his relationship with the governor before he got the Senate seat that he had conversations with the brother, with Robert in which he offered to write a check or to have his law firm write a check and said that he was willing to work, to do something personally for the governor, to help him.
I'm in Kissimmee, which is just south of the city of Orlando. And we're starting our story here, because the movement of people from Puerto Rico is having a huge impact in this area of Florida. Now, let's talk about the island. There is an economic crisis in Puerto Rico that has implications for the entire United States. Drug cartels have moved in, and most of the drugs, they're ending up all up and down the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. The murder rate now on Puerto Rico is even higher than in Mexico. Now, all of those problems are driving people away. Many of them are arriving here in Florida. And I'm here with NPR's Greg Allen, who covers Florida. And, Greg, what kind of impact is all this having here?
Well, one of the reasons I am actually optimistic is - take the one state that was mentioned, Nevada. Is there a better example of a Republican tying themselves in knots over health care than Dean Heller, who the president is now openly threatening to provide a primary challenge or not to fund in his race? The fact of the matter is, though, that many of the Democrats that are up already won in Republican states. Heidi Heitkamp won her election in 2012 in a state that President Obama lost by double digits. And so my advice to Democrats is simple - be authentic. Be who you are and focus like a laser beam on the economy and on jobs, which I think Democrats are starting to do. And we're seeing signs of that, in fact, this coming week as Democrats introduce a large broad economic plan looking forward.
There's several things that we look for. First of all, we need a scene and a circumstance that is suggestive of self-inflicted injury, meaning that there's no other person who was with them at the time and nobody else could have come in and done anything. So they were alone. They were in a secure place. And all of the injury would have to have been self-inflicted under those circumstances. So that's the setup. Then the autopsy report would be looking for things like defensive injuries or signs of a struggle to indicate that somebody else was involved. If all of the injuries are consistent with the scene and the circumstances and could be self-inflicted, it's most likely a suicide.
We're walking on this kind of muddy, rocky ground that's just got new grass, wild daffodils and stones. And then you walk up upon this, and you realize it's the ruins of an ancient city. It's known as a dead city. It's one of hundreds of its kind across northern Syria. Now, it's a U.N. World Heritage Site. These cities date back to the 1st century, and track the transition from ancient pagan Rome to Christian Byzantium. You can still see columns, doorways, arched windows. These cities were some of the most developed rural settlements of the era. Up until recently, they were deserted - frozen in time.
Right. Right at the time of Brown's trial in Virginia, he survives the raid and is put on trial. The issue of his sanity comes up right away. In fact, his defense tries to get him off within an insanity defense, and he wants no part of it. I think then and now, the question of John Brown's sanity is a way of really marginalizing him, of saying he's - this is the product of one man's fevered imagination, and therefore we don't really have to be that troubled by it or take it that seriously. But I don't think he was insane. He was an obsessive character. Herman Melville wrote a wonderful poem in which he calls him weird John Brown. I think he saw an Ahab in this man. His white whale was the destruction of slavery, and he would take everyone down with him if he had to. But that didn't make him insane.
But then again, they also - you know, require the same training and discipline, and things like that. I mean, you know, it's just a matter of - I don't know, well - I don't know. I just think that it's bad whenever you've got these people - there seems to be a lot of people that take these kind of drugs. And you know, like you're saying - the one caller that just called in a minute ago, he was talking about how basically, all the kids are seeing him, say OK, cheating's bad. And what happens whenever you get caught cheating? You lie. That way, you can get out of it.
First we want to hear from you. If you've gathered intelligence in law enforcement, the armed forces or in the business world, how could this kind of information be useful or be abused? Our phone number is 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Later in the program, Farhad Manjoo on how to compete with Apple - if you can. But first, FBI monitoring. Michael Schmidt covers federal law enforcement for the New York Times and joins us on the phone. Nice to have you with us today.
Obuntu is the Nguni word, simply translated into English, talk about humanity, people's humanity. But the English word doesn't really represent the full meaning of the African expression of the words. It's based in the African sense of people not as individuals, not the individualistic Western view of people, but people as members of the community who live in a communal spirit in a communal life. And really it is my wellbeing is tied up with your wellbeing. Your wellbeing is tied up with my wellbeing. Tutu used to say, you know, person is a person who's through other persons. Tutu used to say we wouldn't be able to talk or walk or think or be human beings without other human beings - solitary human beings are contradiction in terms. And that approach to our relationships with one another as human beings lies deeply embedded and behind Tutu's passion for reconciliation, that in South Africa black and white South Africans needed to find one another and become reconciled in a real way.
Yeah, that's been some of - you know, we don't know exactly what they'll do at this point. The summary was that they may just do a shorter CR and then ultimately punt to the 5 of March. There's also some other rumors out there that the Republicans in the Senate would like to punt the issue of DACA for an entire year and take it off the table for a year and address it later. I, too, don't think that's showing much leadership in terms of dealing with the issues of the day that the president himself has created. But wait and see just what their intentions will be.
It is me. (Unintelligible) listening to both these last two comments. I have a slightly different take on it, and I do think that we are facing our mortality in a way that other people don't, and it scares people to think that they might have to, and in that way they - people want to turn away from you in a certain sense. But I think that it's not even so much - as Leroy is saying - so much as facing death but facing the fact that we do not have the control, that this illusion that we controlled our lives and controlled our fates by eating the right thing or doing the right thing - I mean, I wasn't a smoker. I don't have any risk behavior.
What sight could be more moving than a mother nursing her baby? What better icon could one find for love, intimacy and boundless giving? There’s a reason why the Madonna and Child became one of the world’s great religious symbols. To see this spirit of maternal generosity carried to its logical extreme, consider Diaea ergandros, a species of Australian spider. All summer long, the mother fattens herself on insects so that when winter comes her little ones may suckle the blood from her leg joints. As they drink, she weakens, until the babies swarm over her, inject her with venom and devour her like any other prey. You might suppose such ruthlessness to be unheard-of among mammalian children. You would be wrong. It isn’t that our babies are less ruthless than Diaea ergandros, but that our mothers are less generous. The mammal mother works hard to stop her children from taking more than she is willing to give. The children fight back with manipulation, blackmail and violence. Their ferocity is nowhere more evident than in the womb. This fact sits uncomfortably with some enduring cultural ideas about motherhood. Even today, it is common to hear doctors talking about the uterine lining as the ‘optimal environment’ for nurturing the embryo. But physiology has long cast doubt on this romantic view. The cells of the human endometrium are tightly aligned, creating a fortress-like wall around the inside of the uterus. That barrier is packed with lethal immune cells. As far back as 1903, researchers observed embryos ‘invading’ and ‘digesting’ their way into the uterine lining. In 1914, R W Johnstone described the implantation zone as ‘the ﬁghting line where the conﬂict between the maternal cells and the invading trophoderm takes place’. It was a battlefield ‘strewn with… the dead on both sides’. When scientists tried to gestate mice outside the womb, they expected the embryos to wither, deprived of the surface that had evolved to nurture them. To their shock they found instead that – implanted in the brain, testis or eye of a mouse – the embryo went wild. Placental cells rampaged through surrounding tissues, slaughtering everything in their path as they hunted for arteries to sate their thirst for nutrients. It’s no accident that many of the same genes active in embryonic development have been implicated in cancer. Pregnancy is a lot more like war than we might care to admit. So if it’s a fight, what started it? The original bone of contention is this: you and your nearest relatives are not genetically identical. In the nature of things, this means that you are in competition. And because you live in the same environment, your closest relations are actually your most immediate rivals. It was Robert Trivers, in the 1970s, who first dared to explore the sinister implications of this reality in a series of influential papers. The following decade, a part-time graduate student named David Haig was musing over Trivers’s ideas when he realised that the nurturing behaviour of mammal mothers creates a particularly excellent opportunity for exploitation. It is in your mother’s genetic interests, Haig understood, to provide equally for all her children. But your father might never have another child with her. This makes her other children your direct competitors, and also gives your father’s genes a reason to game the system. His genome would evolve to manipulate your mother into providing more resources for you. In turn, her genes would manoeuvre to provide you with fewer resources. The situation becomes a tug-of-war. Some genes fall silent, while others become more active, counterbalancing them. Even with the help of modern medicine, pregnancy still kills about 800 women every day worldwide That insight led Haig to found the theory of genomic imprinting, which explains how certain genes are expressed differently depending on whether they come from your father or your mother. Armed with this theory, we can see how conflicts of genetic interest between parents play out within the genomes of their offspring. Because both parental genomes drive each other to keep ramping up their production of powerful hormones, should one gene fail, the result can be disastrous for both mother and infant. Normal development can proceed only as long as both parental genotypes are correctly balanced against one another. Just as in a tug-of-war, if one party drops its end, both fall over. This is one reason why mammals cannot reproduce asexually, and why cloning them is so difficult: mammalian development requires the intricate co-ordination of paternal and maternal genomes. A single misstep can ruin everything. Diaea ergandros, the ultimate mother, doesn’t have to worry about this, of course. She will never have more than one brood, so there is no need for her to restrain her offspring. But most mammal mothers breed more than once, and often with different males. This fact alone ensures that the paternal and maternal genomes work against one another. You can see the tragic consequences of this hidden war throughout the class Mammalia. Yet there is one species where it ascends to really mind-boggling heights of bloodiness. Yours. For most mammals, despite the underlying conflict, life goes on almost as normal during pregnancy. They flee from predators, capture prey, build homes and defend territories – all while gestating. Even birth is pretty safe: they might grimace or sweat a bit during labour, but that’s usually the worst of it. There are exceptions. Hyena mothers, for example, give birth through an impractical penis-like structure, and about 18 per cent of them die during their first delivery. But even for them, pregnancy itself is rarely perilous. If we look at primates, however, it’s a different story. Primate embryos can sometimes implant in the Fallopian tube instead of the womb. When that happens, they tunnel ferociously towards the richest nutrient source they can find; the result is often a bloodbath. And among the great apes, things look even dicier. Here we start to see perhaps the most sinister complication of pregnancy: preeclampsia, a mysterious condition characterised by high blood pressure and protein discharge in the urine. Preeclampsia is responsible for around 12 per cent of human maternal deaths worldwide. But it’s very much just the start of our problems. The mother is a despot: she provides only what she chooses A list of the reproductive ills that afflict our species might start with placental abruption, hyperemesis gravidarum, gestational diabetes, cholestasis and miscarriage, and carry on from there. In all, about 15 per cent of women suffer life-threatening complications during each pregnancy. Without medical assistance, more than 40 per cent of hunter-gatherer women never reach menopause. Even with the help of modern medicine, pregnancy still kills about 800 women every day worldwide. So, we have a bit of a mystery here. The basic genetic conflict that makes the womb such a battle zone crops up across innumerable species: all it takes for war to break out is for mothers to have multiple offspring by different fathers. But this is quite a common reproductive arrangement in nature, and as we saw, it doesn’t cause other mammals so many problems. How did we humans get so unlucky? And does it have anything to do with our other extraordinary feature – our unparalleled brain development? In most mammals, the mother’s blood supply remains safely isolated from the foetus. It passes its nutrients to the foetus through a filter, which the mother controls. The mother is a despot: she provides only what she chooses, which makes her largely invulnerable to paternal manipulation during pregnancy. In primates and mice, it’s a different story. Cells from the invading placenta digest their way through the endometrial surface, puncturing the mother’s arteries, swarming inside and remodelling them to suit the foetus. Outside of pregnancy, these arteries are tiny, twisty things spiralling through depths of the uterine wall. The invading placental cells paralyse the vessels so they cannot contract, then pump them full of growth hormones, widening them tenfold to capture more maternal blood. These foetal cells are so invasive that colonies of them often persist in the mother for the rest of her life, having migrated to her liver, brain and other organs. There’s something they rarely tell you about motherhood: it turns women into genetic chimeras. Perhaps this enormous blood supply explains why primates have brains five to ten times larger than the average mammal. Metabolically speaking, brains are extremely expensive organs, and most of their growth occurs before birth. How else is the fetus to fund such extravagance? Is this unfettered access to maternal blood the key to the extraordinary brain development we see in young primates? Given the invasive nature of pregnancy, it’s perhaps not surprising that the primate womb has evolved to be wary of committing to it. Mammals whose placentae don’t breach the walls of the womb can simply abort or reabsorb unwanted foetuses at any stage of pregnancy. For primates, any such manoeuvre runs the risk of haemorrhage, as the placenta rips away from the mother’s enlarged and paralysed arterial system. And that, in a sentence, is why miscarriages are so dangerous. It’s also why primates make every effort to test their embryos before they allow them to implant. The embryo is walled out by the tight-packed cells of the endometrium, while an intimate hormonal dialogue takes place. This conversation is, in Haig’s words, a ‘job interview’. Should the embryo fail to convince its mother that it is a perfectly normal, healthy individual, it will be summarily expelled. How does an embryo convince its mother that it is healthy? By honestly displaying its vigour and lust for life, which is to say, by striving with all its strength to implant. And how does the mother test the embryo? By making the embryo’s task incredibly difficult. Just as the placenta has evolved to be aggressive and invasive, the endometrium has evolved to be tough and hostile. For humans, the result is that half of all human pregnancies fail, most at the implantation stage, so early that the mother may not even realise she was pregnant. Embryonic development becomes a trial of strength. And this leads to another peculiarity of the primate reproductive system – menstruation. We have it for the simple reason that it’s not such an easy matter to dispose of an embryo that is battling to survive. The tissues of the endometrium are partially insulated from the mother’s bloodstream, protecting her circulatory system from invasion by a placenta she has not yet decided to accept. But that means her own hormonal signals can struggle to be heard inside the womb. So, rather than risk corruption of the endometrial tissue and ongoing conflict with an embryo, what does the mother do? She just sloughs off the whole endometrium after each ovulation. This way, even the most aggressive embryo has to have her agreement before it can get comfortable. In the absence of continual, active hormonal signalling from a healthy embryo, the entire system auto-destructs. Around 30 per cent of pregnancies end this way. I said that the mother struggles to pass hormonal signals into the womb. The thing is, once the embryo implants, it gets full access to her tissues. This asymmetry means two things. Firstly, the mother can no longer control the nutrient supply she offers the foetus – not without reducing the nutrient supply to her own tissues. Is this unfettered access to maternal blood the key to the extraordinary brain development we see in young primates? Fascinatingly, the intensity of the invasion does seem to correlate with brain development. Great apes, the largest-brained primates, seem to experience deeper and more extensive invasion of the maternal arteries than other primates. In humans – the largest-brained ape of all – placental cells invade the maternal bloodstream earlier even than in other great apes, allowing the foetus unprecedented access to oxygen and nutrients during early development. This would be one of evolution’s little ironies: after all, if it wasn’t for the cognitive and social capacities granted by our big brains, many more of us would die from the rigours of our brutal reproductive cycle. One can imagine how the two traits might have arisen in tandem. But the connection remains speculative. Uteri rarely fossilise, so the details of placental evolution are lost to us. The second major consequence of the foetus’s direct access to maternal nutrients is that the foetus can also release its own hormones into the mother’s bloodstream, and thus manipulate her. And so it does. The mother counters with manipulations of her own, of course. But there is a strong imbalance: while the foetus freely injects its products into the mother’s blood, the mother is granted no such access to foetal circulation. She is walled out by placental membranes, and so her responses are limited to defensively regulating hormones within her own body. As the pregnancy continues, the foetus escalates its hormone production, sending signals designed to increase the mother’s blood sugar and blood pressure and thus its own resource supply. In particular, the foetus increases its production of a hormone that prompts the mother’s brain to release cortisol, the primary stress hormone. Cortisol suppresses her immune system, stopping it from attacking the foetus. More importantly, it increases her blood pressure, so that more blood pumps past the placenta and consequently more nutrients are available to the foetus. The mother doesn’t take this foetal manipulation lying down. In fact, she pre-emptively reduces her blood sugar levels. She also releases a protein that binds to the foetal hormone, rendering it ineffective. So then the foetus further increases its production. By eight months, the foetus spends an estimated 25 per cent of its daily protein intake on manufacturing these hormonal messages to its mother. And how does the mother reply? She increases her own hormonal production, countering the embryo’s hormones with her own that decrease her blood pressure and sugar. Through all this manipulation and mutual reprisal, most of the time the foetus ultimately gets about the right amount of blood, and about the right amount of sugar, allowing it to grow fat and healthy in time for birth. This is the living instantiation of Haig’s tug-of-war between maternal and paternal genomes. As long as each side holds its end up, nobody gets hurt. But what happens when things go wrong? Since the turn of the millennium, the Human Genome Project has provided a wealth of data, most of which remains incomprehensible to us. Yet by looking for signs of genomic imprinting – that is, genes that are expressed differently depending on whether they are inherited from the father or the mother – researchers have been able to pin down the genetic causes of numerous diseases of pregnancy and childhoods. Genomic imprinting, and the maternal-fetal battle behind it, have been shown to account for gestational diabetes, Prader-Willi Syndrome, Angelman Syndrome, childhood obesity and several cancers. Researchers suspect that it may also underlie devastating psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autism. In 2000, Ian Morison and colleagues compiled a database of more than 40 imprinted genes. That number had doubled by 2005; by 2010, it had nearly doubled again. Identifying genetic mechanisms does not in itself provide a cure for these complex diseases, but it is a vital step towards one. Preeclampsia, perhaps the most mysterious disease of pregnancy, turns out to be a particularly good example of the way in which the evolutionary, genetic and medical pictures are all lining up. More than two decades ago, Haig suggested that it resulted from a breakdown in communication between mother and foetus. In 1998, Jenny Graves expanded on this idea, suggesting that it could be explained by failure of imprinting on a maternally inherited gene. It’s only in the past few years, however, that we’ve pieced together how this process occurs. This story shows how, with the help of evolutionary theory, we are at last starting to make sense of the grim, tangled mess that is human development So, picture the foetus tunnelling towards the mother’s bloodstream. All else being equal, the arterial expansion of early pregnancy would cause the mother’s blood pressure to drop. Foetal hormones counter this effect by raising her blood pressure. Several hormones are involved when the maternal arteries expand during early pregnancy. If these chemicals get out of balance, those arteries can fail to expand, starving the foetus of oxygen. If that happens, the foetus sometimes resorts to more extreme measures. It releases toxins that damage and constrict the mother’s blood vessels, driving up blood pressure. This risks kidney and liver damage, if not stroke: the symptoms of preeclampsia. In 2009, researchers showed that the maternally inherited gene H19 is strongly associated with the disease. This was just as Jenny Graves predicted. H19 is known to be crucial to early growth of the placenta. Changes in several other maternally inherited genes, and some paternally inherited ones, are also suspected of being involved. There’s a lot that has yet to be discovered, but this story shows how, with the help of evolutionary theory, we are at last starting to make sense of the grim, tangled mess that is human development. Our huge brains and our traumatic gestation seem intimately connected; at the very least, they are both extraordinary features of humanity. Did the ancients guess this connection when they crafted their mythologies? Perhaps the story of Eve, cursed with the sorrows of pregnancy when she ‘ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge’, was once just an intuitive explanation for the cruelty that nature saw fit to visit on our species. Be that as it may, if we want to reduce the danger and suffering of pregnancy, the only way out is through. We need more knowledge – lots of it.
I was just going to say, that's true of, you know, everything. I remember when I was actually working for the design group of the superconducting super collider, which we lost because of politics. We would know all the answers to the questions the LHC is going to ask, maybe. But I remember that it was very important that it be sold in every single state and that that opportunity before they chose taxes was milked to the maximum. And now, even if you look at some of the space programs that are dubious and things, you'll find that it's because parts are being manufactured in a certain state. So, that's a very big factor.
We haven't made a final decision on this. But I'm suspecting that the way things are developing with the current seasonal flu vaccine and this one, by timing alone, this might come after the seasonal vaccine is ready to be delivered for the fall season. On top of that, the other key thing that needs to go on between now and when the vaccine would be ready, would be to do the important testing to try to find out what the right dose is and whether or not this needs one or two doses. Some of those things would also factor in on whether or not it will be appropriate to fold into the seasonal vaccine.
Oh, well, please. I mean, we can chase an ideal, but this doesn't get to the heart of it which is the influence that special interests always have and I think always will have on legislation. That's the way the Republic has always operated, for better or for worse. And it does bear mentioning that I think that in the case that something is being lobbied for that is considered a good thing by what you might call the blue state crowd, somehow I think we're a little bit less indignant, sometimes a little bit of lobbying can be a good thing. Obviously, the Abramoff scandal is the bad kind of lobbying. This is too flagrant and too sleazy. But we're not going to really change anything. Don't we see something like this happening every, about every 20 years? This is just the latest episode.
That's what we thought of transfer evolution before Raptorex was discovered. We thought that the arms got small as the animal got large. And what we have to admit now, is that this design emerged as small body size, and that's not what happened. That's what's revolutionary about the specimen in terms of mechanics, evolution and so on. It was all put together at pint size. And then I think, rarely, can this actually occur in evolution, where you can take something that's 150 pounds and basically, bone for bone, ratio for ratio - allowing for some robustness to handle the weight, scale it up to five or six tons. But it happened in the case of Tyrannosaurs. The evidence is at hand.
Predominately from the city's black community. I think that a lot of the rhetoric that he had been using during the campaign was considered widely to be relatively racially divisive. He, of course, referred to New Orleans as Chocolate City during a Martin Luther King birthday speech and said that most of his opponents in the race didn't quote "look like us," so a lot of his support, a lot of the white voters in the city were less than excited about voting for him and it looks like, at least according to exit polling that I saw, he only got about ten percent of his support from white voters.
Walling and state officials say that means coming up with what's called a corrosion control plan. Here's the thing, the Flint River isn't full of lead, but the water is highly corrosive, much more so than the Detroit water Flint used to buy. Basically, the water is eating the lead from service lines and solder as it makes its way to people's faucets. Marc Edwards is an environmental engineering professor at Virginia Tech who has looked at lead contamination in several cities, including Flint. He says Flint isn't the worst he's seen, but it's not good, either. He says the city should have been treating the water from the outset to make it less corrosive.
I think it's one of those things you will only understand it if you're from here. And like a lot of my friends who grew up in this area and then moved elsewhere, they are surprised how much they missed it. LeBron in his essay in Sports Illustrated compared his four years in Miami to having gone away to college, which he didn't do And suddenly he's 29-years- old, has two children, a third of the way and really he's making this as a family based decision. Yes, there's some nice basketball elements to it but I can tell you the general motion, the way his heart beat for this area, is so true.
Right, five times in the last five years - and interest rates are still low. But her critics on the left say she did - even that was too much. She should have waited longer. After all, we barely have any wage increases, and prices are still below - rising below the Fed's target. Of course, other people say she should have moved sooner to raise rates. And they point to the stock market and the bond market. And they say that she allowed a bubble to blow on her watch and that Jay Powell may have to deal with the consequences.
No. However, if I am in that situation, then I think that the best call to make is on the ground. I mean, yes, there's sometimes you have to make your own assessment, sometimes loose or strict in order to circumvent the Ivory Tower, than from that your hire may have. Sometimes, maybe you don't have time to send up a (unintelligible) rep and explain to them, this is exactly what I see. It does not fit the bill for what you set down. There's no time for that dialogue. And you make things happen and you still meet the intent of hire.
That's correct. Which, you know, until yesterday didn't necessarily raise a lot of eyebrows. But now that we know that there are things in the same notebook that pertain to Valerie Plame, who was actually described as `Valerie Flame,' it does raise a question of whether she's protecting other sources. Now let's not forget that this is a woman who is being applauded for her sacrifice in trying to protect confidential sources. We also have no idea whether these additional sources are inside the administration, outside the administration, higher than Karl Rove or Lewis Libby or not. It's hard to get too much higher than Karl Rove or Lewis Libby.
Mr. J. HILLSTRAND: We make them finish the fight. We - if someone fights on our boat, we used to say, get it done right now, you know? I would have - I know what he's talking about, but… What do you think Andy - we let them finish the fight, and then we usually shake hands, and it's over. Mr. A. HILLSTRAND: Yeah. We (unintelligible) we have all the safety precautions in place, but you can't have an unfinished - you know, a fist - you know, you can have a fistfight on the boat, and it's not the end of the world as long as they finish it, and they just come off with no hard feelings. Now, if they're going to keep trying to kill the guy, then that's another issue and they're gone, you know?
There's a fast deadline approaching of midnight Friday, and there is no agreement in sight. House Republican leaders had wanted to pass as early as tomorrow a short-term funding bill that would run for about two weeks to December 22 with the goal of just buying Congress more time to figure out the negotiations on the tax bill and reach an agreement on what the spending levels for the federal government should be. Congress still needs to do that before the end of the year. And then they hit a bump. A group of hardline conservatives in the House known as the Freedom Caucus are saying they could withhold their votes. They could vote against that stopgap spending bill, threatening a shutdown. And in exchange, they're trying to get some concessions from their leaderships to say that at the end of the year, they're not going to get jammed with a bunch of legislation they don't support because frankly that is what Congress tends to do when it's the last votes out of town before the Christmas holiday.
Well, I've often told people - a good friend of mine uses this, too, my friend Sam Storch(ph). He taught astronomy in the New York City School System for over 40 years, and he used to tell kids to watch events like this. And, of course, when they gave him that blank stare, he said: Well, all I can tell you guys is if you don't decide to get up and watch it, if you decide to stay in bed, it's going to happen without you. So take full advantage of it, because time and tide and eclipses wait for no man - or woman, either.
Ford says the company's July auto sales will exceed those from last July. The company releases its monthly figures today, but speaking yesterday, an official said that July numbers were already firming up. What kicked sales over the top was the government's Cash for Clunkers program that gives vouchers of up to $4,500 to drivers who trade in old cars for new more, fuel-efficient ones. The program's been a hit, and Congress is under pressure to extend it. Ford points out that the most traded-in vehicle under the Cash for Clunkers program is the Ford Explorer SUV. The vehicle that most buyers have driven away with is the Ford Focus compact car.
Well, that's right. They had come back a couple of weeks earlier just to take a break from Britain. They were going to stay in the U.S., see some friends, spend Christmas in the U.S., and then head back to London. And they were friends with the Roosevelts, and they had set a date with Franklin and Eleanor to have dinner - quiet Sunday dinner at the White House on December 7th. The president was interested in hearing from Ed about how things were in Britain. And on the morning of December 7th, Ed Murrow was out playing golf when he heard the word about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Janet called Eleanor and said well, I guess dinner is off. And Eleanor Roosevelt said to Janet Murrow, no, we still have to eat, so come on over.
Well, all of those things sound good. What I'm not hearing is what happens if America gets caught short. If we were to wake up sometime in April of next year to find that countries like Burma and North Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia hadn't really told us what was going on and tourists started emerging from those countries that had active flu that was transferable and we had to move very quickly, the research would be too slow. None of those things would be ready to deliver and we would be back to a very limited amount of egg-based flu vaccine. And I'm unhappy that we don't have some capacity to address that. And it's not really new science. It's really technology and implementing that technology, which incidentally doesn't cost anything in the first phases because all you have to do is get the companies to sit around with lawyers and fix what they're going to do and get the technical teams together. And incidentally, these technical teams are completely different from viral vaccine teams. They're in a different sector of the pharmaceutical industry, so there's no overlap between them. But if we don't do that, then that option will close.
No, I don't. I agree with Cee Cee a hundred percent. I have not-for-profit called Abstinence for Singles. We have two federal grants, one is a healthy marriage grant in inner-city community, and the other one is the sea bay(ph), which is an abstinence-only education grant. And I agree with her a hundred percent. And from a perspective of a man - if children, the young people, high school, during high school, college students see a man as manly, handsome, athletic. And every time when I finished speaking, guys come to me and say, man, you know, we expected when you came that you was going to be like 260, your grill was going to be messed up and you was going to look crazy. But you are sharp brother, man. How do you do it? I'm intrigued. And so I believe - I don't care what the studies say. I believe we can do all things through Christ, who strengthens us. But more importantly, you have to get the message out there so people can make the choice. That's the issue. Abstinence is taken lightly. A lot of people think it doesn't work, so they don't teach it. We owe it to everybody to at least hear what abstinence can offer and then that person can make a choice.
I think an immediate effect would come from the consumer protection piece of this. In the current regime, someone out there looking for a home loan might have been able to go out there and fill out a form that absolutely failed to represent their creditworthiness, if their salary was inadequate to the loan that they were taking out. In the old regime, they would've gotten it anyway. With this agency in place, consumers will be protected from getting into situations like that that are not only very destructive for them but also when you have a whole bunch of consumers getting involved in those risks pose a systemic risk to the whole system.
I think a number of observers were curious, perhaps a little surprised, in the governor's two big roll out interviews with ABC and CBS. That she did not speak more about her experience as governor of Alaska. You know, when you think about it, what does a governor do when he or she is running for president? They talk about what they did in Texas, or what they accomplished in Arkansas. It's just what they do. It's not foreign policy experience, but it is solid domestic experience and I think people have been a little surprised that she hasn't made greater use of that.
Well, NPR has a contract with Mark Fiore. Mark does not work for NPR. He does his cartooning on his own. He's a syndicator. It appears on other Web sites. He's had a relationship with NPR for about three months. This cartoon had sat on the NPR Opinion Page for over two months, since November 12th. And suddenly it got noticed by someone and it got launched out into the blogosphere. And there was just a flood of emails and phone calls and comments. As of today, there are 1,500 comments, which is a near-record for NPR, on the cartoon. I've gotten over 400 emails, scores of phone calls, and there are over 500 comments on the piece that I wrote.
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. And here are the headlines from some of the stories NPR News is following today. There are indications that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who leads al-Qaeda in Iraq, has been wounded, perhaps mortally. There is still a possibility that this news is disinformation designed to confuse US and Iraqi forces. And Democrats made another effort today to stop a vote on John Bolton's nomination to be the next ambassador to the United Nations. Republicans are pressing for a vote today on the nomination. You can hear more on those stories coming up later today on "All Things Considered" from NPR News.
People lose sight 60 years later of what the Nazi war machine had done, what Tojo's Japan had done in terms of torture. People don't appreciate that we've already been through this. We've been through it far worse than we are going through it today. And the Geneva Conventions were established in order to respond to situations that were not markedly different from the situation that we have today. The Nazi regime was viewed as the evildoer of all evildoers, the enemy of civilization. They hate our freedom, they hate our democracy. And I think that there's a little bit of a historical amnesia going on here in thinking, all right, the Supreme Court's thrown this out. Let's start again. We've already been there. We've already done it. Congress has already acted.
Yeah. I just have a question and a comment. I live on Wichita, Kansas. It's one of the smaller - on the end of the, you know, American city that's over 300,000. And I've noticed that we'd had more than influx of whites into our downtown area particularly because the city has, you know, followed this American model - the new American model for metropolitan, which is let's eliminate all the low-income housing downtown, and you know, move it out of the city to try to make our city look more wealthy for instance with you know, high-end lofts, you know, more expensive housing. So that's the kind of experience we've had here. I don't know if that resonates across the country.
Well, actually he bruited about the subject of race because he understood that he was living in a racist society and that doors were closed to him. And at the same time, he believed early in his life and career in the principles of Booker T. Washington and he believed in hard work and education and uplift and not complaining. And then he was very torn by this idea of interracial romance because his first great love was a white woman on the prairie. And he was really terrified of what would happen if he allowed himself to fall in love with her and have children because then those children worried him that they might have to pass as white in order to have any kind of equality on society.
Well, it went on for a couple of hours and the prisons director Terry Collins told us that several times, the staff asked the inmate if he wanted to take a break and the staff was also given the option to take a break. But at that point, both parties just wanted to press ahead. But eventually, it got to the point that the prison's director insisted that the break be taken. And then later, after they tried a few more times, the prison's director, after talking to a staff and hearing that they were skeptical there to be able to find a workable vein, decided to ask the governor for a reprieve.
Most of us think of motion as a very visual thing. If I walk across this stage or gesture with my hands while I speak, that motion is something that you can see. But there's a world of important motion that's too subtle for the human eye, and over the past few years, we've started to find that cameras can often see this motion even when humans can't. So let me show you what I mean. On the left here, you see video of a person's wrist, and on the right, you see video of a sleeping infant, but if I didn't tell you that these were videos, you might assume that you were looking at two regular images, because in both cases, these videos appear to be almost completely still. But there's actually a lot of subtle motion going on here, and if you were to touch the wrist on the left, you would feel a pulse, and if you were to hold the infant on the right, you would feel the rise and fall of her chest as she took each breath. And these motions carry a lot of significance, but they're usually too subtle for us to see, so instead, we have to observe them through direct contact, through touch. But a few years ago, my colleagues at MIT developed what they call a motion microscope, which is software that finds these subtle motions in video and amplifies them so that they become large enough for us to see. And so, if we use their software on the left video, it lets us see the pulse in this wrist, and if we were to count that pulse, we could even figure out this person's heart rate. And if we used the same software on the right video, it lets us see each breath that this infant takes, and we can use this as a contact-free way to monitor her breathing. And so this technology is really powerful because it takes these phenomena that we normally have to experience through touch and it lets us capture them visually and non-invasively. So a couple years ago, I started working with the folks that created that software, and we decided to pursue a crazy idea. We thought, it's cool that we can use software to visualize tiny motions like this, and you can almost think of it as a way to extend our sense of touch. But what if we could do the same thing with our ability to hear? What if we could use video to capture the vibrations of sound, which are just another kind of motion, and turn everything that we see into a microphone? Now, this is a bit of a strange idea, so let me try to put it in perspective for you. Traditional microphones work by converting the motion of an internal diaphragm into an electrical signal, and that diaphragm is designed to move readily with sound so that its motion can be recorded and interpreted as audio. But sound causes all objects to vibrate. Those vibrations are just usually too subtle and too fast for us to see. So what if we record them with a high-speed camera and then use software to extract tiny motions from our high-speed video, and analyze those motions to figure out what sounds created them? This would let us turn visible objects into visual microphones from a distance. And so we tried this out, and here's one of our experiments, where we took this potted plant that you see on the right and we filmed it with a high-speed camera while a nearby loudspeaker played this sound. (Music: "Mary Had a Little Lamb") And so here's the video that we recorded, and we recorded it at thousands of frames per second, but even if you look very closely, all you'll see are some leaves that are pretty much just sitting there doing nothing, because our sound only moved those leaves by about a micrometer. That's one ten-thousandth of a centimeter, which spans somewhere between a hundredth and a thousandth of a pixel in this image. So you can squint all you want, but motion that small is pretty much perceptually invisible. But it turns out that something can be perceptually invisible and still be numerically significant, because with the right algorithms, we can take this silent, seemingly still video and we can recover this sound. (Music: "Mary Had a Little Lamb") (Applause) So how is this possible? How can we get so much information out of so little motion? Well, let's say that those leaves move by just a single micrometer, and let's say that that shifts our image by just a thousandth of a pixel. That may not seem like much, but a single frame of video may have hundreds of thousands of pixels in it, and so if we combine all of the tiny motions that we see from across that entire image, then suddenly a thousandth of a pixel can start to add up to something pretty significant. On a personal note, we were pretty psyched when we figured this out. (Laughter) But even with the right algorithm, we were still missing a pretty important piece of the puzzle. You see, there are a lot of factors that affect when and how well this technique will work. There's the object and how far away it is; there's the camera and the lens that you use; how much light is shining on the object and how loud your sound is. And even with the right algorithm, we had to be very careful with our early experiments, because if we got any of these factors wrong, there was no way to tell what the problem was. We would just get noise back. And so a lot of our early experiments looked like this. And so here I am, and on the bottom left, you can kind of see our high-speed camera, which is pointed at a bag of chips, and the whole thing is lit by these bright lamps. And like I said, we had to be very careful in these early experiments, so this is how it went down. (Video) Abe Davis: Three, two, one, go. Mary had a little lamb! Little lamb! Little lamb! (Laughter) AD: So this experiment looks completely ridiculous. (Laughter) I mean, I'm screaming at a bag of chips — (Laughter) — and we're blasting it with so much light, we literally melted the first bag we tried this on. (Laughter) But ridiculous as this experiment looks, it was actually really important, because we were able to recover this sound. (Audio) Mary had a little lamb! Little lamb! Little lamb! (Applause) AD: And this was really significant, because it was the first time we recovered intelligible human speech from silent video of an object. And so it gave us this point of reference, and gradually we could start to modify the experiment, using different objects or moving the object further away, using less light or quieter sounds. And we analyzed all of these experiments until we really understood the limits of our technique, because once we understood those limits, we could figure out how to push them. And that led to experiments like this one, where again, I'm going to speak to a bag of chips, but this time we've moved our camera about 15 feet away, outside, behind a soundproof window, and the whole thing is lit by only natural sunlight. And so here's the video that we captured. And this is what things sounded like from inside, next to the bag of chips. (Audio) Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go. AD: And here's what we were able to recover from our silent video captured outside behind that window. (Audio) Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go. (Applause) AD: And there are other ways that we can push these limits as well. So here's a quieter experiment where we filmed some earphones plugged into a laptop computer, and in this case, our goal was to recover the music that was playing on that laptop from just silent video of these two little plastic earphones, and we were able to do this so well that I could even Shazam our results. (Laughter) (Music: "Under Pressure" by Queen) (Applause) And we can also push things by changing the hardware that we use. Because the experiments I've shown you so far were done with a camera, a high-speed camera, that can record video about a 100 times faster than most cell phones, but we've also found a way to use this technique with more regular cameras, and we do that by taking advantage of what's called a rolling shutter. You see, most cameras record images one row at a time, and so if an object moves during the recording of a single image, there's a slight time delay between each row, and this causes slight artifacts that get coded into each frame of a video. And so what we found is that by analyzing these artifacts, we can actually recover sound using a modified version of our algorithm. So here's an experiment we did where we filmed a bag of candy while a nearby loudspeaker played the same "Mary Had a Little Lamb" music from before, but this time, we used just a regular store-bought camera, and so in a second, I'll play for you the sound that we recovered, and it's going to sound distorted this time, but listen and see if you can still recognize the music. (Audio: "Mary Had a Little Lamb") And so, again, that sounds distorted, but what's really amazing here is that we were able to do this with something that you could literally run out and pick up at a Best Buy. So at this point, a lot of people see this work, and they immediately think about surveillance. And to be fair, it's not hard to imagine how you might use this technology to spy on someone. But keep in mind that there's already a lot of very mature technology out there for surveillance. In fact, people have been using lasers to eavesdrop on objects from a distance for decades. But what's really new here, what's really different, is that now we have a way to picture the vibrations of an object, which gives us a new lens through which to look at the world, and we can use that lens to learn not just about forces like sound that cause an object to vibrate, but also about the object itself. And so I want to take a step back and think about how that might change the ways that we use video, because we usually use video to look at things, and I've just shown you how we can use it to listen to things. But there's another important way that we learn about the world: that's by interacting with it. We push and pull and poke and prod things. We shake things and see what happens. And that's something that video still won't let us do, at least not traditionally. So I want to show you some new work, and this is based on an idea I had just a few months ago, so this is actually the first time I've shown it to a public audience. And the basic idea is that we're going to use the vibrations in a video to capture objects in a way that will let us interact with them and see how they react to us. So here's an object, and in this case, it's a wire figure in the shape of a human, and we're going to film that object with just a regular camera. So there's nothing special about this camera. In fact, I've actually done this with my cell phone before. But we do want to see the object vibrate, so to make that happen, we're just going to bang a little bit on the surface where it's resting while we record this video. So that's it: just five seconds of regular video, while we bang on this surface, and we're going to use the vibrations in that video to learn about the structural and material properties of our object, and we're going to use that information to create something new and interactive. And so here's what we've created. And it looks like a regular image, but this isn't an image, and it's not a video, because now I can take my mouse and I can start interacting with the object. And so what you see here is a simulation of how this object would respond to new forces that we've never seen before, and we created it from just five seconds of regular video. (Applause) And so this is a really powerful way to look at the world, because it lets us predict how objects will respond to new situations, and you could imagine, for instance, looking at an old bridge and wondering what would happen, how would that bridge hold up if I were to drive my car across it. And that's a question that you probably want to answer before you start driving across that bridge. And of course, there are going to be limitations to this technique, just like there were with the visual microphone, but we found that it works in a lot of situations that you might not expect, especially if you give it longer videos. So for example, here's a video that I captured of a bush outside of my apartment, and I didn't do anything to this bush, but by capturing a minute-long video, a gentle breeze caused enough vibrations that we could learn enough about this bush to create this simulation. (Applause) And so you could imagine giving this to a film director, and letting him control, say, the strength and direction of wind in a shot after it's been recorded. Or, in this case, we pointed our camera at a hanging curtain, and you can't even see any motion in this video, but by recording a two-minute-long video, natural air currents in this room created enough subtle, imperceptible motions and vibrations that we could learn enough to create this simulation. And ironically, we're kind of used to having this kind of interactivity when it comes to virtual objects, when it comes to video games and 3D models, but to be able to capture this information from real objects in the real world using just simple, regular video, is something new that has a lot of potential. So here are the amazing people who worked with me on these projects. (Applause) And what I've shown you today is only the beginning. We've just started to scratch the surface of what you can do with this kind of imaging, because it gives us a new way to capture our surroundings with common, accessible technology. And so looking to the future, it's going to be really exciting to explore what this can tell us about the world. Thank you. (Applause)
OK. I'm sorry. I guess I'm trying to get my words together. Instead of blaming the victims, why don't we actually create jobs in the third world in general, but in Afghanistan in particular, which is another subject, and in Mexico, especially the southern states, and in Central America, where they're trying to build up their infrastructure for tourism, but soldiering, I found out on public TV, is the only thing too many of these adult males know, especially in El Salvador and Nicaragua? We have the infrastructure to do that - the child-sponsorship charities, the religious and the secular charities. All we need is the funding, and we - one infrastructure from Washington, the Peace Corps - all we need is extra funding from Washington - not only there, but in Afghanistan especially, not just Washington, but Western Europe, all the promises we made to Afghanistan...
And there were people who said hey, Ira, you can convert your car to a plug-in. But I wanted to wait. My question is, is the wait over? Because coming this winter, a couple of plug-ins are hitting the streets in the U.S. The first is Chevy Volt. It can run on an electric battery for the first 40 miles before switching on a gas engine to generate more electricity to power the car. And the Nissan Leaf - it doesn't even have a gas tank, only a plug. It's pure electric with a 100-mile range, and you plug it into an outlet to recharge it.
And when I watch my children learning so much about different cultures, about wildlife and having such beautiful, wonderful adventures, I think, you know, that's what we all need to do for our kids. We all need to give them a chance and do what we can to back them up and don't worry what people say. If you've got kids who are enthusiastic about sports, encourage them. Don't let people say, are you pushing them. Let them go for it, let them have some fun and achieve some things in their life. When you're a little, tiny person like Robert's age, really, you start with your name, who you are, who your parents are. You don't have much. And you can build off that to become a real, strong, successful person. And I hope to do that with Bindi and Robert. I kind of think that I was the outcast. I think Bindi and Robert are probably going to be wildlife voyeurs just like their daddy, but whatever they wanted to do, I'll support them.
Sure. I think a lot of dioceses, including the archdiocese of Boston, are aware of this issue and have set up these offices that attempt to reach out to victims and their families. And the archdiocese of Boston has begun attempting to reconcile those victims who are interested in that with sort of the church as a center of worship. But for a lot of victims who were so profoundly injured at the start of their faith lives by the most important person in their faith institution, the priest, it's just not possible. I mean there are a lot of victims who just can't walk back into the physical structure of a Catholic church, and that's going to remain a lifelong challenge both for the victims and for the church that, for many people, I don't think will ever be resolved; but for some, it has been.
They can spend dollars, eat lobster and drink wine in beachside restaurants in which Cubans are not permitted. They can watch news from around the world and travel the Internet as Cubans can't and it is startling and sad to see legions of young women lined up behind tourist hotels hoping, as Yoani Sanchez, the Cuban blogger has written, to snag a tourist to take them to a hotel and offer them, the next morning, a breakfast that comes with milk. The largest hotel company in Latin America is the Grupode Tirismo Gaviota. It is owned by the Cuban military. So while I've been glad to go to Cuba as a reporter, I can't bring myself to return as a tourist. Maybe now more Americans will get the chance to see Cuba and I hope they get to know what they're really seeing.
Yeah, this is - that's a great question because I think that in the nanotechnology community, one of the - we'll call it one of their fears is, you know, there's so much to do and so much cool stuff, so many hard problems we can solve, what's going to happen to the research, and I think that actually, this kind of data coming out early, well, it's a little bit of a - you know, let's hope people don't ever react. On the other hand, really makes it much easier to do the research because when people do ask you, yeah, what about the effects, you actually have something to say. So, I think that the two go hand in hand. Plus, the fact that you can make a space elevator and you'll know how to coat it, so that if the fibers did come out of it, they would be benign.
U.S. and European officials say there's little doubt that a remarkable nexus of sanctions from the U.S., EU and U.N. Security Council played a big role in bringing Iran to the table. The issue, now that Iran appears willing to make tangible concessions to prove it's not seeking a nuclear weapon, is how to provide sanctions relief without totally giving up the leverage they provide. It's clear that if there is to be a final deal, Iran will need some early sanctions relief to quiet hard-line critics back home. There are plenty of frozen Iranian assets that could be released, but that's not lifting sanctions, which is what Iran's leaders have promised their people. This may be where the U.N. sanctions come in. With all five permanent members of the Security Council at the table with Iran, there's little to stop the council from simply passing a new resolution that either suspends or cancels some of the sanctions.
The scenes that stay with me the most, I think, are first a family that had walked about 20 miles from their village, which had been totally destroyed, they said, to a village that had been significantly destroyed and sat like millions of people in this part of the country now under an improvised shelter, a plastic tarp thrown over some bamboo rods that they hung up in the trees and just waited, an extended family, a mother with her 1-year-old son, her in-laws, her mother, all of them just waiting for someone to evacuated them in a town where the village leader - it's a small town - stood and answered my questions very patiently. And when I asked him, of course through an interpreter, what he knew of his family, he said well, I assume they're all buried, and I just have to stay here and do my job. And he started weeping as he said it, and I don't think I'll ever forget that.
Now what about the racial politics of running for president in America? You have unprecedented moment where a white woman and African-American man are vying for the top spot in terms of the Democratic field. This ad that you have done is very specific - referring to our community - issues like racial profiling. Will it reach - hit the right spot in the black community and/or will it distance others of other races? Rep. JACKSON JR.: Well, I hope it does hit the right spot. Barack Obama is not speaking as a friend of the community; he is speaking as part of the community - he's one of us. He directly relates to the struggles within the African-American community. You know, when my father ran for president in '84 and '88, it was all for the legacy and a history from 1960 to the time he announced his candidacy in 1984 on speaking to issues of civil rights and social justice for African-Americans primarily, but for all Americans. And so Reverend Jackson started with an African-American base. But the political reality of America, to make America better for everyone, Reverend Jackson acknowledged that he had to build a Rainbow Coalition.
Yes, I think some changes have already come about. There's definitely been more attention by film crews to speak up when they see a problem after Sarah Jones was killed. One problem that people in the industry complain about is that the fines are too minimal. OSHA fines, you know, maybe $60,000, $70,000 in a fatality and that that's perhaps not much of a disincentive for companies to change their behavior. So I think some people would argue that there needs to be more done to strengthen the fines and also to beef up enforcement because a lot of times, accidents happen and they're not reported and no one knows about them.
OK. I'm not on Barack Obama's campaign staff, but I understand the movement that's afoot. And one of the reasons why Hillary Clinton has had such difficulty with doing what the congressman has said - and that is saying that I'm here. I'm going to fix things. I'm a fighter and so forth. That's a tremendous message, but it hasn't been able to overrun the feeling among the American people that this is a decisive moment in history to change. Now, if we take racism, we can destroy that movement and the possibilities that we can enter a new era in American history.
Well, I don't think everyone needs it. But my 40 years of teaching the novels and my recent lecture tour, which took me to many libraries and communities last year, convinced me that, increasingly, public school teachers are finding it more and more uncomfortable to get these books into the classroom. And, in fact, if you consult the records of the American Library Association, you'll see that "Huckleberry Finn" is the fourth most-challenged book among the so-called classics of all time and that "Tom Sawyer" falls behind. I think it's 14th. This has resulted in a situation where many school districts and many administrators and a growing number of teachers simply feel that they'll have to use other readings. That is a great shame, because these two are probably the most vibrant novels of the 19th century.
Yeah. Sorry to step on Robin Williams. But all I was going to say is that the - yeah. I mean, basically the directors would turn him loose. You know, they would say, you know, yeah, you're going to start here, and you're basically talking about this, and then they would just kind of let him go. And they would come back with, you know, three or four hours each time. I mean, they would come back with three or four hours of him ad-libbing. And then they'd go through and say, you know, something: We like this. We like this. We hate this and this and this, you know? But, you know, but this is brilliant.
Well, youre right to say that over the last 20 years both parties have used this little-used procedure but never for something this big and never in such a partisan way. When I was a very young aide on the Hill I remember that Lyndon Johnson, who had big Democratic majorities in Congress, had the civil rights bills written in Everett Dirksens office. He was the Republican leader and he got more than 70 votes. And the reason was he didnt just want to pass it. He knew it was controversial and he wanted the country to have confidence in it. He didnt want them trying to repeal it as soon as it was passed, which is what will happen here if its jammed through.
No, I'm with Roland on this one. This decision was made by the party, and you know, it was a very, quote-unquote, democratic process, and he's absolutely right. It's only an issue now because, of course, every delegate vote counts, every vote counts. We're just going to have to do it without Florida and Michigan, and I'm frankly glad that we're moving on and leaving it alone because I just think it would be more of a mess to do a do-over. That seems to me more problematic in the end than just moving on. I mean, so -and I agree with Roland. You know, go after the people who made this decision to disenfranchise themselves. I mean, this wasn't about people - you know, the people getting cheated. It wasn't about election fraud. This was about a very clear decision, and if they don't like the decision, then you know, like Roland said, throw the bums out of office.
Travelers at New Haven's Union Station stop and look up from BlackBerrys, iPods and private screens to a large information board. All eyes watch as panels flip around 'til they settle on words and numbers that let folks know when the next train departs. Some passengers jump up and head quickly to the track, others sigh and sit back to wait some more. Connecticut transportation officials have announced they'll take down the old schedule board and replace it with two new, LED light screens. Quinnipiac University Professor Rich Hanley says that's a shame because the mechanical sign fits Union Station, which was built during the age of the great American railroad.
I just would like to comment. I was not particularly persuaded by the argument that the Hezbollah fighters are using the U.N. placements and so on as hiding places and places to launch their missiles. I find this suspect. If the Israelis were so good with their photography of what they're able to destroy, you would think they would have proof. I wonder whether any your reporters have said photographs of this kind of action or so on - I really find this to be Israeli disinformation and part of their campaign. Because it covers up, it gives them an excuse for whenever they have these accidental bombings of these places where children and women are hiding, and where people live and in their homes.
Well, you know, he was murdered on April, 2011. Almost two years now, of the day of his birthday. We celebrated his birthday. He goes out with his girlfriend in the Condado area, you know, very well-lit area. At 10 o'clock, they decided to walk the streets. A kid - 14-year-old kid - goes out to steal his iPhone. He gives the iPhone. He gives the money. But the guy decides to attack his girlfriend and stabs her twice. My son jumps in to defend her and he died a hero. He got knifed three times. The kid is serving, now, 30 years in jail. My son is dead.
Let's go south. All of you are actually going south. This is the direction of south, this way, and if you go 8,000 kilometers out of the back of this room, you will come to as far south as you can go anywhere on Earth, the Pole itself. Now, I am not an explorer. I'm not an environmentalist. I'm actually just a survivor, and these photographs that I'm showing you here are dangerous. They are the ice melt of the South and North Poles. And ladies and gentlemen, we need to listen to what these places are telling us, and if we don't, we will end up with our own survival situation here on planet Earth. I have faced head-on these places, and to walk across a melting ocean of ice is without doubt the most frightening thing that's ever happened to me. Antarctica is such a hopeful place. It is protected by the Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1959. In 1991, a 50-year agreement was entered into that stops any exploitation in Antarctica, and this agreement could be altered, changed, modified, or even abandoned starting in the year 2041. Ladies and gentlemen, people already far up north from here in the Arctic are already taking advantage of this ice melt, taking out resources from areas already that have been covered in ice for the last 10, 20, 30,000, 100,000 years. Can they not join the dots and think, "Why is the ice actually melting?" This is such an amazing place, the Antarctic, and I have worked hard for the last 23 years on this mission to make sure that what's happening up here in the North does never happen, cannot happen in the South. Where did this all begin? It began for me at the age of 11. Check out that haircut. It's a bit odd. (Laughter) And at the age of 11, I was inspired by the real explorers to want to try to be the first to walk to both Poles. I found it incredibly inspiring that the idea of becoming a polar traveler went down pretty well with girls at parties when I was at university. That was a bit more inspiring. And after years, seven years of fundraising, seven years of being told no, seven years of being told by my family to seek counseling and psychiatric help, eventually three of us found ourselves marching to the South Geographic Pole on the longest unassisted march ever made anywhere on Earth in history. In this photograph, we are standing in an area the size of the United States of America, and we're on our own. We have no radio communications, no backup. Beneath our feet, 90 percent of all the world's ice, 70 percent of all the world's fresh water. We're standing on it. This is the power of Antarctica. On this journey, we faced the danger of crevasses, intense cold, so cold that sweat turns to ice inside your clothing, your teeth can crack, water can freeze in your eyes. Let's just say it's a bit chilly. (Laughter) And after 70 desperate days, we arrive at the South Pole. We had done it. But something happened to me on that 70-day journey in 1986 that brought me here, and it hurt. My eyes changed color in 70 days through damage. Our faces blistered out. The skin ripped off and we wondered why. And when we got home, we were told by NASA that a hole in the ozone had been discovered above the South Pole, and we'd walked underneath it the same year it had been discovered. Ultraviolet rays down, hit the ice, bounced back, fried out the eyes, ripped off our faces. It was a bit of a shock — (Laughter) — and it started me thinking. In 1989, we now head north. Sixty days, every step away from the safety of land across a frozen ocean. It was desperately cold again. Here's me coming in from washing naked at -60 Celsius. And if anybody ever says to you, "I am cold" — (Laughter) — if they look like this, they are cold, definitely. (Applause) And 1,000 kilometers away from the safety of land, disaster strikes. The Arctic Ocean melts beneath our feet four months before it ever had in history, and we're 1,000 kilometers from safety. The ice is crashing around us, grinding, and I'm thinking, "Are we going to die?" But something clicked in my head on this day, as I realized we, as a world, are in a survival situation, and that feeling has never gone away for 25 long years. Back then, we had to march or die. And we're not some TV survivor program. When things go wrong for us, it's life or death, and our brave African-American Daryl, who would become the first American to walk to the North Pole, his heel dropped off from frostbite 200 klicks out. He must keep going, he does, and after 60 days on the ice, we stood at the North Pole. We had done it. Yes, I became the first person in history stupid enough to walk to both Poles, but it was our success. And sadly, on return home, it was not all fun. I became very low. To succeed at something is often harder than actually making it happen. I was empty, lonely, financially destroyed. I was without hope, but hope came in the form of the great Jacques Cousteau, and he inspired me to take on the 2041 mission. Being Jacques, he gave me clear instructions: Engage the world leaders, talk to industry and business, and above all, Rob, inspire young people, because they will choose the future of the preservation of Antarctica. For the world leaders, we've been to every world Earth Summit, all three of them, with our brave yacht, 2041, twice to Rio, once in '92, once in 2012, and for the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, we made the longest overland voyage ever made with a yacht, 13,000 kilometers around the whole of Southern Africa doing our best to inspire over a million young people in person about 2041 and about their environment. For the last 11 years, we have taken over 1,000 people, people from industry and business, women and men from companies, students from all over the world, down to Antarctica, and during those missions, we've managed to pull out over 1,500 tons of twisted metal left in Antarctica. That took eight years, and I'm so proud of it because we recycled all of it back here in South America. I have been inspired ever since I could walk to recycle by my mum. Here she is, and my mum — (Applause) — my mum is still recycling, and as she is in her 100th year, isn't that fantastic? (Applause) And when — I love my mum. (Laughter) But when Mum was born, the population of our planet was only 1.8 billion people, and talking in terms of billions, we have taken young people from industry and business from India, from China. These are game-changing nations, and will be hugely important in the decision about the preservation of the Antarctic. Unbelievably, we've engaged and inspired women to come from the Middle East, often for the first time they've represented their nations in Antarctica. Fantastic people, so inspired. To look after Antarctica, you've got to first engage people with this extraordinary place, form a relationship, form a bond, form some love. It is such a privilege to go to Antarctica, I can't tell you. I feel so lucky, and I've been 35 times in my life, and all those people who come with us return home as great champions, not only for Antarctica, but for local issues back in their own nations. Let's go back to where we began: the ice melt of the North and South Poles. And it's not good news. NASA informed us six months ago that the Western Antarctic Ice Shelf is now disintegrating. Huge areas of ice — look how big Antarctica is even compared to here — Huge areas of ice are breaking off from Antarctica, the size of small nations. And NASA have calculated that the sea level will rise, it is definite, by one meter in the next 100 years, the same time that my mum has been on planet Earth. It's going to happen, and I've realized that the preservation of Antarctica and our survival here on Earth are linked. And there is a very simple solution. If we are using more renewable energy in the real world, if we are being more efficient with the energy here, running our energy mix in a cleaner way, there will be no financial reason to go and exploit Antarctica. It won't make financial sense, and if we manage our energy better, we also may be able to slow down, maybe even stop, this great ice melt that threatens us. It's a big challenge, and what is our response to it? We've got to go back one last time, and at the end of next year, we will go back to the South Geographic Pole, where we arrived 30 years ago on foot, and retrace our steps of 1,600 kilometers, but this time only using renewable energy to survive. We will walk across those icecaps, which far down below are melting, hopefully inspiring some solutions on that issue. This is my son, Barney. He is coming with me. He is committed to walking side by side with his father, and what he will do is to translate these messages and inspire these messages to the minds of future young leaders. I'm extremely proud of him. Good on him, Barney. Ladies and gentlemen, a survivor — and I'm good — a survivor sees a problem and doesn't go, "Whatever." A survivor sees a problem and deals with that problem before it becomes a threat. We have 27 years to preserve the Antarctic. We all own it. We all have responsibility. The fact that nobody owns it maybe means that we can succeed. Antarctica is a moral line in the snow, and on one side of that line we should fight, fight hard for this one beautiful, pristine place left alone on Earth. I know it's possible. We are going to do it. And I'll leave you with these words from Goethe. I've tried to live by them. "If you can do, or dream you can, begin it now, for boldness has genius, power and magic in it." Good luck to you all. Thank you very much. (Applause)
They confirmed that Gavin Long died yesterday on his 29th birthday. He was a decorated former Marine. But authorities say he held very strong anti-government views. He allied himself with the Sovereign Citizen movement which doesn't recognize most government officials or authorities like courts or police as legitimate. And authorities also said they've been trying to figure out more about him by tracing some of the ideas and postings he put on social media. For instance, he tried to change his name last year, but that was never finalized. And authorities believe, perhaps most importantly for now in the investigation, that he appears to have acted alone.
Caitlin Quattromani: The election of 2016 felt different. Political conversations with our family and friends uncovered a level of polarization that many of us had not previously experienced. People who we always thought were reasonable and intelligent seemed like strangers. We said to ourselves, "How could you think that? I thought you were smart." Lauran Arledge: Caitlin and I met in the summer of 2011, and we bonded around being working moms and trying to keep our very energetic boys busy. And we soon found out we had almost everything in common. From our love of Colorado to our love of sushi, there wasn't much we didn't agree on. We also discovered that we share a deep love of this country and feel a responsibility to be politically active. But no one's perfect — (Laughter) and I soon found out two disappointing things about Caitlin. First, she hates camping. CQ: I think camping is the worst. LA: So there would not be any joint camping trips in our future. The second thing is that she's politically active all right — as a conservative. CQ: I may hate camping, but I love politics. I listen to conservative talk radio just about every day, and I've volunteered for a few different conservative political campaigns. LA: And I'd say I'm a little to the left, like all the way to the left. (Laughter) I've always been interested in politics. I was a political science major, and I worked as a community organizer and on a congressional campaign. CQ: So as Lauran and I were getting to know each other, it was right in the middle of that 2012 presidential campaign, and most of our early political conversations were really just based in jokes and pranks. So as an example, I would change Lauran's computer screen saver to a picture of Mitt Romney, or she would put an Obama campaign magnet on the back of my car. (Laughter) LA: Car, not minivan. CQ: But over time, those conversations grew more serious and really became a core of our friendship. And somewhere along the line, we decided we didn't want to have any topic be off limits for discussion, even if those topics pushed us way outside of our friendship comfort zone. LA: And so to most of us, political conversations are a zero-sum game. There's a winner and there's a loser. We go for the attack and we spot a weakness in someone's argument. And here's the important part: we tend to take every comment or opinion that's expressed as a personal affront to our own values and beliefs. But what if changed the way we think about these conversations? What if, in these heated moments, we chose dialogue over debate? When we engage in dialogue, we flip the script. We replace our ego and our desire to win with curiosity, empathy and a desire to learn. Instead of coming from a place of judgment, we are genuinely interested in the other person's experiences, their values and their concerns. CQ: You make it sound so simple, Lauran. But getting to that place of true dialogue is hard, especially when we're talking about politics. It is so easy to get emotionally fired up about issues that we're passionate about, and we can let our ego get in the way of truly hearing the other person's perspective. And in this crazy political climate we're in right now, unfortunately, we're seeing an extreme result of those heated political conversations, to the point where people are willing to walk away from their relationships. In fact, Rasmussen released a poll earlier this year that said 40 percent of people reported that the 2016 election negatively impacted a personal relationship, and the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience tells us that people tend to feel their way to their beliefs rather than using reasoning, and that when reason and emotion collide, it's emotion that invariably wins. So no wonder it's hard to talk about these issues. LA: And look, we're just two regular friends who happen to think very differently about politics and the role that government should play in our lives. And I know we were all taught not to talk about politics because it's not polite, but we need to be able to talk about it, because it's important to us and it's a part of who we are. CQ: We have chosen to avoid political debate and instead engage in dialogue in order to maintain what we fondly call our bipartisan friendship. (Laughter) LA: And this election and all of the craziness that has followed has given us several opportunities to practice this skill. (Laughter) Let's start with January and the Women's March. At this point, you can probably guess which one of us participated. (Laughter) CQ: Oh, the Women's March. I was annoyed and irritated that entire day, really because of two things. Number one, the name "Women's March." As a conservative woman, the march's platform of issues didn't represent me, and that's OK, but hearing it talked about as this demonstration of sisterhood and solidarity for all women didn't ring true for me. The other piece was the timing of the event, the fact that it was the day after the presidential inauguration. It felt like we weren't even giving the new administration to actually do anything, good or bad, before people felt the need to demonstrate against it. LA: And under normal circumstances, I would agree with Caitlin. I think an administration does deserve the benefit of the doubt. But in this case, I was marching to show my concern that a man with such a poor track record with women and other groups had been elected as president. I had to be part of the collective voice that wanted to send a clear message to the new president that we did not accept or condone his behavior or rhetoric during the election. CQ: So I'm already feeling kind of aggravated, and then I see this Facebook from Lauran pop up in my social media feed. (Laughter) Seeing Lauran's sons at the march and holding signs took it to a new level for me, and not in a good way, because I know these boys, I love these boys, and I didn't feel they were old enough to understand what the march stood for. I didn't understand why Lauran would choose to have them participate in that way, and I assumed it wasn't a choice that the boys made for themselves. But I also know Lauran. You're an incredible mom who would never exploit your boys in any way, so I had to stop and check myself. I had a decision to make. I could take the easy way out and just choose not to say anything to her, and instead just kind of simmer in my frustration, or I could ask her to learn more about her motivations. LA: And I shared with Caitlin that we actually started talking about the March weeks before we participated. And my boys were curious as to why the event was being organized, and this led to some very interesting family conversations. We talked about how in this country, we have the right and the privilege to demonstrate against something we don't agree with, and my husband shared with them why he thought it was so important that men joined the Women's March. But the most significant reason we marched as a family is that it was a way for us to honor my parents' legacy. They spent their careers working to defend the rights of some of our most vulnerable citizens, and they passed these values down to me and my brother, and we want to do the same with our sons. CQ: After talking to Lauran, I really understood not only why she felt it was so important to march, but why she had her boys with her. And frankly, my assumptions were wrong. It was the boys who wanted to march after they talked about the issues as a family. But what's most important about this example is to think about the alternative. Had Lauran and I not talked about it, I would have been annoyed with her, and it could have resulted in an undercurrent of disrespect in our friendship. But by asking Lauran questions, it allowed us to use dialogue to get to a place of true understanding. Now, to be clear, our conversation didn't really change my mind about how I felt about the March, but it absolutely changed my thinking around why she brought her boys with her. And for both of us, that dialogue allowed us to understand each other's perspective about the Women's March even though we disagreed. LA: The second topic that challenged our ability to engage in dialogue was around my need to understand how Caitlin could vote for Trump. (Laughter) Caitlin is a successful professional woman who is deeply caring and compassionate, and the Caitlin I know would never excuse any man from talking about women the way that Trump did during the campaign. It was hard for me to reconcile these two things in my mind. How could you overlook the things that were said? CQ: So I'm guessing I may not be the only one here that thought we didn't have the best choices for the presidential election last year. (Laughter) The Republican candidate who I did support didn't make it out of the primary, so when it came time to vote, I had a decision to make. And you're right, there were some terrible things that came out during the Trump campaign, so much so that I almost decided to just abstain rather than voting for president, something I had never even considered doing before. But ultimately, I did vote for Donald Trump, and for me it was really a vote for party over person, especially recognizing how important that presidential pick is on influencing our judicial branch. But I shared with Lauran it was a decision I really wrestled with, and not one that I made lightly. LA: And so after our conversation, I was struck by a few things. First, I had fallen victim to my own confirmation bias. Because of my strong feelings about Trump, I had given all Trump voters the same attributes, and none of them forgiving. (Laughter) But knowing Caitlin, I started to ask questions. What were Trump voters really concerned about? Under all the divisive language, what was really going on? What could we learn about ourselves and our country from this unlikely event? I also learned that we shared a deep disappointment in this election, and that we have growing concerns about our two-party political system. But the most important thing about this conversation is that it happened at all. Without an open and honest dialogue between the two of us, this election would have been the elephant in the room for the next four years, pun intended. (Laughter) CQ: So, look — (Applause) So, look — we know it takes work to get past the difficult, frustrating and sometimes emotional parts of having discussions about issues like the Women's March or why your friend may have voted for a candidate that you can't stand. But we need to have these conversations. Our ability to move past political debate into true dialogue is a critical skill we should all be focused on right now, especially with the people that we care about the most. LA: And it's not just as adults that we need to bottle this behavior. It's critical that we do it for our children as well. My sons were inundated with this election. We were listening to the news in the morning, and they were having conversations with their friends at school. I was concerned that they were picking up so much polarizing misinformation, and they were growing really fearful of a Trump presidency. Then one day, after the election, I was taking my sons to school, and my younger son, completely out of the blue, said, "Mom, we don't know anybody who voted for Trump, right?" (Laughter) And I paused and I took a deep breath. "Yes, we do." (Laughter) "The Quattromanis." And his response was so great. He kind of got this confused look on his face, and he said ... "But we love them." (Laughter) And I answered, "Yes, we do." (Laughter) And then he said, "Why would they vote for him?" And I remember stopping and thinking that it was really important how I answered this question. Somehow, I had to honor our own family values and show respect for our friends. So I finally said, "They think that's the right direction for this country." And before I had even gotten the whole sentence out, he had moved on to the soccer game he was going to play at recess. CQ: So life with boys. (Laughter) So what Lauran and I have discovered through our bipartisan friendship is the possibility that lives in dialogue. We have chosen to be genuinely curious about each other's ideas and perspectives and to be willing to listen to one another even when we disagree. And by putting aside our ego and our preconceived ideas, we've opened ourselves up to limitless learning. And perhaps most importantly for our relationship, we have made the commitment to each other that our friendship is way more important than either of us being right or winning a conversation about politics. So today, we're asking you to have a conversation. Talk to someone outside of your political party who might challenge your thinking. Make an effort to engage with someone with whom you might typically avoid a political conversation. But remember, the goal isn't to win, the goal is to listen and to understand and to be open to learning something new. LA: So let's go back to election night. As the polls were closing and it became clear that Trump was going to be our new president, I was devastated. I was sad, I was confused, and I'll be honest — I was angry. And then just before midnight, I received this text message from Caitlin. [I know this is a hard night for you guys. We are thinking of you. Love you.] And where there so easy could have been weeks or months of awkwardness and unspoken hostility, there was this — an offering of empathy rooted in friendship. And I knew, in that moment, that we would make it through this. CQ: So we must find a way to engage in meaningful conversations that are going to move us forward as a nation, and we can no longer wait for our elected officials to elevate our national discourse. LA: The challenges ahead are going to require all of us to participate in a deeper and more meaningful way ... and it starts with each one of us building connection through dialogue — in our relationships, our communities and as a country. Thank you. (Applause)
Well, I can't read his mind, but I imagine that he is really worried because he has taken a number of steps, you know, they created a number of new institutions - this term auction facility - and then the terms securities lending facility, and then the prime dealers credit facility. These are major steps. Now, we're loaning to non-banks, to dealers in treasury securities. So, he's expanding the scope of monetary policy. I think he is worried that he is going to run out of ammunition. Cutting the Fed funds rate, he doesn't have that much further to cut it, so he's looking for other tools and I give him credit for that. He's thinking ahead that we might have a serious crisis and he's acting on it.
Well, my colleagues roll their eyes whenever any of us gives an estimate. But I can say that we're in - the companies are in phase one studies. Phase one studies means very small trials with, say, a dozen, up to 100 people. And the results so far have been promising, but they haven't proven anything. The timeframe forward typically from here on is about five years if things go well. But, you know, we have to be cautious because things can go wrong, and they often do in drug development. But, you know, we're certainly a lot closer than I ever thought we would be in my lifetime, and I certainly never thought that I'd be seeing patients given a drug that came out of the aging field so quickly.
That game against Georgia Tech was Michigan's only victory that year. The story of Willis Ward's benching is not a great moment in the school's storied football history, but people close to both men say it speaks to Ford's character. The incident was on Ford's mind in 1999 when he took one of the final political stands of his long life by writing an op-ed piece for The New York Times supporting the University of Michigan and its use of affirmative action in its admissions policies. Two lawsuits challenged that practice. Barry Rabe, a professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy in Ann Arbor, sees a direct link between the young Ford - the football player who took a stand - and the aging former president.
A confident people on the other hand, would have gone slow on the adulation and asked a few pointed questions of Hassan Nasrallah. Was the leader of Hezbollah oblivious to Israel's security doctrine, which by the way has been in place for more than three decades? The Israelis euphemistically call it a doctrine of massive retaliation. In practice, it means the indiscriminate demolition of large chunks of inhabited lands. Was the cross-border raid worth the risk, the risk of an Israeli response that would wreak havoc and destruction on Lebanon? Equally egregious is Hezbollah's matter-of-fact admission that it had spent months planning its raid. Really? And during those long months, did the thought ever cross Nasrallah's mind that he should consult with the hapless prime minister of Lebanon, who happens to be one of the very few Arab leaders who came to his position through the democratic process?
I was in Haiti when the earthquake happened. I was right at the epicenter of it. It's just like, you know, from what I have experienced, what I have seen, you know, I wish I wish not upon everybody to have seen the disaster that I have seen. (Unintelligible), the only complaint that I have, you know, I was in Haiti, and paying attention to what the Haitian government will say to the people of Haiti, and myself as a Haitian woman, not one day ever have I heard the President Preval ever came out and spoke to us and said you know what? This is a tragedy. This is Mother Nature. We're going to get through it together. We have to pull ourselves together.
The Rio Grande Valley is a world apart, surrounded and isolated by empty ranchland to the north, the Gulf to the east and Mexico to the south. A million and a half people live there amid both dazzling wealth and stark poverty. Federal authorities say the Valley, as it's called, is steeped in corruption of every stripe - drug smuggling, boat stealing, courthouse bribery, under-the-table payoffs and health care fraud. Late last year, the feds launched an operation to clean up this part of Texas. NPR's John Burnett has the first in our series on corruption in the Rio Grande Valley.
…one thing to, you know, we were talking about Newton and paper and it's very, very important that he was part of this first revolution of paper, this, you know, turning money from a thing into an abstraction, which was very much part of how we thought about a lot of things, turning lots of concrete things into abstractions. But Newton did not get rid of England's coinage. In fact, one of the things he's most remembered for in the history of money is supervising England's transition from a silver standard, which failed because they didn't devalue silver, to the gold standard that lasted until the 20th century. That was under Newton's watch.
Those guidelines remain in force today, and one of the most basic rules, says all research participants should give their informed consent. In other words, they should be able to decide for themselves whether to participate in an experiment. But there are occasions when informed consent is waived, and the FDA is set to decide on one of them soon. The United States Navy wants to start trials of a blood substitute. It would be given to people who are in a trauma, but who may be unconscious and couldn't give their consent to use the blood substitute. Should that trial be allowed to go forward? That's one of the issues we'll be talking about this hour.
But the military draws a distinction between hazing and harmless rights of passage. And these days, says Fidell, the military is cracking down. Last summer, the Secretary of the Navy issued an updated anti-hazing policy. It says all hazing is contrary to Navy core values and will not be tolerated. The second criminal case at Bremerton goes far beyond hazing. It involves two Machinist Mates from the USS Columbus sub. They're accused of pointing a loaded gun at their alleged victim and threatening to blow his head off. The hazing and assault cases are not exactly top of mind in this sleepy Navy town, an hour's ferry ride from Seattle. But at the Westside Burrito Connection, a popular Navy hangout, cashier Veronica Lopez(ph) calls the allegations sad.
All throughout the Cold War in the United States, we protected dissidents from the Soviet government. These are, you know, writers. These are speakers. These are physicists. These are not people who can benefit the United States government even if they had wanted to. And we protected them nonetheless because of the message it sent. Now, the Russian government doesn't get many chances in this context internationally, on the global stage, to do the right thing. I have been criticizing the Russian government while I am here. What more can I do to satisfy you or any of these critics who hold these positions? The reality is there is nothing that will satisfy them because it is their suspicion, it is their skepticism, it is their distrust of the Russian government as an institution which is motivating this.
NPR political editor Ken Rudin is feeling a little under the weather today feel better, Ken. So we've called on two of the NPR Washington desk's finest to pinch-hit: national political correspondents Don Gonyea and Mara Liasson. As usual, there's a lot to talk about - Sarah Palin on church and state, a bevy of birther bills in Pennsylvania, Joe Sestak and Arlen Specter duke it out on the airwaves. Later, we'll focus on a couple of primaries. In Florida, will Charlie Crist pull a Joe Lieberman to duck Marco Rubio? And in Arkansas, does Bill Halter help Blanche Lincoln? They debate on Friday night.
Well, it - politically, it did not hurt that the endorsement came right in the middle of a Hillary Clinton speech attacking Donald Trump over national security. While that was good timing, it also helps House Republicans get in front of next week what Paul Ryan is kicking off, a three-week agenda project, that House Republicans are going to outline the things they will do if a Republican president wins in November. And it is his way of asserting House Republicans' role in deciding what the Republican Party is going to be about this fall. It's going to give his lawmakers something to run on. And it does what he said he would do it - when he became speaker is he wants the Republican Party to become a proposition party that tells voters what they're going to do and not just a party that tells voters what they oppose.
I'm good. I wanted to ask a question about something Mr. Koppel touched on, the differences in the U.S. immigration policy for Haitian-Americans as compared to Cuban-Americans. I found it to be a bit one-sided. Cuban-Americans, obviously when they come here, Cubans rather, when they come here, they're allowed to stay. Haitians, on the other hand, when they come, they're immediately returned or, if they're not returned, they're kept in - housed in detention centers or in prisons or jails. A good example is about 10 years ago, the case of Elian Gonzalez. When he came, his mother brought him from Cuba. Obviously, she didn't make. You know, she died in the process, but he was brought here, and I think, if I remember correctly, he was put into, you know, this nice house up in D.C. He was given a trip to Disneyworld, and I think shortly after that, there were some Haitians who attempted to come to this country. And when they got here, they were housed in detention centers. So my question is: What is the difference in the policy, and why is there such a difference?
This is my first time at TED. Normally, as an advertising man, I actually speak at TED Evil, which is TED's secret sister that pays all the bills. It's held every two years in Burma. And I particularly remember a really good speech by Kim Jong Il on how to get teens smoking again. (Laughter) But, actually, it's suddenly come to me after years working in the business, that what we create in advertising, which is intangible value — you might call it perceived value, you might call it badge value, subjective value, intangible value of some kind — gets rather a bad rap. If you think about it, if you want to live in a world in the future where there are fewer material goods, you basically have two choices. You can either live in a world which is poorer, which people in general don't like. Or you can live in a world where actually intangible value constitutes a greater part of overall value, that actually intangible value, in many ways is a very, very fine substitute for using up labor or limited resources in the creation of things. Here is one example. This is a train which goes from London to Paris. The question was given to a bunch of engineers, about 15 years ago, "How do we make the journey to Paris better?" And they came up with a very good engineering solution, which was to spend six billion pounds building completely new tracks from London to the coast, and knocking about 40 minutes off a three-and-half-hour journey time. Now, call me Mister Picky. I'm just an ad man ... ... but it strikes me as a slightly unimaginative way of improving a train journey merely to make it shorter. Now what is the hedonic opportunity cost on spending six billion pounds on those railway tracks? Here is my naive advertising man's suggestion. What you should in fact do is employ all of the world's top male and female supermodels, pay them to walk the length of the train, handing out free Chateau Petrus for the entire duration of the journey. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, you'll still have about three billion pounds left in change, and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down. (Laughter) Now, here is another naive advertising man's question again. And this shows that engineers, medical people, scientific people, have an obsession with solving the problems of reality, when actually most problems, once you reach a basic level of wealth in society, most problems are actually problems of perception. So I'll ask you another question. What on earth is wrong with placebos? They seem fantastic to me. They cost very little to develop. They work extraordinarily well. They have no side effects, or if they do, they're imaginary, so you can safely ignore them. (Laughter) So I was discussing this. And I actually went to the Marginal Revolution blog by Tyler Cowen. I don't know if anybody knows it. Someone was actually suggesting that you can take this concept further, and actually produce placebo education. The point is that education doesn't actually work by teaching you things. It actually works by giving you the impression that you've had a very good education, which gives you an insane sense of unwarranted self-confidence, which then makes you very, very successful in later life. So, welcome to Oxford, ladies and gentlemen. (Laughter) (Applause) But, actually, the point of placebo education is interesting. How many problems of life can be solved actually by tinkering with perception, rather than that tedious, hardworking and messy business of actually trying to change reality? Here's a great example from history. I've heard this attributed to several other kings, but doing a bit of historical research, it seems to be Fredrick the Great. Fredrick the Great of Prussia was very, very keen for the Germans to adopt the potato and to eat it, because he realized that if you had two sources of carbohydrate, wheat and potatoes, you get less price volatility in bread. And you get a far lower risk of famine, because you actually had two crops to fall back on, not one. The only problem is: potatoes, if you think about it, look pretty disgusting. And also, 18th century Prussians ate very, very few vegetables — rather like contemporary Scottish people. (Laughter) So, actually, he tried making it compulsory. The Prussian peasantry said, "We can't even get the dogs to eat these damn things. They are absolutely disgusting and they're good for nothing." There are even records of people being executed for refusing to grow potatoes. So he tried plan B. He tried the marketing solution, which is he declared the potato as a royal vegetable, and none but the royal family could consume it. And he planted it in a royal potato patch, with guards who had instructions to guard over it, night and day, but with secret instructions not to guard it very well. (Laughter) Now, 18th century peasants know that there is one pretty safe rule in life, which is if something is worth guarding, it's worth stealing. Before long, there was a massive underground potato-growing operation in Germany. What he'd effectively done is he'd re-branded the potato. It was an absolute masterpiece. I told this story and a gentleman from Turkey came up to me and said, "Very, very good marketer, Fredrick the Great. But not a patch on Ataturk." Ataturk, rather like Nicolas Sarkozy, was very keen to discourage the wearing of a veil, in Turkey, to modernize it. Now, boring people would have just simply banned the veil. But that would have ended up with a lot of awful kickback and a hell of a lot of resistance. Ataturk was a lateral thinker. He made it compulsory for prostitutes to wear the veil. (Laughter) (Applause) I can't verify that fully, but it does not matter. There is your environmental problem solved, by the way, guys: All convicted child molesters have to drive a Porsche Cayenne. (Laughter) What Ataturk realized actually is two very fundamental things. Which is that, actually, first one, all value is actually relative. All value is perceived value. For those of you who don't speak Spanish, jugo de naranja — it's actually the Spanish for "orange juice." Because actually it's not the dollar. It's actually the peso in Buenos Aires. Very clever Buenos Aires street vendors decided to practice price discrimination to the detriment of any passing gringo tourists. As an advertising man, I have to admire that. But the first thing is that all value is subjective. Second point is that persuasion is often better than compulsion. These funny signs that flash your speed at you, some of the new ones, on the bottom right, now actually show a smiley face or a frowny face, to act as an emotional trigger. What's fascinating about these signs is they cost about 10 percent of the running cost of a conventional speed camera, but they prevent twice as many accidents. So, the bizarre thing, which is baffling to conventional, classically trained economists, is that a weird little smiley face has a better effect on changing your behavior than the threat of a £60 fine and three penalty points. Tiny little behavioral economics detail: in Italy, penalty points go backwards. You start with 12 and they take them away. Because they found that loss aversion is a more powerful influence on people's behavior. In Britain we tend to feel, "Whoa! Got another three!" Not so in Italy. Another fantastic case of creating intangible value to replace actual or material value, which remember, is what, after all, the environmental movement needs to be about: This again is from Prussia, from, I think, about 1812, 1813. The wealthy Prussians, to help in the war against the French, were encouraged to give in all their jewelry. And it was replaced with replica jewelry made of cast iron. Here's one: "Gold gab ich für Eisen, 1813." The interesting thing is that for 50 years hence, the highest status jewelry you could wear in Prussia wasn't made of gold or diamonds. It was made of cast iron. Because actually, never mind the actual intrinsic value of having gold jewelry. This actually had symbolic value, badge value. It said that your family had made a great sacrifice in the past. So, the modern equivalent would of course be this. (Laughter) But, actually, there is a thing, just as there are Veblen goods, where the value of the good depends on it being expensive and rare — there are opposite kind of things where actually the value in them depends on them being ubiquitous, classless and minimalistic. If you think about it, Shakerism was a proto-environmental movement. Adam Smith talks about 18th century America, where the prohibition against visible displays of wealth was so great, it was almost a block in the economy in New England, because even wealthy farmers could find nothing to spend their money on without incurring the displeasure of their neighbors. It's perfectly possible to create these social pressures which lead to more egalitarian societies. What's also interesting, if you look at products that have a high component of what you might call messaging value, a high component of intangible value, versus their intrinsic value: They are often quite egalitarian. In terms of dress, denim is perhaps the perfect example of something which replaces material value with symbolic value. Coca-Cola. A bunch of you may be a load of pinkos, and you may not like the Coca-Cola company, but it's worth remembering Andy Warhol's point about Coke. What Warhol said about Coke is, he said, "What I really like about Coca-Cola is the president of the United States can't get a better Coke than the bum on the corner of the street." Now, that is, actually, when you think about it — we take it for granted — it's actually a remarkable achievement, to produce something that's that democratic. Now, we basically have to change our views slightly. There is a basic view that real value involves making things, involves labor. It involves engineering. It involves limited raw materials. And that what we add on top is kind of false. It's a fake version. And there is a reason for some suspicion and uncertainly about it. It patently veers toward propaganda. However, what we do have now is a much more variegated media ecosystem in which to kind of create this kind of value, and it's much fairer. When I grew up, this was basically the media environment of my childhood as translated into food. You had a monopoly supplier. On the left, you have Rupert Murdoch, or the BBC. (Laughter) And on your right you have a dependent public which is pathetically grateful for anything you give it. (Laughter) Nowadays, the user is actually involved. This is actually what's called, in the digital world, "user-generated content." Although it's called agriculture in the world of food. (Laughter) This is actually called a mash-up, where you take content that someone else has produced and you do something new with it. In the world of food we call it cooking. This is food 2.0, which is food you produce for the purpose of sharing it with other people. This is mobile food. British are very good at that. Fish and chips in newspaper, the Cornish Pasty, the pie, the sandwich. We invented the whole lot of them. We're not very good at food in general. Italians do great food, but it's not very portable, generally. (Laughter) I only learned this the other day. The Earl of Sandwich didn't invent the sandwich. He actually invented the toasty. But then, the Earl of Toasty would be a ridiculous name. (Laughter) Finally, we have contextual communication. Now, the reason I show you Pernod — it's only one example. Every country has a contextual alcoholic drink. In France it's Pernod. It tastes great within the borders of that country, but absolute shite if you take it anywhere else. (Laughter) Unicum in Hungary, for example. The Greeks have actually managed to produce something called Retsina, which even tastes shite when you're in Greece. (Laughter) But so much communication now is contextual that the capacity for actually nudging people, for giving them better information — B.J. Fogg, at the University of Stanford, makes the point that actually the mobile phone is — He's invented the phrase, "persuasive technologies." He believes the mobile phone, by being location-specific, contextual, timely and immediate, is simply the greatest persuasive technology device ever invented. Now, if we have all these tools at our disposal, we simply have to ask the question, and Thaler and Sunstein have, of how we can use these more intelligently. I'll give you one example. If you had a large red button of this kind, on the wall of your home, and every time you pressed it, it saved 50 dollars for you, put 50 dollars into your pension, you would save a lot more. The reason is that the interface fundamentally determines the behavior. Okay? Now, marketing has done a very, very good job of creating opportunities for impulse buying. Yet we've never created the opportunity for impulse saving. If you did this, more people would save more. It's simply a question of changing the interface by which people make decisions, and the very nature of the decisions changes. Obviously, I don't want people to do this, because as an advertising man I tend to regard saving as just consumerism needlessly postponed. (Laughter) But if anybody did want to do that, that's the kind of thing we need to be thinking about, actually: fundamental opportunities to change human behavior. Now, I've got an example here from Canada. There was a young intern at Ogilvy Canada called Hunter Somerville, who was working in improv in Toronto, and got a part-time job in advertising, and was given the job of advertising Shreddies. Now this is the most perfect case of creating intangible, added value, without changing the product in the slightest. Shreddies is a strange, square, whole-grain cereal, only available in New Zealand, Canada and Britain. It's Kraft's peculiar way of rewarding loyalty to the crown. (Laughter) In working out how you could re-launch Shreddies, he came up with this. Video: (Buzzer) Man: Shreddies is supposed to be square. (Laughter) Woman: Have any of these diamond shapes gone out? (Laughter) Voiceover: New Diamond Shreddies cereal. Same 100 percent whole-grain wheat in a delicious diamond shape. (Applause) Rory Sutherland: I'm not sure this isn't the most perfect example of intangible value creation. All it requires is photons, neurons, and a great idea to create this thing. I would say it's a work of genius. But, naturally, you can't do this kind of thing without a little bit of market research. Man: So, Shreddies is actually producing a new product, which is something very exciting for them. So they are introducing new Diamond Shreddies. (Laughter) So I just want to get your first impressions when you see that, when you see the Diamond Shreddies box there. (Laughter) Woman: Weren't they square? Woman #2: I'm a little bit confused. Woman #3: They look like the squares to me. Man: They — Yeah, it's all in the appearance. But it's kind of like flipping a six or a nine. Like a six, if you flip it over it looks like a nine. But a six is very different from a nine. Woman # 3: Or an "M" and a "W". Man: An "M" and a "W", exactly. Man #2: [unclear] You just looked like you turned it on its end. But when you see it like that it's more interesting looking. Man: Just try both of them. Take a square one there, first. (Laughter) Man: Which one did you prefer? Man #2: The first one. Man: The first one? (Laughter) Rory Sutherland: Now, naturally, a debate raged. There were conservative elements in Canada, unsurprisingly, who actually resented this intrusion. So, eventually, the manufacturers actually arrived at a compromise, which was the combo pack. (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) If you think it's funny, bear in mind there is an organization called the American Institute of Wine Economics, which actually does extensive research into perception of things, and discovers that except for among perhaps five or ten percent of the most knowledgeable people, there is no correlation between quality and enjoyment in wine, except when you tell the people how expensive it is, in which case they tend to enjoy the more expensive stuff more. So drink your wine blind in the future. But this is both hysterically funny — but I think an important philosophical point, which is, going forward, we need more of this kind of value. We need to spend more time appreciating what already exists, and less time agonizing over what else we can do. Two quotations to more or less end with. One of them is, "Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new." Which isn't a bad definition of what our job is, to help people appreciate what is unfamiliar, but also to gain a greater appreciation, and place a far higher value on those things which are already existing. There is some evidence, by the way, that things like social networking help do that. Because they help people share news. They give badge value to everyday little trivial activities. So they actually reduce the need for actually spending great money on display, and increase the kind of third-party enjoyment you can get from the smallest, simplest things in life. Which is magic. The second one is the second G.K. Chesterton quote of this session, which is, "We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders," which I think for anybody involved in technology, is perfectly true. And a final thing: When you place a value on things like health, love, sex and other things, and learn to place a material value on what you've previously discounted for being merely intangible, a thing not seen, you realize you're much, much wealthier than you ever imagined. Thank you very much indeed. (Applause)
I think it goes to that old saying that you can find a statistic to prove any argument. I think you can quote a sentence or two of this document and find that you can prove either of those points of view. So to that end, yes, we're hearing the president and his aides cite passages about Iraq. The judgment that Iraq has become a cause celebre for jihadists and that abandoning Iraq would hand those jihadists a victory. The president's camp says that underscores what they have been saying all along, that Iraq is central to the war on terror and that the U.S. needs to stay the course.
We're going to spend next few minutes talking about the conditions many women face simply walking down the street. On March 8, which happened to be International Women's Day, journalist Andrea Noel was walking in Mexico City wearing a summer dress. Video footage from a nearby security camera shows what happened next. A stranger ran up behind her, pulled down her underwear and knocked her down. Andrea Noel decided to file a police report and posted the security footage on her social media accounts. What happened next made the story news across Mexico. Along with support, Andrea Noel also received hundreds of explicit death threats, rape threats and comments criticizing her for the whole episode. Andrea Noel landed in New York a few days ago, so I called her there, and I asked her if the threats were the reason she left Mexico so abruptly.

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