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And I'd like to read a passage from the book just to give people some idea of what it is you're talking about, kind of the tone. This is very early in the book. As you just described, Joyce, the wife, is looking up at the World Trade Center, surrounded by other New Yorkers looking at it, and she's thinking about the fact that her husband is there, and here's what happens. “Joyce heard gasps and groans and appeals to God's absent mercy. A woman beside her sobbed without restraint, but Joyce felt something erupt inside her, something warm, very much like - yes, it was a pang of pleasure so intense it was nearly like the appeasement of hunger.

Well, I think the two are not mutually exclusive because the Ahmed Baba Institute exists within the community and is staffed by people from the community, those same impulses and instincts remain in place. And the very few documents that were burned were ones that had been slated to be examined and digitized. So I think that the really important thing, just from talking to scholars and people who were working with the manuscripts, is to get the documents digitized as quickly as possible. Even if it's time that eats away at their pages, what's contained in them will be maintained through the ages.

Early Monday morning a powerful explosion at a coal mine in Tallmansville, West Virginia, trapped 13 men in a tunnel more than 260 feet underground. It's been more than 33 hours since the explosion. Rescuers' attempts to contact the miners have thus far gone unanswered. Joining us now is Joseph Sbaffoni, director of Pennsylvania's Bureau of Deep Mine Safety. His agency was closely involved in the 2002 rescue of nine men who spent three days in a water-filled mine shaft in Somerset, Pennsylvania. He joins us now from his office in Pittsburgh. Nice to have you on TALK OF THE NATION.

You know, Michel, there's literally so many federal crimes that no one can count them. We know that there are at least 4,000. And that's just a criminal law. So there's no way that any attorney general can enforce all the laws, so each AG decides which ones she wants to prioritize. Eric Holder's Department and then followed by Loretta Lynch has focused on criminal justice reform, things like getting rid of private prisons when they're used to house federal employees, ratcheting down the war on drugs. It's likely that under William Sessions, the Department will go in the opposite direction.

Alvin Johnson(ph) of Columbia, South Carolina was also angered by the piece but for a more personal reason. He writes, I myself was made an amputee at age 25 by a careless driver. And I have the same injury as the young girls. But to say that everything has changed - even to the smallest thing - is absurd and insults amputees everywhere - never mind people with far more devastating disabilities. Well, we'd like to hear from you. So, please write to us at npr.org, click Contact Us at the top of the page. And don't forget to tell us where you're writing from and how to pronounce your name.

Sure, I will. I'm sorry. Yeah, originally, it was introduced by Green Dot, which is a charter school company. It's also heavily supported by Parent Revolution, which is an AstroTurf group, you know, portrayed as a grassroots group, but it isn't really. And it's funded by Broad, Walton, Rogers, Gates, by big money. And what's been happening in California - and it's only happened a few times - is that outside organizations are coming in, corporations are coming in, not parents, and they're selling the idea of school takeover to parents. And, you know, the argument has been made, even among some of the people who signed the petitions, that it was very misleading, the way it was done. So what's happening is that it's not really a grassroots action by parents to change a school or to turn around the school. It's corporation coming in, selling a product to parents. And sometimes (unintelligible)

Ellen and Bobby Cooley have only one child left at home. He'll join his siblings in Flagstaff next year for middle school. The Cooleys hope all their children will go to college. When asked if they're proud of their children's accomplishments, Ellen Cooley has to pause. She bows her head when she finally speaks. Ms. E. COOLEY: It's so emotional to me. I just tell them, go on. Get going, 'cause I didn't finish. Sometime, I just cry with - by myself. You know, just to know they're really up there. They're getting their own scholarship. Then we just pray for them every time when they're leaving somewhere.

So it was easy to sort of start getting into the rhythm of things. Once we moved out of ESL, then, you know, it was easier to see some of the cliques and so on and so forth, that you normally see in modern high schools, I guess, in the United States. Another interesting fact was that we had a lot more commonalities with a lot of the people from Eastern countries. I was surprised, as a European, to find that there were a lot more commonalities between the Asians and us. I can't necessarily put specifics on the table, but something like, you know, respect for the elders and stuff like that that was a clear divide between how the American kids treated some of their teachers while, you know, how some of the Asian kids would treat some of the teachers. And that was a binding kind of experience, as well.

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. And here are some of the headlines from the stories NPR News is following today. Firefighters are searching for survivors in the mountains of mud that buried more than a dozen homes in La Conchita, California, yesterday. At least four people were killed, 14 injured in the mudslide. And here in Washington today, the Senate Judiciary Committee is considering a proposal to ban asbestos lawsuits in exchange for setting up a compensation fund to help victims of asbestos poisoning. You can hear more on those stories coming up later today on "All Things Considered" from NPR News.

Unidentified Woman #1 (Actress): (As Woman) I'm running away, mother. I've left Clyde(ph). You know I've never loved the man. And I can't stand it no longer. I've left him and I'm leaving the Negro race. Oh, don't you look at me like that. I've tried. Heaven knows I have. But I can't stand it any longer. My mind is made up and I'm through. Oscar Micheaux was a polarizing figure and much about his life is only now coming to light. Thanks in part to film historian Patrick McGilligan. His new book is called "The Great and Only: Oscar Micheaux."

Thank you. I believe that our country is moving into a very dangerous mode. You know, it started when this administration decided to abandon the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Now, this was a signed treaty. Everyone agreed it was a good thing. Everybody also knows that it's not effective against countries like Russia, who get to launch hundreds of missiles. We seem to be going in a direction, a very militarist direction, that is going to instill fear in a lot of nations out there, and there is nothing worse than instilling fear in countries like Russia or China, countries that are capable of establishing a strong nuclear-attack force...

Yeah, this is why the ruling is so significant, really, because people know, often, what they're up against. And, in a way, this is a bad day for transparency. It will push people farther underground, people that before had reservations about the retaliation they might face if they go on and make public, uncomfortable truths about what's going on within organizations. They're now more likely to be quiet, because this kind of technical separation between your public speech versus speech - let's call it within the chain of command - is going to have the effect of really silencing people that would otherwise come forward with information, with troubling facts.

The Arab world has lost a connection to its past. Iraqi calligrapher Khalil al-Zahawi was killed in Baghdad last Friday. Al-Zahawi was known throughout the Middle East, revered as an artist and a teacher. He mastered the Arabic script known as Ta'liq - that's an Arabic word for hanging. It's a type of lettering that looks almost suspended on the page. Al-Zahawi reinterpreted the script. He stretched the letters and surrounded them with other words until the text took on the feeling of a painting. His books and exhibitions and his lively Baghdad gallery helped shape a new generation of contemporary Arab artists. Khalil al-Zahawi had recently been warned to leave Iraq, and indeed had shipped the majority of his collection north to Irbil. When he was shot Friday, he was standing on the steps of his own home in Baghdad.

There's a couple of new studies. One said that young black adults are much more likely to be infected with an STD, including AIDS or HIV, than young white adults even if they engage in the same or even safer sexual behavior. And also former President Clinton teamed up with two Indian pharmaceutical companies to cut prices of HIV and AIDS treatment for children, so making those drugs more accessible. Those will be drugs for HIV-positive children for as little as 16 cents a day. Let's me start with you, Nat. Are we making some advances here? Or, I mean it seems as if these two bits of news, the infection rates of young African-Americans and the Clinton cost cutting for kids' drugs, they're positive and negative. Where is - what's the overall picture?

This is Talk of the Nation. I'm Don Gonyea in Washington. Just over a month into his term, President Obama has so far taken two oaths of office, nominated three people for commerce secretary and visited more than a half dozen states. More to come this week. If you want to look back at all the significant events and developments from Mr. Obama's first month, check out NPR's The Obama Tracker. It's at npr.org. It gives you a day-by-day rundown of the president throughout his term. Go to npr.org and then click on Talk of the Nation to find that. We're looking at the first month of the Obama administration - what's worked, what hasn't, and what it tells us, most importantly, about what's still to come. Looking at the last 38 days, what has the president done that has surprised you? Our number is 800-989-8255; our email address, talk@npr.org. And again, you can join the conversation at our Web site. Go to npr.org and click on Talk of the Nation.

Well, I think what they're hoping to do--if you remember, the issue here is that the Shiite majority wants to form a nine-province region in the country that is basically autonomous. That's half the provinces in the country. I think what they're going to try to do is set up a mechanism by which you could do that but not actually enshrine the autonomous area into the constitution. So they'll say something like `There has to be a referendum in these areas and two-thirds of the votes of the National Assembly,' etc., etc. So they'll put the mechanism in place, and that'll make everybody, you know, happy enough for the moment to sign off on the thing. This is such a fractious country and there's so little agreement on so few things. That's why it's so difficult. I mean, a constitution is a reflection of consensus about a country, and there just isn't very much consensus here.

I saw a blog post earlier today by a journalist who covers, you know, sort of monitors the media that said that there may be fatigue with Pistorius covers, but then - coverage. But then when I went on Twitter afterwards, I think there's very much still an appetite for all kinds of, you know, whether gossip or what the police are going to do next. So there's definitely still an interest. In fact, he's trying to continue practicing while he's on bail. So I think there's fatigue by some people, but other people are interested. I just want to make a quick point. I don't know how homosexuality is a problem, but anyway.

Let me share some emails that we've been getting from our listeners. Here's one from Tom(ph) in Fairbanks, Alaska. Exxon spent over a decade appealing the $5 billion jury award from 1994, eventually getting it cut to $500 million. Many who, quote, won had long since lost their businesses or died. Has BP promised not to spend years in appeals? It was certainly worthwhile for Exxon, on top of the much reduced award, they had use of the money during the appeals. I don't know if either of you has the answer to that, but let me read a couple more emails before you comment. Here's another from Maria(ph) in Minneapolis: I hope we can hold BP's feet to the fire, but I am enough of a realist to know that we will end up paying for the losses. As much as it will hurt and anger us, what other choice do we have? Do we let our Gulf Coast die because BP can't or won't pay?

Christopher, if I can just jump in, I wouldn't even say some. If you look at the basis of the black experience, the black culture, you look at the base of the church and the role that it plays, whether it was creating institutions such as Morehouse, which I attended, or some of these other institutions. And you look at blacks and how we feel about homosexuality and alternative lifestyles. If you look at how we feel about crime, me being a former judge and prosecutor, disproportionately when the three strikes bill passed in cal, African-Americans overwhelmingly said yeah, lock Leroy up. Because the bottom line is I'm tired of him stealing my car. And so if you look at the foundation about marriage and the responsibility for brothers to man up, you're seeing a very conservative ideology amongst blacks. The problem is, is that we have had this history of the Southern strategy and Jim Crow. And all these instances where we have not been a part of the mainstream and so what we have now is Barack Obama giving Republicans an opportunity to say, you know what? Let's look at how we re-brand ourselves, particularly to individuals that we're going to need as the culture becomes more diverse.

Yup. I managed to track him down through my father about 10 years after I left school, and I was lucky. I got to see him most Christmases when I went back to England. Until about 15 years ago, when we lost track. And so I was quite persistent. I would see him across town in Romsey, and I'd dashed over, and I just had to say thank you. I was quite gushing. I'm doing this now. I'm doing that. He'd say calm down, calm down, it's OK. And I know he had this effect on lots of kids. But the interesting thing is that - that it had nothing to do with the subject he was teaching. He was just generally empathetic. He was a cool guy, and he just had time for the kids. And it was his – his just passion for us that made me have complete trust in him. And when he used to bring records into school, I used to, you know, take them home and play them, and he changed my life in a way, nothing...

I have been putting one foot in front of the other for as long as I can remember. And suddenly putting one foot in front of the other requires counting. It means learning how to use a pedometer, an exhausting exercise in itself. Before I can set it, the instruction manual tells me, I must first precisely measure my stride. It occurs to me that I could shorten my stride so my pedometer would be fooled into thinking I've gone the recommended 10,000 steps by, say, noon after just a few round trips between the couch and the refrigerator. But instead I dutifully entered the correct data and set the pedometer to zero. The next morning, pedometer in hand, I get out of bed and walk to the bathroom. Fifteen steps! And so the obsession begins. I try to keep on the move, even as I get dressed, which adds a slight edge of peril to the enterprise. By 9 AM, I have flown more than 800 miles, but to my horror have only walked about 1,000 steps. The day is suddenly looking very long. Since I had to get up at 4 AM in Los Angeles to fly to Portland, all I really want to do is go to my hotel and grab an hour's nap. But guilt is a powerful force, pushing me out the hotel door and across the street to a path along the Willamette River. It is a beautiful day with Mt. Hood shining in the distance. But this walk in the park is, in fact, no walk in the park. It's a job. And soon I am ignoring the scenery for sneak peeks at the pedometer. And I can see that a half-hour stroll is not going to cut it.

Not at all. In fact, what Mayor Bloomberg tried to do, and I think he was very successful in it, is trying to reach across the racial lines to bring everyone together. Look, it's an open secret that New York City is a predominantly Democratic city. In fact, Democrats outnumber Republicans 5:1. It is a very diverse city ethnicwise. And what Mayor Bloomberg did, which was something that Mayor Giuliani did as well, which is to literally break down the racial barriers and says, `I am not necessarily a Republican running for re-election. I'm your mayor running for re-election. And we've done a lot of work. We've done a lot of good over the last four years. Let's continue on that effort.' I mean, he relentlessly went through all the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and looked--and literally shook thousands of hands, not taking any votes for granted, and he should be commended for that.

They invited me up there in January, this past January, and I gave them a PowerPoint presentation, appraising his sculpture, giving them pictures, showing them pictures of Dr. King, where he was off, you know, and I told them at the time, you know, they asked me, well, do you think this guy has a capacity to do this? And, of course, if he's a sculptor. The problem is it's a cultural thing. And so, they don't believe in the concept of - I'm - I do black folks, and I know how they look, I know how they act. I know their anatomy. And here's a guy in China that's never been around any black people before in his life and he's expected to capture the essence of one of our greatest leaders. And it doesn't make any sense to me.

Okay. I'm a person who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, forced to take medication, forced into a hospital, and it remains - and the doctor's going to say, oh, that was a long time ago, so it's different now - it remains one of the most horrible experiences in my life, and it shaped my whole life because I became an advocate, like David. When I was in the hospital, I said to myself there's got to be a better way to treat people than this. I was depressed. I was actually looking for help when I went in. I ended up getting involuntarily committed after having gone in voluntarily, and I said there's got to be a better way. Why are we treating people like criminals whose only crime is that they're depressed or miserable or unhappy?

No, absolutely, absolutely. And I try to do that in the book, to cover the range, I mean the kind of structural instabilities that are inherent in the labor arrangements, but also, you know, working within those labor arrangements, people make of it what they will. Some people see it as a fantastic opportunity, amazing travel, as you put it quite nicely, the various connections that you don't know where they're going to lead, that people can take all kinds of different approaches to entering these arrangements, as they do in lots of different fields like music or, you know, writing your novel or being a journalist.

Well, I don't know what percentage at the end of World War II was held by foreigners. My suspicion is that it was very small, but I don't know that. And I - to be honest, I have not looked recently at the percentage of the current debt that is held by foreigners. The last time I looked, it was - is, I think, near 50 percent. But I - and I would say that the fact that more of the debt today is held by foreigners than it used to be creates additional problems and not fewer problems because the dollar is the currency of the world economy. And if foreigners lose faith in the willingness of the United States to repay its debt, the dollar will cease to function as a global form of money used for trade and international investment. And that would have, I think, very dramatic effects on the functioning of the world economy.

So, a big question that we're facing now and have been for quite a number of years now: are we at risk of a nuclear attack? Now, there's a bigger question that's probably actually more important than that, is the notion of permanently eliminating the possibility of a nuclear attack, eliminating the threat altogether. And I would like to make a case to you that over the years since we first developed atomic weaponry, until this very moment, we've actually lived in a dangerous nuclear world that's characterized by two phases, which I'm going to go through with you right now. First of all, we started off the nuclear age in 1945. The United States had developed a couple of atomic weapons through the Manhattan Project, and the idea was very straightforward: we would use the power of the atom to end the atrocities and the horror of this unending World War II that we'd been involved in in Europe and in the Pacific. And in 1945, we were the only nuclear power. We had a few nuclear weapons, two of which we dropped on Japan, in Hiroshima, a few days later in Nagasaki, in August 1945, killing about 250,000 people between those two. And for a few years, we were the only nuclear power on Earth. But by 1949, the Soviet Union had decided it was unacceptable to have us as the only nuclear power, and they began to match what the United States had developed. And from 1949 to 1985 was an extraordinary time of a buildup of a nuclear arsenal that no one could possibly have imagined back in the 1940s. So by 1985 — each of those red bombs up here is equivalent of a thousands warheads — the world had 65,000 nuclear warheads, and seven members of something that came to be known as the "nuclear club." And it was an extraordinary time, and I am going to go through some of the mentality that we — that Americans and the rest of the world were experiencing. But I want to just point out to you that 95 percent of the nuclear weapons at any particular time since 1985 — going forward, of course — were part of the arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union. After 1985, and before the break up of the Soviet Union, we began to disarm from a nuclear point of view. We began to counter-proliferate, and we dropped the number of nuclear warheads in the world to about a total of 21,000. It's a very difficult number to deal with, because what we've done is we've quote unquote "decommissioned" some of the warheads. They're still probably usable. They could be "re-commissioned," but the way they count things, which is very complicated, we think we have about a third of the nuclear weapons we had before. But we also, in that period of time, added two more members to the nuclear club: Pakistan and North Korea. So we stand today with a still fully armed nuclear arsenal among many countries around the world, but a very different set of circumstances. So I'm going to talk about a nuclear threat story in two chapters. Chapter one is 1949 to 1991, when the Soviet Union broke up, and what we were dealing with, at that point and through those years, was a superpowers' nuclear arms race. It was characterized by a nation-versus-nation, very fragile standoff. And basically, we lived for all those years, and some might argue that we still do, in a situation of being on the brink, literally, of an apocalyptic, planetary calamity. It's incredible that we actually lived through all that. We were totally dependent during those years on this amazing acronym, which is MAD. It stands for mutually assured destruction. So it meant if you attacked us, we would attack you virtually simultaneously, and the end result would be a destruction of your country and mine. So the threat of my own destruction kept me from launching a nuclear attack on you. That's the way we lived. And the danger of that, of course, is that a misreading of a radar screen could actually cause a counter-launch, even though the first country had not actually launched anything. During this chapter one, there was a high level of public awareness about the potential of nuclear catastrophe, and an indelible image was implanted in our collective minds that, in fact, a nuclear holocaust would be absolutely globally destructive and could, in some ways, mean the end of civilization as we know it. So this was chapter one. Now the odd thing is that even though we knew that there would be that kind of civilization obliteration, we engaged in America in a series — and in fact, in the Soviet Union — in a series of response planning. It was absolutely incredible. So premise one is we'd be destroying the world, and then premise two is, why don't we get prepared for it? So what we offered ourselves was a collection of things. I'm just going to go skim through a few things, just to jog your memories. If you're born after 1950, this is just — consider this entertainment, otherwise it's memory lane. This was Bert the Turtle. (Video) This was basically an attempt to teach our schoolchildren that if we did get engaged in a nuclear confrontation and atomic war, then we wanted our school children to kind of basically duck and cover. That was the principle. You — there would be a nuclear conflagration about to hit us, and if you get under your desk, things would be OK. (Laughter) I didn't do all that well in psychiatry in medical school, but I was interested, and I think this was seriously delusional. (Laughter) Secondly, we told people to go down in their basements and build a fallout shelter. Maybe it would be a study when we weren't having an atomic war, or you could use it as a TV room, or, as many teenagers found out, a very, very safe place for a little privacy with your girlfriend. And actually — so there are multiple uses of the bomb shelters. Or you could buy a prefabricated bomb shelter that you could simply bury in the ground. Now, the bomb shelters at that point — let's say you bought a prefab one — it would be a few hundred dollars, maybe up to 500, if you got a fancy one. Yet, what percentage of Americans do you think ever had a bomb shelter in their house? What percentage lived in a house with a bomb shelter? Less than two percent. About 1.4 percent of the population, as far as anyone knows, did anything, either making a space in their basement or actually building a bomb shelter. Many buildings, public buildings, around the country — this is New York City — had these little civil defense signs, and the idea was that you would run into one of these shelters and be safe from the nuclear weaponry. And one of the greatest governmental delusions of all time was something that happened in the early days of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, as we now know, and are well aware of their behaviors from Katrina. Here is their first big public announcement. They would propose — actually there were about six volumes written on this — a crisis relocation plan that was dependent upon the United States having three to four days warning that the Soviets were going to attack us. So the goal was to evacuate the target cities. We would move people out of the target cities into the countryside. And I'm telling you, I actually testified at the Senate about the absolute ludicrous idea that we would actually evacuate, and actually have three or four days' warning. It was just completely off the wall. Turns out that they had another idea behind it, even though this was — they were telling the public it was to save us. The idea was that we would force the Soviets to re-target their nuclear weapons — very expensive — and potentially double their arsenal, to not only take out the original site, but take out sites where people were going. This was what apparently, as it turns out, was behind all this. It was just really, really frightening. The main point here is we were dealing with a complete disconnect from reality. The civil defense programs were disconnected from the reality of what we'd see in all-out nuclear war. So organizations like Physicians for Social Responsibility, around 1979, started saying this a lot publicly. They would do a bombing run. They'd go to your city, and they'd say, "Here's a map of your city. Here's what's going to happen if we get a nuclear hit." So no possibility of medical response to, or meaningful preparedness for all-out nuclear war. So we had to prevent nuclear war if we expected to survive. This disconnect was never actually resolved. And what happened was — when we get in to chapter two of the nuclear threat era, which started back in 1945. Chapter two starts in 1991. When the Soviet Union broke up, we effectively lost that adversary as a potential attacker of the United States, for the most part. It's not completely gone. I'm going to come back to that. But from 1991 through the present time, emphasized by the attacks of 2001, the idea of an all-out nuclear war has diminished and the idea of a single event, act of nuclear terrorism is what we have instead. Although the scenario has changed very considerably, the fact is that we haven't changed our mental image of what a nuclear war means. So I'm going to tell you what the implications of that are in just a second. So, what is a nuclear terror threat? And there's four key ingredients to describing that. First thing is that the global nuclear weapons, in the stockpiles that I showed you in those original maps, happen to be not uniformly secure. And it's particularly not secure in the former Soviet Union, now in Russia. There are many, many sites where warheads are stored and, in fact, lots of sites where fissionable materials, like highly enriched uranium and plutonium, are absolutely not safe. They're available to be bought, stolen, whatever. They're acquirable, let me put it that way. From 1993 through 2006, the International Atomic Energy Agency documented 175 cases of nuclear theft, 18 of which involved highly enriched uranium or plutonium, the key ingredients to make a nuclear weapon. The global stockpile of highly enriched uranium is about 1,300, at the low end, to about 2,100 metric tons. More than 100 megatons of this is stored in particularly insecure Russian facilities. How much of that do you think it would take to actually build a 10-kiloton bomb? Well, you need about 75 pounds of it. So, what I'd like to show you is what it would take to hold 75 pounds of highly enriched uranium. This is not a product placement. It's just — in fact, if I was Coca Cola, I'd be pretty distressed about this — (Laughter) — but basically, this is it. This is what you would need to steal or buy out of that 100-metric-ton stockpile that's relatively insecure to create the type of bomb that was used in Hiroshima. Now you might want to look at plutonium as another fissionable material that you might use in a bomb. That — you'd need 10 to 13 pounds of plutonium. Now, plutonium, 10 to 13 pounds: this. This is enough plutonium to create a Nagasaki-size atomic weapon. Now this situation, already I — you know, I don't really like thinking about this, although somehow I got myself a job where I have to think about it. So the point is that we're very, very insecure in terms of developing this material. The second thing is, what about the know-how? And there's a lot of controversy about whether terror organizations have the know-how to actually make a nuclear weapon. Well, there's a lot of know-how out there. There's an unbelievable amount of know-how out there. There's detailed information on how to assemble a nuclear weapon from parts. There's books about how to build a nuclear bomb. There are plans for how to create a terror farm where you could actually manufacture and develop all the components and assemble it. All of this information is relatively available. If you have an undergraduate degree in physics, I would suggest — although I don't, so maybe it's not even true — but something close to that would allow you, with the information that's currently available, to actually build a nuclear weapon. The third element of the nuclear terror threat is that, who would actually do such a thing? Well, what we're seeing now is a level of terrorism that involves individuals who are highly organized. They are very dedicated and committed. They are stateless. Somebody once said, Al Qaeda does not have a return address, so if they attack us with a nuclear weapon, what's the response, and to whom is the response? And they're retaliation-proof. Since there is no real retribution possible that would make any difference, since there are people willing to actually give up their lives in order to do a lot of damage to us, it becomes apparent that the whole notion of this mutually assured destruction would not work. Here is Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, and Sulaiman was a key lieutenant of Osama Bin Laden. He wrote many, many times statements to this effect: "we have the right to kill four million Americans, two million of whom should be children." And we don't have to go overseas to find people willing to do harm, for whatever their reasons. McVeigh and Nichols, and the Oklahoma City attack in the 1990s was a good example of homegrown terrorists. What if they had gotten their hands on a nuclear weapon? The fourth element is that the high-value U.S. targets are accessible, soft and plentiful. This would be a talk for another day, but the level of the preparedness that the United States has achieved since 9/11 of '01 is unbelievably inadequate. What you saw after Katrina is a very good indicator of how little prepared the United States is for any kind of major attack. Seven million ship cargo containers come into the United States every year. Five to seven percent only are inspected — five to seven percent. This is Alexander Lebed, who was a general that worked with Yeltsin, who talked about, and presented to Congress, this idea that the Russians had developed — these suitcase bombs. They were very low yield — 0.1 to one kiloton, Hiroshima was around 13 kilotons — but enough to do an unbelievable amount of damage. And Lebed came to the United States and told us that many, many — more than 80 of the suitcase bombs were actually not accountable. And they look like this. They're basically very simple arrangements. You put the elements into a suitcase. It becomes very portable. The suitcase can be conveniently dropped in your trunk of your car. You take it wherever you want to take it, and you can detonate it. You don't want to build a suitcase bomb, and you happen to get one of those insecure nuclear warheads that exist. This is the size of the "Little Boy" bomb that was dropped at Hiroshima. It was 9.8 feet long, weighed 8,800 pounds. You go down to your local rent-a-truck and for 50 bucks or so, you rent a truck that's got the right capacity, and you take your bomb, you put it in the truck and you're ready to go. It could happen. But what it would mean and who would survive? You can't get an exact number for that kind of probability, but what I'm trying to say is that we have all the elements of that happening. Anybody who dismisses the thought of a nuclear weapon being used by a terrorist is kidding themselves. I think there's a lot of people in the intelligence community — a lot of people who deal with this work in general think it's almost inevitable, unless we do certain things to really try to defuse the risk, like better interdiction, better prevention, better fixing, you know, better screening of cargo containers that are coming into the country and so forth. There's a lot that can be done to make us a lot safer. At this particular moment, we actually could end up seeing a nuclear detonation in one of our cities. I don't think we would see an all-out nuclear war any time soon, although even that is not completely off the table. There's still enough nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the superpowers to destroy the Earth many, many times over. There are flash points in India and Pakistan, in the Middle East, in North Korea, other places where the use of nuclear weapons, while initially locally, could very rapidly go into a situation where we'd be facing all-out nuclear war. It's very unsettling. Here we go. OK. I'm back in my truck, and we drove over the Brooklyn Bridge. We're coming down, and we bring that truck that you just saw somewhere in here, in the Financial District. This is a 10-kiloton bomb, slightly smaller than was used in Hiroshima. And I want to just conclude this by just giving you some information. I think — "news you could use" kind of concept here. So, first of all, this would be horrific beyond anything we can possibly imagine. This is the ultimate. And if you're in the half-mile radius of where this bomb went off, you have a 90 percent chance of not making it. If you're right where the bomb went off, you will be vaporized. And that's — I'm just telling you, this is not good. (Laughter) You assume that. Two-mile radius, you have a 50 percent chance of being killed, and up to about eight miles away — now I'm talking about killed instantly — somewhere between a 10 and 20 percent chance of getting killed. The thing about this is that the experience of the nuclear detonation is — first of all, tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit at the core here, where it goes off, and an extraordinary amount of energy in the form of heat, acute radiation and blast effects. An enormous hurricane-like wind, and destruction of buildings almost totally, within this yellow circle here. And what I'm going to focus on, as I come to conclusion here, is that, what happens to you if you're in here? Well, if we're talking about the old days of an all-out nuclear attack, you, up here, are as dead as the people here. So it was a moot point. My point now, though, is that there is a lot that we could do for you who are in here, if you've survived the initial blast. You have, when the blast goes off — and by the way, if it ever comes up, don't look at it. (Laughter) If you look at it, you're going to be blind, either temporarily or permanently. So if there's any way that you can avoid, like, avert your eyes, that would be a good thing. If you find yourself alive, but you're in the vicinity of a nuclear weapon, you have — that's gone off — you have 10 to 20 minutes, depending on the size and exactly where it went off, to get out of the way before a lethal amount of radiation comes straight down from the mushroom cloud that goes up. In that 10 to 15 minutes, all you have to do — and I mean this seriously — is go about a mile away from the blast. And what happens is — this is — I'm going to show you now some fallout plumes. Within 20 minutes, it comes straight down. Within 24 hours, lethal radiation is going out with prevailing winds, and it's mostly in this particular direction — it's going northeast. And if you're in this vicinity, you've got to get away. So you're feeling the wind — and there's tremendous wind now that you're going to be feeling — and you want to go perpendicular to the wind [not upwind or downwind]. if you are in fact able to see where the blast was in front of you. You've got to get out of there. If you don't get out of there, you're going to be exposed to lethal radiation in very short order. If you can't get out of there, we want you to go into a shelter and stay there. Now, in a shelter in an urban area means you have to be either in a basement as deep as possible, or you have to be on a floor — on a high floor — if it's a ground burst explosion, which it would be, higher than the ninth floor. So you have to be tenth floor or higher, or in the basement. But basically, you've got to get out of town as quickly as possible. And if you do that, you actually can survive a nuclear blast. Over the next few days to a week, there will be a radiation cloud, again, going with the wind, and settling down for another 15 or 20 miles out — in this case, over Long Island. And if you're in the direct fallout zone here, you really have to either be sheltered or you have to get out of there, and that's clear. But if you are sheltered, you can actually survive. The difference between knowing information of what you're going to do personally, and not knowing information, can save your life, and it could mean the difference between 150,000 to 200,000 fatalities from something like this and half a million to 700,000 fatalities. So, response planning in the twenty-first century is both possible and is essential. But in 2008, there isn't one single American city that has done effective plans to deal with a nuclear detonation disaster. Part of the problem is that the emergency planners themselves, personally, are overwhelmed psychologically by the thought of nuclear catastrophe. They are paralyzed. You say "nuclear" to them, and they're thinking, "Oh my God, we're all gone. What's the point? It's futile." And we're trying to tell them, "It's not futile. We can change the survival rates by doing some commonsensical things." So the goal here is to minimize fatalities. And I just want to leave you with the personal points that I think you might be interested in. The key to surviving a nuclear blast is getting out, and not going into harm's way. That's basically all we're going to be talking about here. And the farther you are away in distance, the longer it is in time from the initial blast; and the more separation between you and the outside atmosphere, the better. So separation — hopefully with dirt or concrete, or being in a basement — distance and time is what will save you. So here's what you do. First of all, as I said, don't stare at the light flash, if you can. I don't know you could possibly resist doing that. But let's assume, theoretically, you want to do that. You want to keep your mouth open, so your eardrums don't burst from the pressures. If you're very close to what happened, you actually do have to duck and cover, like Bert told you, Bert the Turtle. And you want to get under something so that you're not injured or killed by objects, if that's at all possible. You want to get away from the initial fallout mushroom cloud, I said, in just a few minutes. And shelter and place. You want to move [only] crosswind for 1.2 miles. You know, if you're out there and you see buildings horribly destroyed and down in that direction, less destroyed here, then you know that it was over there, the blast, and you're going this way, as long as you're going crosswise to the wind. Once you're out and evacuating, you want to keep as much of your skin, your mouth and nose covered, as long as that covering doesn't impede you moving and getting out of there. And finally, you want to get decontaminated as soon as possible. And if you're wearing clothing, you've taken off your clothing, you're going to get showered down some place and remove the radiation that would be — the radioactive material that might be on you. And then you want to stay in shelter for 48 to 72 hours minimum, but you're going to wait hopefully — you'll have your little wind-up, battery-less radio, and you'll be waiting for people to tell you when it's safe to go outside. That's what you need to do. In conclusion, nuclear war is less likely than before, but by no means out of the question, and it's not survivable. Nuclear terrorism is possible — it may be probable — but is survivable. And this is Jack Geiger, who's one of the heroes of the U.S. public health community. And Jack said the only way to deal with nuclear anything, whether it's war or terrorism, is abolition of nuclear weapons. And you want something to work on once you've fixed global warming, I urge you to think about the fact that we have to do something about this unacceptable, inhumane reality of nuclear weapons in our world. Now, this is my favorite civil defense slide, and I — (Laughter) — I don't want to be indelicate, but this — he's no longer in office. We don't really care, OK. This was sent to me by somebody who is an aficionado of civil defense procedures, but the fact of the matter is that America's gone through a very hard time. We've not been focused, we've not done what we had to do, and now we're facing the potential of bad, hell on Earth. Thank you.

Can you describe for us a moment where digital technology and the ability to transfer those pictures via high-speed fiber optics cable hit home for you? Oh, yeah. I mean, I remember specifically an image that I took on the top of Victoria Falls, where a piece of land emerged only at very, very low times in the river. So I went out with these wonderful guys, local guys who would go out there and swim actually in the swimming hole at the top of Victoria Falls. As we're about to leave, the sun was setting and I turned around and one of the guys was standing at the edge of the fall with this kind of spiritual body language. I remember trying to get the shot quickly. And then there was this sort of unbelievable feeling of that evening - having it and sending it to the editor. You know, one of the most beautiful, privileged photos I've ever taken, and it was in front of the editor that evening. And that was extraordinary to me.

It's going to be tough, because, you know, there were players out there already who were ad supported online destinations, like Google and Yahoo, that have had a big head start on AOL. You know, AOL for years has relied heavily on the subscription revenues. So, I mean, Google for instance is reporting more than a billion dollars in ad revenues a quarter. You know, in the second quarter that was announced just a few days ago by AOL, they had a 40 percent jump in ad revenues, but it was only to 450 million dollars. So they've got a lot of catching up to do, and it means you've got to also put some compelling content on your services to draw advertisers in and get those page views you need to be able to charge the kind of rates to get the revenues you need.

From time to time, NPR's ombudsman joins us on Talk of the Nation to answer your questions about our reporting. Many news outlets were accused of bias during the presidential campaign. NPR was no exception. Ombudsman Alicia Shepard joins us in a moment to talk about what she found when she examined those complaints and took a look at NPR's campaign coverage. And we want to hear from you now that the elections are over and passions have cooled somewhat, do you think our coverage was biased, when and why? Our phone numbers 800-989-8255. Email us talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website at npr.org/talk. NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard joins us now, nice to have you back on Talk of the Nation.

Five former detainees brought this lawsuit. They say the CIA flew them overseas to be tortured. And they say a Boeing subsidiary, called Jeppesen DataPlan, provided logistical support. The former detainees are suing to hold Jeppesen accountable. So far they've had no luck. Bush administration lawyers argued there was no way to try this case without revealing state secrets. Activist groups and newspaper editorial pages hammered the Justice Department for taking that position, but a trial judge agreed and threw the case out. Yesterday, the suit went before three judges on an appeals court. And everyone wondered whether the Obama Justice Department would change course. ACLU attorney Ben Wisner represents the detainees. We reached him on a cell phone right after the arguments.

We're going to take a short break and come back and talk lots more about these cancer treatments. Our number, our phone number, you're welcome to call in, our number is 1-800-989-8255. You can also tweet us @scifri, @-S-C-I-F-R-I, talking about individualized medicine and targeting cancer cells and seeing where we might develop new drugs that target the vulnerabilities on them. Instead of just throwing a drug out for, let's say, breast cancer or other kind of cancer, we now target the cells, target the cancers, target the spots on those cancers itself. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break.

The Ukrainian armed forces have struck some blows against militants in the East, mainly thanks to their airpower. But overall, the news from Sloviansk, Donetsk and Luhansk has been grim. Video footage posted online appears to show a separatist attack on a border guard post in Luhansk Province, which eventually forced the outgunned guards to flee, opening a corridor for the flow of fighters and weapons from Russia. The government in Kiev is well aware that one of Moscow's objectives may be to open a corridor through eastern Ukraine to Crimea, already under Russian control in an annexation not recognized internationally. But Ihor Smeshko, former head of Ukrainian intelligence and longtime military man, says, in addition to the military's aging equipment, the armed forces are handicapped by organizational problems that hinder their ability to execute, what the government calls, its anti-terrorism operation in the East.

The National Geographic Channel and engineer Marshall Brain give us a fascinating behind the scenes look in the new series "Factory Floor with Marshall Brain." This hour, we'll move from conveyor belts to durability labs to the final product. Everything you've ever wanted to know about what it takes to make some of our most common products. If you want to talk with him about how ordinary things are made, from tennis balls and escalators to fireworks and frozen pizza or if you make any of them, give us a call. Our number here in Washington, 800-989-8255 or send an email to talk@npr.org and of course you can send us your comments on our blog at npr.org/blogofthenation. Marshall Brain is the host of "Factory Floor with Marshall Brain." He is the founder of the website "How Stuff Works" and he joins us now from North Carolina public radio, WUNC in Durham, North Carolina. Welcome to Talk of the Nation.

When I was in the House, I was shocked to find out that women weren't allowed to use the gym. So, I thought I have just got to do something about it. And I'm known for writing parodies. So, I took the song "Five Foot Two Eyes of Blue," and I wrote words. And I got a singing group. We called ourselves the Red, White and Blues. And at one luncheon I asked permission if we could sing this song: (Singing) Exercise, glamorize, where to go, will you advise? Can't everybody use your gym? That was it. And we kept going on: equal rights, we'll wear tights, let's avoid those macho fights. And it went on. And our colleagues were hysterical laughing, and we got into the gym. So, it showed that you have to use a sense of humor, you know, and do whatever it takes.

I was going to say, you know, what's fascinating about this is that the emotional pull of a Kennedy at a Democratic Convention, I mean, goes back to 1964 when they had that tribute to Bobby Kennedy - I'm sorry, to John Kennedy, who had been assassinated nine months before that. And Bobby Kennedy stood up on the stage in 1964 at Atlantic City at the convention. Lyndon Johnson didn't even want him there, but he knew he had to speak. And again, another time when a Kennedy spoke and everybody was brought to tears. And it came full circle on Monday night in Denver with Ted Kennedy's speech.

My funding so far has been from American Express, Chase, Capital One, and pretty much anyone else who feels like giving me a credit card. But the Holy Grail is getting this onto TVs, DVRs and TiVos. If I could be watching "Braveheart" for the umpteenth time and get a little alert that says, hey, there's a no-hitter on ESPN right now, hit select to change that channel now -or even better, if I'm out and I can tell my TiVo I like ACC basketball, SCC's football, the Yankees, the Colts and the Red Wings start recording anytime, anything interesting happens. In my fantasy world, I hope that it will be on the TiVo one day where you can pay 99 cents, $1.99 a month and make your TiVo or DVR truly smart and understands sports.

In 2002, a group of treatment activists met to discuss the early development of the airplane. The Wright Brothers, in the beginning of the last century, had for the first time managed to make one of those devices fly. They also had taken out numerous patents on essential parts of the airplane. They were not the only ones. That was common practice in the industry, and those who held patents on airplanes were defending them fiercely and suing competitors left and right. This actually wasn't so great for the development of the aviation industry, and this was at a time that in particular the U.S. government was interested in ramping up the production of military airplanes. So there was a bit of a conflict there. The U.S. government decided to take action, and forced those patent holders to make their patents available to share with others to enable the production of airplanes. So what has this got to do with this? In 2002, Nelson Otwoma, a Kenyan social scientist, discovered he had HIV and needed access to treatment. He was told that a cure did not exist. AIDS, he heard, was lethal, and treatment was not offered. This was at a time that treatment actually existed in rich countries. AIDS had become a chronic disease. People in our countries here in Europe, in North America, were living with HIV, healthy lives. Not so for Nelson. He wasn't rich enough, and not so for his three-year-old son, who he discovered a year later also had HIV. Nelson decided to become a treatment activist and join up with other groups. In 2002, they were facing a different battle. Prices for ARVs, the drugs needed to treat HIV, cost about 12,000 [dollars] per patient per year. The patents on those drugs were held by a number of Western pharmaceutical companies that were not necessarily willing to make those patents available. When you have a patent, you can exclude anyone else from making, from producing or making low-cost versions, for example, available of those medications. Clearly this led to patent wars breaking out all over the globe. Luckily, those patents did not exist everywhere. There were countries that did not recognize pharmaceutical product patents, such as India, and Indian pharmaceutical companies started to produce so-called generic versions, low-cost copies of antiretroviral medicines, and make them available in the developing world, and within a year the price had come down from 10,000 dollars per patient per year to 350 dollars per patient per year, and today that same triple pill cocktail is available for 60 dollars per patient per year, and of course that started to have an enormous effect on the number of people who could afford access to those medicines. Treatment programs became possible, funding became available, and the number of people on antiretroviral drugs started to increase very rapidly. Today, eight million people have access to antiretroviral drugs. Thirty-four million are infected with HIV. Never has this number been so high, but actually this is good news, because what it means is people stop dying. People who have access to these drugs stop dying. And there's something else. They also stop passing on the virus. This is fairly recent science that has shown that. What that means is we have the tools to break the back of this epidemic. So what's the problem? Well, things have changed. First of all, the rules have changed. Today, all countries are obliged to provide patents for pharmaceuticals that last at least 20 years. This is as a result of the intellectual property rules of the World Trade Organization. So what India did is no longer possible. Second, the practice of patent-holding companies have changed. Here you see the patent practices before the World Trade Organization's rules, before '95, before antiretroviral drugs. This is what you see today, and this is in developing countries, so what that means is, unless we do something deliberate and unless we do something now, we will very soon be faced with another drug price crisis, because new drugs are developed, new drugs go to market, but these medicines are patented in a much wider range of countries. So unless we act, unless we do something today, we will soon be faced [with] what some have termed the treatment time bomb. It isn't only the number of drugs that are patented. There's something else that can really scare generic manufacturers away. This shows you a patent landscape. This is the landscape of one medicine. So you can imagine that if you are a generic company about to decide whether to invest in the development of this product, unless you know that the licenses to these patents are actually going to be available, you will probably choose to do something else. Again, deliberate action is needed. So surely if a patent pool could be established to ramp up the production of military airplanes, we should be able to do something similar to tackle the HIV/AIDS epidemic. And we did. In 2010, UNITAID established the Medicines Patent Pool for HIV. And this is how it works: Patent holders, inventors that develop new medicines patent those inventions, but make those patents available to the Medicines Patent Pool. The Medicines Patent Pool then license those out to whoever needs access to those patents. That can be generic manufacturers. It can also be not-for-profit drug development agencies, for example. Those manufacturers can then sell those medicines at much lower cost to people who need access to them, to treatment programs that need access to them. They pay royalties over the sales to the patent holders, so they are remunerated for sharing their intellectual property. There is one key difference with the airplane patent pool. The Medicines Patent Pool is a voluntary mechanism. The airplane patent holders were not left a choice whether they'd license their patents or not. They were forced to do so. That is something that the Medicines Patent Pool cannot do. It relies on the willingness of pharmaceutical companies to license their patents and make them available for others to use. Today, Nelson Otwoma is healthy. He has access to antiretroviral drugs. His son will soon be 14 years old. Nelson is a member of the expert advisory group of the Medicines Patent Pool, and he told me not so long ago, "Ellen, we rely in Kenya and in many other countries on the Medicines Patent Pool to make sure that new medicines also become available to us, that new medicines, without delay, become available to us." And this is no longer fantasy. Already, I'll give you an example. In August of this year, the United States drug agency approved a new four-in-one AIDS medication. The company, Gilead, that holds the patents, has licensed the intellectual property to the Medicines Patent Pool. The pool is already working today, two months later, with generic manufacturers to make sure that this product can go to market at low cost where and when it is needed. This is unprecedented. This has never been done before. The rule is about a 10-year delay for a new product to go to market in developing countries, if at all. This has never been seen before. Nelson's expectations are very high, and quite rightly so. He and his son will need access to the next generation of antiretrovirals and the next, throughout their lifetime, so that he and many others in Kenya and other countries can continue to live healthy, active lives. Now we count on the willingness of drug companies to make that happen. We count on those companies that understand that it is in the interest, not only in the interest of the global good, but also in their own interest, to move from conflict to collaboration, and through the Medicines Patent Pool they can make that happen. They can also choose not to do that, but those that go down that road may end up in a similar situation the Wright brothers ended up with early last century, facing forcible measures by government. So they'd better jump now. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm sitting in a bar with a couple of friends — literally, a couple, married couple. They're the parents of two young children, seven academic degrees between them, big nerds, really nice people but very sleep-deprived. And they ask me the question I get asked more than any other question. They go, "So, Emily, how do couples, you know, sustain a strong sexual connection over multiple decades?" I'm a sex educator, which is why my friends ask me questions like this, and I am also a big nerd like my friends. I love science, which is why I can give them something like an answer. Research actually has pretty solid evidence that couples who sustain strong sexual connections over multiple decades have two things in common. Before I can tell my friends what those two things are, I have to tell them a few things that they are not. These are not couples who have sex very often. Almost none of us have sex very often. We are busy. They are also not couples who necessarily have wild, adventurous sex. One recent study actually found that the couples who are most strongly predicted to have strong sexual and relationship satisfaction, the best predictor of that is not what kind of sex they have or how often or where they have it but whether they cuddle after sex. And they are not necessarily couples who constantly can't wait to keep their hands off each other. Some of them are. They experience what the researchers call "spontaneous desire," that just sort of seems to appear out of the blue. Erika Moen, the cartoonist who illustrated my book, draws spontaneous desire as a lightning bolt to the genitals — kaboom! — you just want it out of the blue. That is absolutely one normal, healthy way to experience sexual desire. But there's another healthy way to experience sexual desire. It's called "responsive desire." Where spontaneous desire seems to emerge in anticipation of pleasure, responsive desire emerges in response to pleasure. There's a sex therapist in New Jersey named Christine Hyde, who taught me this great metaphor she uses with her clients. She says, imagine that your best friend invites you to a party. You say yes because it's your best friend and a party. But then, as the date approaches, you start thinking, "Aw, there's going to be all this traffic. We have to find child care. Am I really going to want to put my party clothes on and get there at the end of the week?" But you put on your party clothes and you show up to the party, and what happens? You have a good time at the party. If you are having fun at the party, you are doing it right. When it comes to a sexual connection, it's the same thing. You put on your party clothes, you set up the child care, you put your body in the bed, you let your skin touch your partner's skin and allow your body to wake up and remember, "Oh, right! I like this. I like this person!" That's responsive desire, and it is key to understanding the couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term, because — and this is the part where I tell my friends the two characteristics of the couples who do sustain a strong sexual connection — one, they have a strong friendship at the foundation of their relationship. Specifically, they have strong trust. Relationship researcher and therapist, developer of emotionally focused therapy, Sue Johnson, boils trust down to this question: Are you there for me? Especially, are you emotionally present and available for me? Friends are there for each other. One. The second characteristic is that they prioritize sex. They decide that it matters for their relationship. They choose to set aside all the other things that they could be doing — the children they could be raising and the jobs they could be going to, the other family members to pay attention to, the other friends they might want to hang out with. God forbid they just want to watch some television or go to sleep. Stop doing all that stuff and create a protected space where all you're going to do is put your body in the bed and let your skin touch your partner's skin. So that's it: best friends, prioritize sex. So I said this to my friends in the bar. I was like, best friends, prioritize sex, I told them about the party, I said you put your skin next to your partner's skin. And one of the partners I was talking to goes, "Aaagh." (Laughter) And I was like, "OK, so, there's your problem." (Laughter) The difficulty was not that they did not want to go to the party, necessarily. If the difficulty is just a lack of spontaneous desire for party, you know what to do: you put on your party clothes and show up for the party. If you're having fun at the party, you're doing it right. Their difficulty was that this was a party where she didn't love what there was available to eat, the music was not her favorite music, and she wasn't totally sure she felt great about her relationships with people who were at the party. And this happens all the time: nice people who love each other come to dread sex. These couples, if they seek sex therapy, the therapist might have them stand up and put as much distance between their bodies as they need in order to feel comfortable, and the less interested partner will make 20 feet of space. And the really difficult part is that space is not empty. It is crowded with weeks or months or more of the, "You're not listening to me," and "I don't know what's wrong with me but your criticism isn't helping," and, "If you loved me, you would," and, "You're not there for me." Years, maybe, of all these difficult feelings. In the book, I use this really silly metaphor of difficult feelings as sleepy hedgehogs that you are fostering until you can find a way to set them free by turning toward them with kindness and compassion. And the couples who struggle to maintain a strong sexual connection, the distance between them is crowded with these sleepy hedgehogs. And it happens in any relationship that lasts long enough. You, too, are fostering a prickle of sleepy hedgehogs between you and your certain special someone. The difference between couples who sustain a strong sexual connection and the ones who don't is not that they don't experience these difficult hurt feelings, it's that they turn towards those difficult feelings with kindness and compassion so that they can set them free and find their way back to each other. So my friends in the bar are faced with the question under the question, not, "How do we sustain a strong connection?" but, "How do we find our way back to it?" And, yes, there is science to answer this question, but in 25 years as a sex educator, one thing I have learned is sometimes, Emily, less science, more hedgehogs. So I told them about me. I spent many months writing a book about the science of women's sexual well-being. I was thinking about sex all day, every day, and I was so stressed by the project that I had zero — zero! — interest in actually having any sex. And then I spent months traveling all over, talking with anyone who would listen about the science of women's sexual well-being. And by the time I got home, you know, I'd show up for the party, put my body in the bed, let my skin touch my partner's skin, and I was so exhausted and overwhelmed I would just cry and fall asleep. And the months of isolation fostered fear and loneliness and frustration. So many hedgehogs. My best friend, this person I love and admire, felt a million miles away. But ... he was still there for me. No matter how many difficult feelings there were, he turned toward them with kindness and compassion. He never turned away. And what was the second characteristic of couples who sustain a strong sexual connection? They prioritize sex. They decide that it matters for their relationship, that they do what it takes to find their way back to the connection. I told my friends what sex therapist and researcher Peggy Kleinplatz says. She asks: What kind of sex is worth wanting? My partner and I looked at the quality of our connection and what it brought to our lives, and we looked at the family of sleepy hedgehogs I had introduced into our home. And we decided it was worth it. We decided — we chose — to do what it took to find our way, turning towards each of those sleepy hedgehogs, those difficult hurt feelings, with kindness and compassion and setting them free so that we could find our way back to the connection that mattered for our relationship. This is not the story we are usually told about how sexual desire works in long-term relationships. But I can think of nothing more romantic, nothing sexier, than being chosen as a priority because that connection matters enough, even after I introduced all of these difficult feelings into our relationship. How do you sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term? You look into the eyes of your best friend, and you keep choosing to find your way back. Thank you. (Applause)

CCDs can capture light and turn it into simple electronic signals, so a visual image could be converted instantly into digital form. Digital photography was born. The military was intensely interested in this for spy satellites, and the first commercial application was for digital TV cameras. Digital still cameras lagged by quite some time, Smith says, because compact memory was still hard to come by - that is until flash memory was invented. Smith knows this story intimately. I had a small exploratory research department at the laboratories, about 30 people, I guess. And the flash memory was invented in my department also.

Yeah. You know, my daughter's 10 years old. She's African-American. She's Muslim but she's still 10. And I think, as a dad - I know her mom talks about - talks to her about these things. But as a dad, I think my approach is probably riddled with a lot of concern, anxiety, paranoia but coming from the African-American experience and knowing full well what it's like to be profiled. So being black and Muslim, it comes with having double the suspicions, double the assumptions, double mythology surrounded - by who you are as a human being. But I think, in a very real sense, I've had to walk her through the realities of what it means to be black in America, being targeted and coming out of a lot of hurtful mythologies that have been codified by religion and even public policy. And so my hope is to navigate her around this to the best of my ability.

So you'll notice that there is a change. So I wanted to add that into the discussion. And that kind of gets to this question here, is now that we have President-elect Obama, you know, has the discussion changed? I do think that there was a missed opportunity during the elections to talk about, you know, multi-racial identity in a different way than we have before. And by that I mean that, you know, he was - I guess he was from the media's perspective, you know, he had been cloaked as a single race category, the first black president. I think there was a missed opportunity while he was talking about his mixed-race identity, but in a kind of, I guess a color blind sort of way. But I would say that there are what I call in my research the politics of being multi-racial and that are still at play. One thing that the previous guest was saying is that, you know, we're talking about black and white, but we do understand that people who are bi-racial or multi-racial - a person like myself, I'm black and Asian. Now what does it mean when white is not part of my binary, and how do I engage in that discussion?

Your timing made you and your partner the most infamous bank robbers in the west. Now, you’ll need to use that timing to help you break out of jail. At the appointed time, you’ll be walking in the yard near the electric fence. Your partner will flash you the signal, and exactly 45 seconds later, short out the fence circuit. It’ll automatically restart after a second or two, but as long as you move fast, you’ll be home free. And then you notice, to your horror, that your watch is broken, and there’s no time to fix it. The signal is coming, and if you make even a small mistake in counting off 45 seconds, you’ll get fried. Searching your pockets, you find something that might help: a lighter and two fuses you made earlier in the prison work program. Each fuse is a length of flammable twine, built to be lit on either end and burn for precisely one minute. The problem is that even though the fuses look uniform, they don’t burn evenly, so if you cut one in half, for example, one side might burn longer than the other. Your partner is going to give the signal any minute, and you’ll have to make your move. How can you use the fuses and lighter to time exactly 45 seconds? Pause the video to figure it out yourself. Answer in 3 Answer in 2 Answer in 1 The length of the fuse may not tell you anything, but you do know the fuses take exactly 60 seconds to burn from end to end. Here’s the key insight: If you start a fuse on one side and it burns for 30 seconds, there’ll still be 30 seconds of fuse left. If you had started it from the other end, it would’ve reached the exact same spot in thirty seconds. That means that if you lit it from both ends simultaneously, it would burn out in precisely 30 seconds. But how will you time the last fifteen? That’ll have to come from the second fuse. If it were a 30 second fuse, you’d be able to use that same trick again to double the burning speed and make it last exactly 15 seconds. And, you realize, you can shorten the second fuse by lighting one end of it at the same time as you light the first. At the moment the first burns out, you’ll be left with 30 seconds on the second fuse. Just when you’ve got this all figured out, you see the signal from your partner, and spring into action. You gather the four ends of the two fuses and light three of them. The moment the first burns out, you light the other end of the second fuse. When it flickers and dies, you know that exactly 45 seconds have passed, and the electric fence is dead. By the time it hiccups back to life, you’re over the fence and home free.

(Former Marine Rifle Company Commander): It was Firdos Square. The entire battalion and attachments had been moving at a rapid pace through Iraq for several weeks, and a few days prior to that we had crossed the Diyala River. When we got into Firdos Square it was really just another day on the road, and we saw the statue, and a bunch of Iraqis and reporters were out there in the square, and it just seemed natural to help them do what they were doing and bring the statue down. It was quite a large statue. I think it was like 30 or 40 feet tall, and they weren't having much luck with the ropes that they were using. So some of the Marines and some of the Iraqis had done a statue climb together and wrapped a heavier cable around it and pulled the statue down. It was largely coordinated by the battalion headquarters.

But it's really clear, though, that - I think Rochelle mentioned that the writing has been on the wall for some time, and I think one of the things that we run the risk of happening here is that Hillary Clinton runs a risk of ignoring something that she has said before, that it takes, in effect, a village to win the Democratic, not only the Democratic nomination, but ultimately for a Democrat to win the White House. And the more she carries on talking about this race issue, the more you see that village, sort of, sectioning off into bits and pieces, and I think, at some point in the not to distant future, I think we'll get to the point where Mrs. Clinton is going to have to call it quits. Because if you look at the numbers, the numbers just don't add up at this point, and I'm not quite sure exactly how she sees a path to the nomination remaining.

Honestly, I have to say I have not heard that. I do know that the most interesting thing that I came in touch with recently was a Thanksgiving dinner at the local VFW hall. They had Army troops coming in and then a busload of Navy troops who are all in Army-style fatigues doing ground combat training at Fort Bliss. And then after that, a group of Air Force troops who were doing the same thing, all of them volunteers for what appeared to be a little bit of a sort of unusual situation where troops were being taken from the different branches and trained for basically infantry duty and being sent to Iraq for a variety of things that were not what they were trained for. And these guys at least were - and women - were very, very gung-ho to get over there.

Well, hospitalist is a field that's emerged about over the last decade, and it's an interesting evolution. Until about 10 or 12 years ago, if you were my patient and I was your primary care doctor and you were hospitalized, you would expect that I would be your doctor in the hospital, and that understandably makes a lot of sense to a lot of people. One of the things we realized starting about a decade ago was in many circumstances, it wasn't working very well. Patients in the hospital were exceptionally sick. Things were happening in real time over the course of the day, and primary care doctors were very busy in the office. And so a new field emerged of generalist physicians, physicians who were not subspecialists but take care of all kinds of problems, who basically live in the hospital and become essentially your primary care doctor in the hospital, coordinating your care, making sure you're getting the right information and the right tests, talking to your family, talking to your primary care doctor. And then when you leave the hospital, returning you back to your primary care doctor - hopefully with a very good hand-off of information back to that doctor.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Because if a 5-year-old goes to kindergarten and starts talking about, you know, his aunts or mothers or whatever, you know, on whatever term - my aunt, who lives next on the house next door with my brothers, other brothers and sisters, that could mean a visit from federal agents and a father end up going to the penitentiary. Perhaps your guest knows more about the actual history of this. And I - but I was, you know, last time I was in Salt Lake and out at their restaurant, and I see a photograph of leaders of the church in federal prison doing time for polygamy, and it's the same photograph I saw from a family history that included some of my relatives in the photograph. So, you know, people took it pretty seriously.

Oh they remind me of the voters did in my Congressional district, and wanting to know whether or not I'm ready to reflect the will of my Congressional district to further Obama's interests, and there's some people want to know that, to see whether or not I've got enough guts to vote the other way. And I can tell you, I do have enough guts to vote the other way if I thought that was in the necessary - if that was in the interests of nationalizing our party. And I think that's what my voters would want me to do. You know, a lot of things can change after the primary. I don't know why people keep dealing with that. Next week, something might jump out that's serious and even that would cause some of the people to rethink how they cast their votes on February the 5th. We already have people who are superdelegates who are now rethinking their commitments that they made two or three months ago, so -because the circumstances have changed.

Yeah, that's the debate, as I say. But what we have found, I mean, just by experience, I don't even need to have a Ph.D. in economics to see that for one thing the - the burger franchises, for example, they keep making them cheaper, when they want to, you know, to increase sales. We find that - I mentioned the Costco example, which has been what The New York Times report call the anti-Walmart because while - a lot of controversies. And there was a big walkout by Walmart workers last year that made news. Costco hasn't had that problem. And so, I think, if you look at different companies who are able to remain competitive and the customers still keep flowing in because when people want to buy something, they're going to find ways to do it, and that - we have not had an inflation problem as the Fed tells us. So I think the usual theories seem to fall by the wayside, quite often, when it comes to supply and demand in this sort of thing.

I'll tell you, what I feel pressure most is getting things right. Most people aren't going to read a biography of Mary Anning or read scientific books about her. They're going to read this novel and they're going to think that's exactly how it happened. I had that feeling after I wrote "Girl with a Pearl Earring." People took it as if that was what really happened with Vermeer the painter, and that's how the painting came about, when actually I made most of it up. And I had no idea that the book was going to have the success it did. And so, afterwards, it was a real shock. And ever since then, as I write books about things that really happened, I have to be very careful. So, I definitely feel the pressure of being in a way like Mary Anning's representative, and I need to get it right as best I can.

What is the greatest human technological innovation? Fire? The wheel? Penicillin? Clothes? Google? None of these come close. As you read this, you are using the winning technology. The greatest tool in the world is language. Without it there would be no culture, no literature, no science, no history, no commercial enterprise or industry. The genus Homo rules the Earth because it possesses language. But how and when did we build this kingdom of speech? And who is ‘we’? After all, Homo sapiens is just one of several species of humans that have walked the Earth. Does ‘we’ refer to our genus, Homo, or to our species, sapiens? To discover the answers to these questions, we need to travel back in time at least 1.9 million years ago to the birth of Homo erectus, as they emerged from the ancient process of primate evolution. Erectus had nearly double the brain size of any previous hominin, walked habitually upright, were superb hunters, travelled the world, and sailed to ocean islands. And somewhere along the way they got language. Yes, erectus. Not Neanderthals. Not sapiens. And if erectus invented language, this means that Neanderthals, born more than a million years later, entered a world already linguistic. Likewise, our species would have emerged into a world that already had language. In spite of the fact that many paleoanthropologists view erectus as little more than a skinny gorilla, of few accomplishments, far too stupid to have language, and lacking a vocal apparatus capable of intelligible speech, the evidence seems overwhelming that they had language. Erectus needed language. They were capable of language. And, though often denied in evolutionary studies, the ‘leap’ to language was little more than a long series of baby steps, requiring no mutations, nor any complex grammar. In fact, the language of erectus would have been every bit as much a ‘real language’ as any modern language. Erectus was an imposing creature. Males stood between 173 cm and 180 cm. Their immediate ancestors, the Australopithecine males, were only about 137 cm tall (their immediate ancestors might have been Homo habilis, but only if we accept that habilis were not Australopithecines, or that they were a separate species from Homo erectus, neither of which is clear). The brains of these early humans averaged around 950 cubic centimetres in volume, double the size of the Australopithecines, though smaller than those of male Neanderthals (1,450 ccs) and sapiens (1,250-1,300 ccs), but still within the range of modern sapiens females. The vocal apparatus of erectus might not have been much more advanced than that of a modern gorilla or it might have been more similar to ours. But whether their speech sounded different than ours or not, it was nevertheless adequate for language. Evidence that erectus had language comes from their settlements, their art, their symbols, their sailing ability and their tools. Erectus settlements are found throughout most of the old world. And, most importantly for the idea that erectus had language, open oceans were not barriers to their travel. Erectus settlements show evidence of culture – values, knowledge structures and social structure. This evidence is important because all these elements enhance each other. Evidence from the erectus settlement studied at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel, for example, suggests not only that erectus controlled fire but that their settlements were planned. One area was used for plant-food processing, another for animal-material processing, and yet another for communal life. Erectus, incredibly, also made sea craft. Sea travel is the only way to explain the island settlements of Wallacea (Indonesia), Crete and, in the Arabian Sea, Socotra. None of these were accessible to erectus except by crossing open ocean, then and now. These island cultural sites demonstrate that erectus was capable of constructing seaworthy crafts capable of carrying 20 people or more. According to most archaeologists, 20 individuals would have been the minimum required to found the settlements discovered. Because the stone tools of erectus were simple and slow to evolve, some have rushed to conclude that they lacked intelligence for language. But stone-cutting implements are simply not the whole story. The evidence for erectus island settlements means that they built water-transport craft. Erectus seem to have had art as well, as exemplified in the 250,000-year-old Venus of Berekhat Ram. Further, archaeologists have discovered 400,000-year-old wooden thrusting and throwing spears in lower Saxony (called the ‘Schöningen spears’), which suggest a robust hunting culture. Thrusting spears, for example, require at least one member of a group to get close enough to the prey, such as mastodons, to pierce them with the weapon. Hunting culture entails cooperation and planning with others. One might object of course that these spears and other tools belong not to erectus but to some other pre-Neanderthal, pre-sapiens species of Homo. This objection has little force. In spite of a proliferation of names for Homo species that preceded Neanderthals (rudolfensis, ergaster, heidelbergensis, naledi, floresiensis and so on), the evidence is unclear for all but three species – erectus, neanderthalensis and sapiens. The burden of proof still rests upon those trying to distinguish the other proposed species of Homo. Finer distinctions among early Homo species are questionable, not only due to the absence of convincing evidence for such divisions but also by other positive evidence. One source is the discovery of the Dmanisi skulls, 1.8 million-year-old skulls found only a few years ago in the Dmanisi cave in the modern-day country of Georgia – all from the same species. These reveal roughly equivalent amounts of variation in shape to that found in purportedly distinct species. The other source of evidence comes from new research that Homo erectus in China seem to have evolved directly into Homo sapiens, a position underscored by more recent discoveries. So why are so many different species suggested? Partially because such proposals represent valid attempts to account for the diversity in form of different fossils and sites. But the proliferation of names is also spurred on by the attraction of being the first to name a new species. The truth is likely much more mundane – Homo changed gradually, with no clear end or beginning points between species, other than the three I support, if even there. However, even if later scholarship establishes that there were indeed more intermediate species and that in fact one of these, such as Homo heidelbergensis, first discovered language, the basic thesis of this essay is unchanged. Language was invented hundreds of thousands of years before Neanderthals and sapiens. But for now, the most reliable scholarship supports the idea that the only clear human species prior to Neanderthals was erectus. ‘Evidence from Flores suggests that our early ancestors were successful seafarers’ Moreover, sailing demonstrates a level of cognitive development rivalling even that of modern humans. The erectus accomplishment of paddling together across one of the strongest ocean currents in the world, such as the Throughflow that then and now surrounds the island of Flores in Indonesia, required not only cooperation, but also corrections, instructions and commands. Few detailed instructions or corrections can be given without language. Since the voyaging capabilities of erectus are so important to assessing their linguistic ability, this is something we need to be clear about. The only alternative to the idea that erectus built boats or rafts is that erectus individuals were accidentally transported to other islands via logs or naturally occurring vegetable rafts or some such. But this doesn’t account for the evidence. In Stone Age Sailors (2014), the anthropologist Alan Simmons puts it like this: our ancestors have often been painted as unintelligent brutes … however … this simply is not the case. Evidence … suggests that at least Homo erectus and perhaps pre-erectus hominins were early seafarers … based on this evidence, it seems that our early ancestors were … successful seafarers … Biological studies suggest that considerable numbers of ‘founder populations’ are required for viable colonisation.As Simmons concludes: ‘Given these variables, purposeful seafaring, involving intentionally constructed craft capable of carrying relatively large payloads (that is, people plus provisions) over considerable distances, is a more plausible model, in light of the increasing global evidence of early humans on many islands.’ To build and operate boats, erectus needed to talk about what material to collect, where to collect it, how to put the material together and so on – just what we ourselves would need to talk about in order to build a raft. In addition to the assembly of a raft, the planning for the trip as a whole, the reasoning for the undertaking, would have all required language. We can therefore conclude that erectus required language. But how difficult would it have been for them to invent language, even with their massive Homo brains? Well, this depends on what is meant by language. There are two fundamental components to language that all linguists agree upon – grammar and symbols. Although some linguists take grammar to be the most important component of human language, others take symbols to be more important. As seen below, though, once symbols appear in language, grammar comes along nearly for free. To understand the nature of the erectus invention of language, it is first important to recognise the distinction between communication and language: Communication is the transfer of information.Language is the transfer of information by symbols. In my book How Language Began (2017), I make the case that erectus symbols began with their tools. In addition to the quartzite hand-axe ‘Excalibur’ used in a burial rite some 350,000 years ago in modern-day Atapuerca in Spain, all erectus tools, like all sapiens tools, became symbols of labour, community and culture. The creation, care, transport and skilled use of tools all demonstrate that these tools meant something more than simply the task they were designed to perform. Just as a shovel represents not only the task of digging, but also evokes memories of killing snakes, preparing a camp site and so on, the tools of erectus had many functions and would have elicited memories of cultural values and activities when they were not present. In other words, erectus tools represented culturally agreed upon meanings that referred to displaced – not immediately present – activities and meanings, the hallmark of symbols. Thus, as erectus invented symbols, activities, tools, sailing, settlement patterns and so on, they were simultaneously inventing culture and transforming mere communication into language. This means that language is no more a part of ‘human nature’ than any other invention. Rather, to the degree that there is anything like human nature, it is seen in the cognitive power and flexibility that supports our ability to innovate. Language is waiting to be invented by any creature with a sufficiently powerful brain, human, non-human or even alien. From this vantage point, the stakes are high for theories of the origins of language. The main question that arises is whether humans possess special cognitive abilities absent from the brains of all other creatures or whether, more simply, humans have language because they are smarter than other creatures (whether through higher densities of neurons, or other advantages of brain organisation). All animals depend on indexes to navigate their way through the world, to feed themselves and escape danger The answer to me is simple – find an animal that can communicate via symbols and you have a linguistic animal. And this is the claim for Homo erectus – it was the first animal to communicate via symbols. Complex grammar is neither necessary nor sufficient for language. DNA replication follows a grammar-like procedure yet no one would say that genes have language. And as I have been claiming for years, some modern languages lack complex syntax. Symbols, not grammar, are thus the sine qua non of language. They alone guarantee communication that is displaced, that is shared by an entire community of speakers, that can be transmitted between speakers and between generations, and that can represent either abstract or concrete ideas or things. Symbols can do these things because of three properties: arbitrariness, intentionality, and conventionalisation. Arbitrariness means that a word such as ‘apple’ has no necessary connection to the fruit referred to by that name. Another symbol could just as easily have been selected to represent the same fruit, as in the Portuguese word maçã. By ‘intentional’ we mean that a form is purposely directed at the meaning it represents. And by ‘conventionalised’ one means that a symbol’s form is a society’s agreed-upon way of referring to a particular quality, event or thing. Apple means ‘apple’ because we say it does. Fascinatingly, the archaeological record supports exactly the progression of steps needed to get creatures from information-transfer without symbols to language (information-transfer via symbols). It is a sequence that Charles Sanders Peirce, the inventor of semiotics (the theory of symbols) would have predicted. I therefore call this sequence the ‘Peircean progression’. The steps in order of appearance in the archaeological record would have been (i) indexes (used by all animals); (ii) icons (first observed with Australopithecus africanus); and (iii) symbols (the tools, art and cultural creations of erectus). This progress is represented in the following diagram: All animals depend on indexes to navigate their way through the world, to feed themselves, to escape danger, to find shelter, and to attend to other biological needs. For example, a lion hunts its prey by the index of smell or perhaps an index of sight (such as a moving tree branch, caused by the passing of another animal). A fox escapes fire by evading the index of smoke, caused by fire. Indexes are thus as old as life. Next come icons. The first icon in the archaeological record demonstrates an intentional recognition that one object resembles another. This is the 3 million-year-old Makapansgat manuport, from South Africa. This small 7 cm x 8.3 cm pebble looks like a human face and had been in the possession of a small group of Australopithecus africanus. We know that Australopithecus carried this stone to their cave because it is unlike the other minerals found there. A million years after this first icon, the evidence for symbols in the cultural accomplishments of Homo erectus appears. In the Peircean progression, the different tools of erectus would have served initially as indexes of the tasks they represented. That is, there would have been a physical link between a spear with blood on the tip and the mastodon it killed. But as culture developed, these tools became more conventionalised more than 1 million years ago, as the archaeology shows, and thus would have gradually taken on the role of symbols. A tool would have represented for erectus a culturally significant task, a representation present even when the tool was not being used. Again, this is perhaps best exemplified by the red quartzite biface found in a possible grave in Atapuerca. As culture developed, tools became symbols, something we otherwise find only among our fellow humans. Organisation and planning of erectus settlements and travel also demonstrate the requisite cognitive ability for grammar and convention. The aggregate archaeological evidence of erectus accomplishments therefore supports the idea that erectus had achieved language more than 800,000 years ago, assuming that sailing followed language, and more likely 1.5 million years ago (supported by extensive travel and tool standardisation). How big a step would the invention of language have been for erectus? Symbols would have also emerged gradually from agreed-upon form-meaning correspondences (spoken words have sound forms and tools have visual, olfactory and tactile forms) interpreted by cultural context. These might have been simple exclamations with gestures and intonation, later conventionalised as symbols. For example, suppose that someone shouted ‘Shamalamadingdong!’ upon a close encounter with a saber-toothed cat. Gestures and intonation could then have broken this down into smaller parts through reverse engineering as many modern language games such as ‘Pig Latin’ do. We also see speakers analyse their languages through ‘back formations’, such as the breaking down of the word ‘alcoholic’ into two (faux) parts, ‘alco-’ and ‘holic’ and then producing a new word such as ‘chocoholic’. Speakers analyse their words and sentences with frequency and ease, however their analyses diverge from linguistic theory. Symbols also likely arose from the conventionalisation of natural sound patterns, such as crying, conventionalised to create ritual wailing in some Ge languages of Brazil. Once a symbol, such as a word, is invented, a phenomenon known as ‘duality-of-patterning’ has been established (a term introduced in the 1960s by the American linguist Charles Hockett). This is the association of a meaningless item, such as a string of sounds, with a meaning. Take the word ‘cat’. Although the three sounds ‘c’ [k], ‘a’ [æ] and ‘t’ [t] are individually meaningless, combined into the word ‘cat’ they take on a conventionalised meaning. The sequence of meaningless sounds in a word can be recognised qua sequence. Once this is done, we can substitute sounds, such as ‘p’ for ‘c’ to get ‘pat’, or ‘d’ for ‘t’ to get ‘cad’, or ‘augh’ [ᴐ] for [æ] to get ‘caught,’ and so on. This relies upon an understanding or discovery of ‘slots’ (the positions for ‘c’, ‘a’ and ‘t’ in the word and syllable) and ‘fillers’, the individual sounds of the language. From this simple slot-filler principle, in conjunction with meaning and culture, we can build grammars of varying levels of complexity. Once you have a set of symbols and a linear order agreed upon by a culture, you have a language Strings of words, phrases and sentences all have slots, the positions for the units that compose them, just as words are fillers for the slots of a sentence. In ‘The goat saw the monkey’ the fillers are nouns (such as ‘goat’ and ‘monkey’), articles (‘the’), and verbs (‘saw’), and the slots are the positions before the verb, the verb and the position after the verb. So just as we can derive ‘pat’ from ‘cat’, in a sense, we can also derive ‘The monkey saw the goat’ or ‘The man saw the boy’ from the slot-filler arrangement of ‘The goat saw the monkey’. Once you have a set of symbols and a linear order agreed upon by a culture, you have a language. That is really all there is to it, though of course most languages become more complex over time. Likewise, the bow and arrow has many degrees of complexity across societies, yet otherwise seems to be universal (because it is an optimal solution to secure protein that moves faster than you do). In the Peircean progression that I am proposing, these distinctions are expressed by the different G(rammars), G1-G3. G1 is a linear grammar (symbols merely placed in a linear order). G2 has some hierarchy (as in the Reed-Kellogg diagrams of English sentences that some of us learned to produce in elementary school). G3 has both hierarchy and recursion (so one can not only say the hierarchically structured ‘Bill said that May came in the room’ – where the sentence ‘that May came in the room’ is inserted into the larger sentence ‘Bill said …’ – but also recursive sentences such as ‘Bill said that May said that Peter said that John said that …’ where the sentences have in principle no upper bound). All of the embellishments of grammar such as hierarchical structures, recursion, relative clauses and other complex constructions are secondary, based on a slot-filler arrangement of and composition of symbols, in conjunction with cultural conventions and general principles of efficient computation. Such principles were first discussed in the paper ‘The Architecture of Complexity’ (1962) by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon. However, syntactic complexity is not required to have a language with the same expressive power as any other language. In fact, there are modern languages whose grammars appear to be little more than symbols in an agreed-upon order, lacking evidence for hierarchy or other hallmarks of complex syntax. Thus, once cultures and symbols appear, grammar is on the way. If this is correct, then language did not begin as singing, as intonation or as gestures. Rather, symbols depended upon gestures, speech and intonation symbiotically and simultaneously – a case also made by David McNeill in How Language Began (2012). Erectus had relative shortcomings of course, beyond possibly lacking the range of sounds of modern humans. It also lacked the modern form of the important FOXP2 gene that sapiens have. Do the shortcomings of vocal apparatus and primitive genes pose a problem for the idea that erectus had language? Not at all. For example, the evolution of speech was triggered by language – as we developed languages, the modes of expressing them improved over time. Yes, sapiens speech is likely better than erectus speech. But this doesn’t mean that erectus lacked speech. Any mammal could have speech with the sounds they are capable of producing today. They just need the right kind of brain. The sapiens version of FOXP2 helps us to articulate sounds more easily and to think more quickly and efficiently than erectus. But it is not a ‘language gene’. And though erectus might have had, as it were, the ‘Model T’ version of this gene while we possess the ‘Tesla version’, their ‘primitive’ FOXP2 would not have deprived them of language. FOXP2 and other genes adapted partially due to evolutionary pressure from language and culture. How many sounds does an entity need to keep their speech distinct, after all? Computers use only two ‘sounds’ – 0 and 1. Anything that can be said in any language of the world, no matter how many speech sounds there are in a given language, can be translated into 0s and 1s on a computer – otherwise you couldn’t type your novel on your laptop. The larynx is a red herring. In fact, there are modern languages such as the Papuan language Rotokas that have fewer than a dozen sounds. Erectus was physically capable of at least as many sounds as a gorilla or my laptop’s binary language. In fact, even with the same vocal apparatus, erectus likely could have made many more sounds than gorillas because of its more advanced brain. Chimps don’t talk because they don’t have the brains to support symbols, not because they lack the right vocal apparatus. Modern English has sentences as simple as ‘You drink. You drive. You go to jail.’ Yet in spite of such grammatical simplicity, we understand these examples just fine. In fact, one can construct similar sentences in any language that will be intelligible to all native speakers of the language. Interpretation requires cultural context, not complex grammar – but this facilitates it, explaining why so many languages have complex grammars, as I explain in Language: The Cultural Tool (2012). Were Homo erectus incapable of modern language because their tools were so primitive? Bollocks Such phrases demonstrate that humans can interpret and use a language even when it lacks any obvious grammar other than the ordering of words. The language of Homo erectus might have been no more complicated than these examples, or more so. The English examples underscore the principle that language is underdetermined apart from cultural context. Syntax alone is insufficient. But what about the many modern paleoanthropologists, linguists and others who do not believe that erectus was capable of modern language because their tools were so primitive? Bollocks. This attribution of inability to erectus is based on a number of errors in reasoning: (i) it focuses almost exclusively on stone tools for erectus, ignoring evidence for bone and wooden tools; (ii) it errs in either assuming that settlements on multiple islands were the result of land bridges or accidents due to wind; (iii) it appears not to consider the significance of erectus village organisation; (iv) no study of erectus speech appears to recognise that speech came later than language and that the human vocal apparatus needs to be able to produce only a small number of sounds to have speech (but see the recent research on macaques led by the evolutionary biologist W Tecumseh Fitch at the University of Vienna); (v) it fails to understand that tools become symbols; (vi) it tends to overestimate the difficulty of having language and fails to realise how slot-filler grammars follow from symbols based on duality-of-patterning. The conclusion that erectus invented language through their higher intelligence and cultural development is strong, as evidenced by the archaeological record. But if language is merely a technology based on symbols and grammar, other creatures could have also discovered it. If they didn’t, it would be because they lack culture. There are some claims that other animals have language as it is defined here – information-transfer via symbols. It is well-known, after all, that many animals can learn symbols. Some examples are horses, great apes and dogs. What is unclear is whether nonhumans invent symbols in the wild. They would need culture to do so. No strong evidence for this exists. The available evidence then strongly suggests that erectus invented language more than a million years ago. In so doing, Homo erectus changed the world more than any creature since, including their grandchild, Homo sapiens.

I think if you look at the history of conflict the world over, at the end of the day, people can pick up guns and fights. They can have revolutions, but when the chiefs are down, you have to sit down and talk. Now, whether someone is going to sit down and talk or not is another discussion. But dialogue and discussions, it always led to result. But when we say this, we are not depending on the benevolence of Robert Mugabe. We are not expecting Robert Mugabe to commit political suicide on our behalf. What we are saying is the circumstances in our region will force Mugabe to the negotiating table kicking and screaming. Now, what we are saying is there has to be political will among Africans. There has to be political rule among Zimbabweans, to drive Mugabe to do what is right. We, as Zimbabweans, will be masters of our own destiny. We re not going to depend on (unintelligible) South Africa to liberate us from Mugabe.

Almost a year ago, my aunt started suffering back pains. She went to see the doctor and they told her it was a normal injury for someone who had been playing tennis for almost 30 years. They recommended that she do some therapy, but after a while she wasn't feeling better, so the doctors decided to do further tests. They did an x-ray and discovered an injury in her lungs, and at the time they thought that the injury was a strain in the muscles and tendons between her ribs, but after a few weeks of treatment, again her health wasn't getting any better. So finally, they decided to do a biopsy, and two weeks later, the results of the biopsy came back. It was stage 3 lung cancer. Her lifestyle was almost free of risk. She never smoked a cigarette, she never drank alcohol, and she had been playing sports for almost half her life. Perhaps, that is why it took them almost six months to get her properly diagnosed. My story might be, unfortunately, familiar to most of you. One out of three people sitting in this audience will be diagnosed with some type of cancer, and one out of four will die because of it. Not only did that cancer diagnosis change the life of our family, but that process of going back and forth with new tests, different doctors describing symptoms, discarding diseases over and over, was stressful and frustrating, especially for my aunt. And that is the way cancer diagnosis has been done since the beginning of history. We have 21st-century medical treatments and drugs to treat cancer, but we still have 20th-century procedures and processes for diagnosis, if any. Today, most of us have to wait for symptoms to indicate that something is wrong. Today, the majority of people still don't have access to early cancer detection methods, even though we know that catching cancer early is basically the closest thing we have to a silver bullet cure against it. We know that we can change this in our lifetime, and that is why my team and I have decided to begin this journey, this journey to try to make cancer detection at the early stages and monitoring the appropriate response at the molecular level easier, cheaper, smarter and more accessible than ever before. The context, of course, is that we're living at a time where technology is disrupting our present at exponential rates, and the biological realm is no exception. It is said today that biotech is advancing at least six times faster than the growth rate of the processing power of computers. But progress in biotech is not only being accelerated, it is also being democratized. Just as personal computers or the Internet or smartphones leveled the playing field for entrepreneurship, politics or education, recent advances have leveled it up for biotech progress as well, and that is allowing multidisciplinary teams like ours to try to tackle and look at these problems with new approaches. We are a team of scientists and technologists from Chile, Panama, Mexico, Israel and Greece, and based on recent scientific discoveries, we believe that we have found a reliable and accurate way of detecting several types of cancer at the very early stages through a blood sample. We do it by detecting a set of very small molecules that circulate freely in our blood called microRNAs. To explain what microRNAs are and their important role in cancer, I need to start with proteins, because when cancer is present in our body, protein modification is observed in all cancerous cells. As you might know, proteins are large biological molecules that perform different functions within our body, like catalyzing metabolic reactions or responding to stimuli or replicating DNA, but before a protein is expressed or produced, relevant parts of its genetic code present in the DNA are copied into the messenger RNA, so this messenger RNA has instructions on how to build a specific protein, and potentially it can build hundreds of proteins, but the one that tells them when to build them and how many to build are microRNAs. So microRNAs are small molecules that regulate gene expression. Unlike DNA, which is mainly fixed, microRNAs can vary depending on internal and environmental conditions at any given time, telling us which genes are actively expressed at that particular moment. And that is what makes microRNAs such a promising biomarker for cancer, because as you know, cancer is a disease of altered gene expression. It is the uncontrolled regulation of genes. Another important thing to consider is that no two cancers are the same, but at the microRNA level, there are patterns. Several scientific studies have shown that abnormal microRNA expression levels varies and creates a unique, specific pattern for each type of cancer, even at the early stages, reflecting the progression of the disease, and whether it's responding to medication or in remission, making microRNAs a perfect, highly sensitive biomarker. However, the problem with microRNAs is that we cannot use existing DNA-based technology to detect them in a reliable way, because they are very short sequences of nucleotides, much smaller than DNA. And also, all microRNAs are very similar to each other, with just tiny differences. So imagine trying to differentiate two molecules, extremely similar, extremely small. We believe that we have found a way to do so, and this is the first time that we've shown it in public. Let me do a demonstration. Imagine that next time you go to your doctor and do your next standard blood test, a lab technician extracts a total RNA, which is quite simple today, and puts it in a standard 96-well plate like this one. Each well of these plates has specific biochemistry that we assign, that is looking for a specific microRNA, acting like a trap that closes only when the microRNA is present in the sample, and when it does, it will shine with green color. To run the reaction, you put the plate inside a device like this one, and then you can put your smartphone on top of it. If we can have a camera here so you can see my screen. A smartphone is a connected computer and it's also a camera, good enough for our purpose. The smartphone is taking pictures, and when the reaction is over, it will send the pictures to our online database for processing and interpretation. This entire process lasts around 60 minutes, but when the process is over, wells that shine are matched with the specific microRNAs and analyzed in terms of how much and how fast they shine. And then, when this entire process is over, this is what happens. This chart is showing the specific microRNAs present in this sample and how they reacted over time. Then, if we take this specific pattern of microRNA of this person's samples and compare it with existing scientific documentation that correlates microRNA patterns with a specific presence of a disease, this is how pancreatic cancer looks like. This inside is a real sample where we just detected pancreatic cancer. (Applause) Another important aspect of this approach is the gathering and mining of data in the cloud, so we can get results in real time and analyze them with our contextual information. If we want to better understand and decode diseases like cancer, we need to stop treating them as acute, isolated episodes, and consider and measure everything that affects our health on a permanent basis. This entire platform is a working prototype. It uses state-of-the-art molecular biology, a low-cost, 3D-printed device, and data science to try to tackle one of humanity's toughest challenges. Since we believe early cancer detection should really be democratized, this entire solution costs at least 50 times less than current available methods, and we know that the community can help us accelerate this even more, so we're making the design of the device open-source. (Applause) Let me say very clearly that we are at the very early stages, but so far, we have been able to successfully identify the microRNA pattern of pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer and hepatic cancer. And currently, we're doing a clinical trial in collaboration with the German Cancer Research Center with 200 women for breast cancer. (Applause) This is the single non-invasive, accurate and affordable test that has the potential to dramatically change how cancer procedures and diagnostics have been done. Since we're looking for the microRNA patterns in your blood at any given time, you don't need to know which cancer you're looking for. You don't need to have any symptoms. You only need one milliliter of blood and a relatively simple array of tools. Today, cancer detection happens mainly when symptoms appear. That is, at stage 3 or 4, and I believe that is too late. It is too expensive for our families. It is too expensive for humanity. We cannot lose the war against cancer. It not only costs us billions of dollars, but it also costs us the people we love. Today, my aunt, she's fighting bravely and going through this process with a very positive attitude. However, I want fights like this to become very rare. I want to see the day when cancer is treated easily because it can be routinely diagnosed at the very early stages, and I'm certain that in the very near future, because of this and other breakthroughs that we are seeing every day in the life sciences, the way we see cancer will radically change. It will give us the chance of detecting it early, understanding it better, and finding a cure. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Yes, I would say that in the area that I work in, there aren't a lot of offerings. We do have some private school settings that offer that. Though here in Chicago, (technical difficulty) of those. I guess it comes back, for me, to the point that parents who take an interest in putting their children in the best possible environment are also parents of students who tend to be those that are higher achieving. It would be curious to know would parents less involved in their child's academic career also be those that would consider this sort of option. So I don't know the answer to that question.

The story of the Wilson Four has stirred great interest within Arizona where the case seems to symbolize so many of the inconsistencies in immigration policy. Each year, an estimated 65,000 high-school students across the country graduate who have the same legal status as the Wilson Four. They're every nationality--Poles, Irish, Nigerians and Salvadoreans as well as Mexicans. At the point when they should be making plans and growing excited about the future, they can only live day to day and fear that something from their past for which they're not responsible will be discovered and used against them. Governor Janet Napolitano, who prosecuted many illegal immigrants as a district attorney, seems conflicted by the case.

Well, this is the murkiest part of the story, because Wolfowitz's fate now rests in the hands of this 24-member executive board. And the members of this board - so far, their strategy seems to have been to leak documents, to turn up the pressure, to essentially make life very uncomfortable for Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank in the hopes that he'll go. And that strategy hasn't worked, because he's still there. Now, the executive directors take authorization from the capitals of the countries they represent. So ultimately, this is a political decision - his future - that rests in the hands of governments from Germany, France, the U.K., and really around the world. The problem is that this board operates by consensus, traditionally. It doesn't vote. This is not Congress. There's no House majority whip to go count noses, and nobody really knows what will happen if there's a vote. So all of that argues for some kind of negotiated outcome.

Well, I don't think there's much of a chance that either Democrats or Republicans would allow them to expire at the end of the year. Neither party wants to take the blame for taxes going up on January 1st. And, in fact, today, President Obama called on lawmakers to work out a deal on taxes, as he said, in the next few days. So it's looking highly likely that there will be probably a temporary extension of all the Bush-era tax cuts, and along with that an extension of lapsed unemployment benefits and probably a green light to go ahead with ratification of the START treaty as part of the deal.

What can you learn and what can other scientists learn about this asteroid from its close pass? Well, we get a chance to see an asteroid really up close and personal here. Large telescopes will be taking a close look at it to get its spectrum, to find out about its composition - and especially radar. We'll get a great view of this asteroid, and we get an idea of its shape, its size, how quickly it's rotating. We get an idea of whether or not it has a moon. We get an idea of what its surface is like, whether it has boulders on its surface. So we're learning a lot about asteroids, and we're learning a lot about how they form. And that tells us, really, how the whole solar system formed. Now, who will be able to see the asteroid this evening? What kind of equipment do you need?

Generally speaking, nominees try to make themselves as small targets as possible. Their objective in the hearings is to essentially not disclose very much, but if they've done a lot beforehand, if they have a rather—relatively substantial record in which they've taken positions, then they are forced to defend that record, or at least to explain it. So a lot depends on how much we knew about the nominee before the hearings. With Judge Roberts, much of what we've known about him is based on his experience in the executive department. He'll likely distance himself from that record, saying he produced it working for other people. Democrats will say that's the record that explains why President Bush is so excited about him.

Among African Americans across the South, the pastor had first dibs on the bird that typically graced the table after church. ‘He ate the biggest, brownest, and best parts of the chicken at every Sunday meal,’ complained Maya Angelou of the pious glutton Reverend Howard Thomas in her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). Often called the preacher’s bird or the gospel fowl, it had a sacred role among West Africans, slaves and their descendants who laid the foundation for America’s love affair with chicken. British settlers brought their flocks to Jamestown in 1607, a dozen years before the first African slaves arrived on Virginia’s shores, and the birds helped to sustain struggling colonists. Food grew so short in 1610 that the governor made the unauthorised killing of any domesticated animal, including cocks and hens, punishable by death. In New England, where chickens arrived on the Mayflower, the Separatist Edward Winslow in 1623 sent an ailing Native American chief two chickens to make a healing soup. Grateful for the exotic gift, the chief is said to have revealed a plot by another tribe to destroy the nascent colony. The bird, however, was rarely more than an incidental food in colonial America. On Winslow’s farm, wild bird remains excavated by archaeologists outnumber those of chickens three to one, and cattle, pig, sheep and goat bones dominate. Virginians, meanwhile, feasted on turkey, goose, pigeon, partridge and duck, along with venison, mutton, pork and beef, as well as shad, sturgeon and shellfish. ‘Seventeenth- and 18th-century descriptions of colonial foodways ignored the chicken for the most part,’ says the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America (2004), edited by Andrew Smith. For enslaved African Americans, this humble status proved a welcome boon. In 1692, after several individuals had bought their freedom with profits from animal sales, the Virginia General Assembly made it illegal for slaves to own horses, cattle and pigs. Masters often banned their human chattels from hunting, fishing or growing tobacco, and at Mount Vernon raising ducks and geese was an undertaking reserved solely for George Washington’s white staff. The chicken ‘is the only pleasure allowed to Negroes; they are not permitted to keep either ducks or geese or pigs’, one visitor there remarked. On the expanding farms of the colonial South, African Americans began to breed, sell, buy and eat fowl as they saw fit. Many first-generation slaves came from West Africa, where the birds were widely raised and often used in ritual sacrifice. Chicken fried in palm oil is still a favourite meal there. Owners granted slaves authority over chickens because the birds were of negligible economic importance and reduced plantation spending on feeding field hands. Just as European Jews gained expertise in moneylending, a profession disdained by Christians, poultry became an African-American speciality because whites preferred beef and pork. Planters often paid their slaves cash for fowl and eggs, giving black cooks an economic incentive to encourage their masters to eat more chicken. By the middle of the 19th century, fried chicken was a quintessentially Southern dish. On the eve of the Civil War, exotic fowl arrived from China and Indonesia, and these large and flamboyant chickens became fashionable to collect and breed. They were crossed with domesticated birds and, by the 1870s, new varieties emerged that produced more eggs and meat. This development coincided with the rapid growth of cities in the northern United States, and the rising demand for cheap protein to feed millions of factory workers. The First World War pushed the chicken from the backyards of US farms to the forefront of the war effort. Herbert Hoover, head of the effort to feed American troops and desperate European civilians, encouraged US citizens to raise birds so that domestic pork and beef could be sent to the boys over there. By 1918, the post office allowed chicks to be shipped via Express Mail, spurring the growth of a hatchery industry that provided egg-laying birds to farmers around the nation. Five years later, in a little town in Delaware, a housewife named Celia Steele ordered 50 chicks from a hatchery through the mail, and by mistake received 500. She housed them in a small building until they were large, and then sold them to Jewish markets in New York City. The broiler industry was born, centred on the Delmarva Peninsula that includes Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, and serving what was the world’s largest urban area. In 1928, the Republican National Committee put out an ad backing Hoover as the presidential candidate, promising ‘A Chicken for Every Pot’. It wasn’t until the Second World War, when President Franklin Roosevelt’s War Food Administration seized all the broilers on Delmarva for recuperating veterans, that demand truly soared. By the time the war ended, people in the US were eating nearly three times as much chicken as they had at the start. Poultry entrepreneurs feared calamity in a postwar world where beef and pork were no longer rationed. So at an industry meeting in Canada, Howard Pierce, an Iowa poultry scientist working for the country’s largest food retailer, A&P, proposed a kind of Manhattan Project for poultry called the Chicken of Tomorrow. He suggested creating a chicken that looked like a turkey, with a broader and thicker breast and meatier thighs and drumsticks, and established the National Chicken of Tomorrow Committee, comprising all the major US poultry organisations, two trade publications, and employees of the US Department of Agriculture, to lead the work. The goal was to create the ideal broiler, with ‘breast meat so thick you can carve it into steaks’ These poultry authorities – all white and all male – created a scoring system, wax models with rounded breasts, and strict rules for a national contest. The goal was to draw on the expertise of small farmers as well as large commercial breeders to create the ideal broiler, with ‘breast meat so thick you can carve it into steaks’. Given the relatively scrawny fowl of yesterday, this was a formidable objective. To drum up interest, A&P paid for a short movie narrated by Lowell Thomas, the nation’s most famous newsreel reporter, full of serious men in ties and white coats examining chickens while women and black people in the background go about more menial tasks, such as feeding and dressing the birds. Given the old emphasis on egg production, ‘relatively few poultrymen took steps to develop better meat-type chickens’, Thomas explained. The committee also co-sponsored a Chicken Booster Day which included a New York City banquet and a screening of the 20th Century Fox film Chicken Every Sunday (1949), starring Celeste Holm and a child actress named Natalie Wood. The real star, of course, was the reassuring meal that brought a broken family back together without breaking the bank. The bird that provided three seasons of eggs, pin money for rural women, and the occasional special dinner was recast as a serious competitor to beef and pork. Contests in 42 US states for the Chicken of Tomorrow led to regional finals and two national competitions, one in 1948 and the last in 1951. Fertilised eggs from contestants’ birds were hatched under the same conditions, fed the same food, and given the same vaccinations. Then they were weighed, slaughtered and dressed. Judges, recruited from universities, industry and governments, gave points for ‘economy of production’ and ‘dressed carcass’. Just as the Manhattan Project brought together university scientists, industrial engineers and government administrators to unlock the secrets of the atom, the Chicken of Tomorrow project drew on thousands of poultry researchers, farmers and agriculture extension agents to fashion a new high-tech device. On a sunny June day in 1951, 8,000 chicken fans filled the Razorback Stadium at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville in the culmination of a nationwide effort to create the fowl of the future. As a band played and the crowd cheered, the US vice president Alben Barkley handed a California farmer named Charles Vantress a $5,000 cheque for his winning entry. The Chicken of Tomorrow award marked the rise of a vast new industry and the metamorphosis of the backyard bird into a technological wonder akin to missiles, the transistor and the thermonuclear weapon, which had been tested for the first time six weeks earlier. The winning bird was chosen not for its exotic stature or pure breeding but for its similarity to a wax model of the perfect carcass as devised by a team of poultry scientists. The grilled chicken in your sandwich or wrap comes from a descendant of the bird that Vantress created by crossing California Cornish males with New Hampshire females. This hardy bird with just the right mix of European and Asian genes weighed an average of more than four pounds, twice the size of a typical barnyard chicken of the day. The speed with which it became the industry norm is astonishing. Within a few years, most commercial broilers came from this stock. A 1951 issue of the Arkansas Agriculturalist declared that ‘the day of the slick-hipped chick is over’ thanks to ‘the leaders of the Chicken-of-Tomorrow program’. Newspapers hailed the scientifically engineered birds as ‘these sweater girls of the barnyard’. Barnyards were relics of the past in the brave new world of the postwar poultry industry. So, too, was the spectrum of unique taste that made chicken meat and eggs vary according to breed and region. Modern chickens lived indoors, ate processed feed from automated bins, consumed a host of vitamins, breathed ventilated air, and were protected from illness by vaccinations and antibiotics. The goal was to convert feed into meat as efficiently and cheaply as possible. This scientific approach worked. While beef and pork prices shot up in the decade after the Second World War, chicken prices fell dramatically. In the new system, farmers were contractors. The company owned the hatcheries and the slaughterhouses, as well as the birds themselves, and provided the feed and medicine. The grower raised the chickens in their own coops – now long and low warehouses – until they reached their full size and were ready for shipping. Until the early 1950s, most US flocks contained no more than 200 chickens, about the size advocated by ancient Roman agricultural writers 2,000 years earlier. In the wake of the Chicken of Tomorrow contest, farms raised tens of thousands of birds, some as many as 100,000. A hen that might live a dozen years on a farm could now be fattened and slaughtered in six brief weeks. There had been nothing like this in human history. There is no record of any other major food – meat, dairy, grains, fruits or vegetables – expanding so quickly in volume and scale. The only exception might be orange-juice concentrate, which, thanks to scientific tinkering and clever advertising, expanded rapidly in this same period. Advances in nutrition and breeding techniques made it possible to grow a bird in half the time of 1940, while the price per pound plummeted from 65 cents to 29. By providing feed and water to the birds – a novelty at the time – Tyson could transport them over longer distances What made chickens different from, say, cows? With a long, entrenched history, ranchers were slow to embrace academic genetics and corporate methods, and were generally suspicious of radical change. By contrast, a rising generation of poultry magnates happily drew on the extensive research by scientists on chicken genetics to create a more efficient product. Most of these new chicken magnates were not farmers but the middlemen who shuttled birds from farm to city. John Tyson, for example, founder of the nation’s largest poultry company in Arkansas, now the world’s largest meat producer, began as an independent trucker. Barely scraping by in the early days of the Depression, he started hauling broilers to Kansas City, St Louis and Chicago. By providing feed and water to the birds – a novelty at the time – he could transport them over longer distances. During the Second World War, as demand for chicken rocketed, Tyson bought up hatcheries and feed factories as well as broiler houses from failed growers, pioneering the vertical integration model that is at the heart of today’s modern business. As chickens were concentrated in huge numbers, disease could sweep through and wipe out whole flocks, while feed prices could fluctuate wildly. Only the largest operations survived and thrived, and Tyson earned a reputation as a smart and hard-nosed entrepreneur apt to fly into rages. He was not sentimental about poultry. ‘Just keep it simple,’ said his son Don, who studied agricultural nutrition at the University of Arkansas before joining the company as general manager in 1952. ‘Kill the chickens, sell ’em, and make some money.’ The father-and-son team drew on the latest science in feed, genetics and management to expand their operations: vitamins, vaccines and antibiotics became essential elements of success through the 1950s. The fact that the product was chicken was almost incidental. ‘We’re not committed to the broiler business as such,’ Don later told one interviewer. ‘We’re committed to so many dollars invested on dollar returned on that investment.’ In the new order, older varieties began to vanish. Just as car manufacturers required uniform parts, these new industrialists wanted a bird that matured quickly using as little feed and with as little variation as possible. So the new generation of scientific breeders focused on creating the most uniform bird possible. To do this, growers increasingly grew dependent on companies to provide the latest model. By 1960, 95 per cent of Arkansas growers were under contract with major corporations such as Tyson. While they muttered about their status as modern-day sharecroppers, public complaints could lead to cancellation of those contracts and immediate bankruptcy. Attempts by growers and poultry-plant workers to organise themselves into unions never went very far in the Midwest or South. After all, the thriving poultry industry brought jobs to some of the country’s poorest regions, from Arkansas’s Ozarks to the hills of north Georgia. Friends in Washington ensured minimal federal oversight. The Arkansas senator J William Fulbright became the industry’s vocal supporter in Congress. When a bill to tighten inspections was under consideration, Don Tyson wrote a brief note to Fulbright: ‘Bill, this would hurt the chicken business.’ The proposed legislation swiftly died. Soon chicken was cheaper than beef or pork, and available neatly packaged according to cut. Picking out pin feathers, removing the guts, and chopping the feet off chickens had long been a laborious chore for housewives in cities as well as the country. Now they did not have to buy an entire chicken, which made the bird more popular for meals beyond just an elaborate Sunday dinner. And as people became more conscious of the dangers of fat in red meat, the low-fat bird became a more appealing choice. Tyson’s $10 million in net sales in 1960 topped $60 million by the end of the decade, reflecting that shift in consumer tastes. The actual number of broiler chickens in the US at any one time remained remarkably stable after the start of the Second World War. But each bird weighed twice as much and required half the feed and half the time to mature. More than half of the nation’s 250,000 poultry workers are women, 50 per cent are Latino, and an estimated one in five is an illegal immigrant Falling prices and thin profit margins, however, left the industry scrambling to come up with ever-new ways to sell its prosaic product, from frozen dinners to precooked army rations. Hungry markets opened up overseas. Tyson, like other major poultry operations, began to spread its product as well as its plants and way of doing business to Mexico, Europe, Asia and South America. Upstart businessmen such as Frank Perdue on the Delmarva Peninsula pioneered advertising campaigns that branded chickens (even though broilers across the country are nearly identical), a marketing ploy that the beef industry has yet to copy successfully. Perdue also rebranded the poultry business as masculine, after it had been long disdained as women’s work. ‘It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken,’ he told television audiences in the 1970s, a century after the industry had taken its first halting steps. It also still takes women and minorities behind the scenes. More than half of the nation’s 250,000 poultry workers are women, 50 per cent are Latino, and an estimated one in five is an illegal immigrant. It is often ugly, low-paid and dangerous work, as is well-documented in newspaper articles, government reports and books by writers who worked undercover in poultry plants. Yet it makes cheap chicken widely available for consumers, including those who wait for sales on boneless breasts to stock their freezers. But US ways of processing chickens, particularly the use of chlorine to clean carcasses, led the European Union to ban US imports. Fifty years after the Chicken of Tomorrow contest, chicken overtook beef as the meat of choice in the US. The introduction of McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets and other highly processed poultry – tenders, patties, hot dogs – helped push the bird over the top. Food scientists discovered that the meat, like the bird of old, was infinitely versatile, absorbing flavours more readily than pork or beef, and perfectly suited for fast food. By 2001, the average person in the US ate more than 80lb of chicken a year, quadruple the 1950 amount. The figure is now close to 100lb. In 2012, Tyson recorded more than $33 billion in sales, and its weekly production topped 41 million chickens in 60 plants. The broiler business is booming in the US and abroad. The vertical integration model pioneered by Tyson has spread to rapidly urbanising South America, India and China, and now the cattle and pork industries are rushing to copy the approach. Once ignored and despised by many in the farm sector, poultry is now an international multibillion-dollar complex that is setting the pace for the world’s agribusiness. In Fayetteville, just off the Fulbright Expressway, a historical marker stands on the campus of the University of Arkansas near the site of the final contest for the Chicken of Tomorrow. The sign commemorates the ‘entrepreneurs who built Arkansas’ poultry industry into a major force in the world economy’. The marker near Razorback Stadium stands on Maple Street at the entrance of the John W Tyson Building, an impressive modern complex of 100 laboratories, a 10,000-square-foot pilot processing plant, a host of classrooms and, as its brochure notes, ‘tasting booths for sensory evaluation’. Funded by the federal government, poultry companies and a state bond approved by public referendum, it is modern and clean, a $20 million concrete-and-steel monument to the success of science and industry. There’s not a live chicken in sight. From ‘Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?: The Epic Saga of the Bird That Powers Civilisation’ by Andrew Lawler. Copyright © 2014 by Andrew Lawler. Published by Atria Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Reprinted by permission.

Yeah. Both my wife and I worked on that - as extras in that film "Real Steel," the Hugh Jackman film, that was filmed here in Michigan, in the Detroit area. And I have two sons, one's Washington D.C. I'd sure like him to move back to Michigan. And I have another one up in Grand Rapids and I'm afraid that if we lose those tax credits - I talked to crew member after crew member, extras when we were on the film sets of "Real Steel" and they say they're going to leave Michigan. They're going to leave Michigan and those - if the movie industry leaves - I just heard that "The Avengers" has canceled their plans to film in Michigan. And I'm afraid we're going to lose a lot of young people. I think it's an important industry, and I think there's recent a study that said Michigan is getting back...

Up next, if you look at all the sources of greenhouse gases out there, from cars to power plants to factories, probably one that does not immediately come to mind is concrete - concrete, yeah, you know, the stuff that they make cement out of. It's always been assumed that the cement used to make concrete could contribute as much as five percent of the global carbon footprint once the energy to make it and the carbon dioxide emitted as it is kilned are taken into account. We've always heard about - it takes - a lot of CO2 is emitted when they make concrete and the cement inside of it.

That's right. There were questions actually about if some of the bodies had been removed, and if so, where they were. There may be some bodies now at the morgue. And that's - we're going to visit that next to see if that is in fact the case. One of the things that the rebels have said is that there's a lack of refrigeration in the city, adequate places where they can store these bodies until the investigators get here. So the bodies obviously are in a pretty serious state of deterioration by the time the experts and investigators get here.

Yeah. I think that that's probably true and that has to do with eras. That has to do with the history of - in New York being older or the east being older in some ways and reflecting the really ancient racial stereotypes of Europe where - you know, races were - if you were from - you know, if you came from Romania or you came from Spain or you came from Italy, you were different races. You know, that's why everybody outside of Rome was a barbarian, you know, because there were different races. You know, and I think that - and but by the time you get to California, you know, that wave of, you know, America gets to California, the races have been changed into color.

And there was one question yesterday about Iraq, specifically about a memo written in 2002 by a British intelligence official some eight months prior to the start of the Iraq War. Known as the Downing Street Memo, it alleges that US and British officials altered or fixed the facts and intelligence to support the case for war. The memo was first published in The Times of London some five weeks ago. Yesterday, the two leaders were asked about what many of their critics see as a smoking gun regarding the decision to go to war. First, Blair. Prime Min. BLAIR: Well, I can respond to that very easily. No, the facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all.

Both the Obama and McCain campaigns were quick to denounce the cartoon as tasteless. New Yorker editor David Remnick has granted any number of interviews to maintain that satire is sometimes offensive, and that the cover lampoons not the Obamas, but those who believe and maybe even perpetuate the rumors. The New Yorker is famous for varied, and challenging cover art, but some quarters call the pen a bit too poisoned this time. Does it hit the mark, or does it reinforce, rather than ridicule, stereotypes? Our phone number is 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. If you haven't seen the cover, you can head over to our blog at npr.org/blogofthenation, and there you can also join the conversation. Later in the program, lessons on leadership from Nelson Mandela. But first, the New Yorker cover, and we begin with Paul Mooney. He's a comedian and television comedy writer, he joins us now by phone from Los Angeles. Nice to have you back on Talk of the Nation. Paul Mooney, you there?

Thanks. Lt. Col. NAGL: And boy, I feel your pain on training the police force. I had all the same problems when I was training police in Al Anbar Province of Iraq back in 2004 about the same time you were. I actually spent the last two days at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, and my host was a young captain who did the same thing you did two years later. He worked with the Afghan police, and he's made some progress since then, but we still have a long, long way to go. And police are very important. They are the first line of defense against insurgents, and they are the public face of the government to the people, but I also want to compliment you for what you did in terms of economic development and the fruit trees and the better wheat. And this shows that in a whole of government effort is required. This isn't just a military fight; we need the State Department and we need the Department of Agriculture. There's an expeditionary imperative to get those guys over there helping build a better future for this people to wean them away one by one, away from the Taliban.

You know, in this day and age, I know when the president speaks out, and if you're a Democrat, you're just supposed to punch back and counter-tweet. I didn't take that bait. I said, you know, this is not a partisan issue. And any day that the commander in chief is talking about an issue that I care so deeply about, it's a good day. But second, I said you have to step up, Mr. President. The moment you jump into this issue, you learn how complicated it is, how many decades in the making it is. But this is on our watch. This is our time, and these are your constituents, Mr. President, just as they are mine.

What happens at wind sites is that the wind might not blow at that ideal rate but those turbines are still producing at somewhat of a lower level. And because of the way that utilities deal with power, this is a little bit different for them, but they certainly indicated that they can handle it. There was a study that was recently done by some of the major power associations - the Edison Electric Institute, the American Public Power Association and the National Rural Electric Cooperatives Association - that said that they can handle wind on their system. It's something that they are interested in doing. And I think that that's, it's something we're seeing more and more. But it certainly is competitive with other forms of electricity. And it really does, in these days of high costs for especially things like natural gas, wind energy is actually brining down the costs of electricity to some consumers by offsetting that need for more natural gas use.

Yes, this is another highly controversial piece of legislation even though when it was originally passed right after the 9/11 attacks in the name of fighting terrorism, only one senator voted against it at that time. But many others have since had second thoughts, and you now have a group of bipartisan group of civil libertarians in the Senate threatening to filibuster the Patriot Act renewal. And, significantly, they were joined today by California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who was an original co-sponsor of the Patriot Act. And tomorrow there's going to be a key test vote that should show whether those critics have the votes they need to sustain a filibuster, and the White House seems very concerned about this. President Bush this afternoon used some very pointed language demanding that this extension to the Patriot Act get approved by Congress. And he said that if that doesn't happen the Patriot Act will expire. That's not really the case, though. Most of its provisions are permanent and only 16 of them would actually expire at the end of the year if they aren't renewed.

Yes. They talk a lot. You know, they've got 30 minutes to ask questions and they spend 10 or 15 minutes doing a lead-in to their first question and then say, `Judge, could you comment on that?' It's more effective if you ask sort of a pointed question, listen to the answer and then follow up. And so a lot of the Democrats have been sort of frustrated. They've been giving speeches and they haven't been able to pin down Roberts and get clear answers and it's just unfortunate that some of these--the older senators have been in the Senate a long time and doing a lot of talking and they don't have that prosecutor skill of sort of asking tight, crisp questions that demand an answer.

That's why we're in Victoria right now. We're headed back towards Michigan, because the gentleman that we talked to that installs them, he said they usually take about a month or two. Michigan weather, in the summer, is usually pretty beautiful. So, we were going to go spend some time with some family, and get this system installed and then work out all the kinks, and then hopefully by next winter, once it starts getting - the weather turns nasty and we can go back out RVing and following the beautiful weather. Then all we have to do is find french fries to be able to run our motor on.

...in '35. And she was a young Jewish girl. We went to the same class. And we had a - it was a very beautiful relationship between two 10-year- olds, a boy and girl, it was really - it was - had nothing erotic in it, but it was a deep involvement of both of us. And so I found this picture and - if I were to rearrange this, I would see that her latest photo, because it actually means that there must be someone to whom this whole thing is totally in order. We just don't realize, everything is chaotic. But it's actually all written in a scrapbook of a great master.

I'm going to talk about some of my discoveries around the world through my work. These are not discoveries of planets or new technologies or science. They're discoveries of people and the way people are, and new leadership. This is Benki. Benki is a leader of the Ashaninka Nation. His people live in Brazil and in Peru. Benki comes from a village so remote up in the Amazon that to get there, either you have to fly and land on water, or go by canoe for several days. I met Benki three years ago in Sao Paulo when I'd brought him and other leaders from indigenous peoples to meet with me and leaders from around the world, because we wanted to learn from each other. We wanted to share our stories with each other. The Ashaninka people are known throughout South America for their dignity, their spirit and their resistance, starting with the Incas and continuing through the 19th century with the rubber tappers. Today's biggest threat to the Ashaninka people and to Benki comes from illegal logging — the people who come into the beautiful forest and cut down ancient mahogany trees, float them down the river to world markets. Benki knew this. He could see what was happening to his forest, to his environment, because he was taken under his grandfather's wing when he was only two years old to begin to learn about the forest and the way of life of his people. His grandfather died when he was only 10. And at that young age, 10 years old, Benki became the paje of his community. Now, in the Ashaninka tradition and culture, the paje is the most important person in the community. This is the person who contains within him all the knowledge, all the wisdom of centuries and centuries of life, and not just about his people, but about everything that his people's survival depended on: the trees, the birds, the water, the soil, the forest. So when he was only 10 and he became the paje, he began to lead his people. He began to talk to them about the forest that they needed to protect, the way of life they needed to nurture. He explained to them that it was not a question of survival of the fittest; it was a question of understanding what they needed to survive and to protect that. Eight years later, when he was a young man of 18, Benki left the forest for the first time. He went 3,000 miles on an odyssey to Rio to the Earth Summit to tell the world what was happening in his tiny, little corner. And he went because he hoped the world would listen. Some did, not everybody. But if you can imagine this young man with his headdress and his flowing robe, learning a new language, Portuguese, not to mention English, going to Rio, building a bridge to reach out to people he'd never met before — a pretty hostile world. But he wasn't dismayed. Benki came back to his village full of ideas — new technologies, new research, new ways of understanding what was going on. Since that time, he's continued to work with his people, and not only the Ashaninka Nation, but all the peoples of the Amazon and beyond. He's built schools to teach children to care for the forest. Together, he's led the reforestation of over 25 percent of the land that had been destroyed by the loggers. He's created a cooperative to help people diversify their livelihoods. And he's brought the internet and satellite technology to the forest — both so that people themselves could monitor the deforestation, but also that he could speak from the forest to the rest of the world. If you were to meet Benki and ask him, "Why are you doing this? Why are you putting yourself at risk? Why are you making yourself vulnerable to what is often a hostile world?" he would tell you, as he told me, "I asked myself," he said, "What did my grandparents and my great-grandparents do to protect the forest for me? And what am I doing?" So when I think of that, I wonder what our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren, when they ask themselves that question, I wonder how they will answer. For me, the world is veering towards a future we don't much want when we really think about it deep inside. It's a future we don't know the details of, but it's a future that has signs, just like Benki saw the signs around him. We know we are running out of what we need. We're running out of fresh water. We're running out of fossil fuels. We're running out of land. We know climate change is going to affect all of us. We don't know how, but we know it will. And we know that there will be more of us than ever before — five times as many people in 40 years than 60 years ago. We are running out of what we need. And we also know that the world has changed in other ways, that since 1960 there are one-third as many new countries that exist as independent entities on the planet. Egos, systems of government — figuring it out — massive change. And in addition to that, we know that five other really big countries are going to have a say in the future, a say we haven't even really started to hear yet — China, India, Russia, South Africa and Benki's own Brazil, where Benki got his civil rights only in the 1988 constitution. But you know all that. You know more than Benki knew when he left his forest and went 3,000 miles. You also know that we can't just keep doing what we've always done, because we'll get the results we've always gotten. And this reminds me of something I understand Lord Salisbury said to Queen Victoria over a hundred years ago, when she was pressing him, "Please change." He said, "Change? Why change? Things are bad enough as they are." We have to change. It's imperative to me, when I look around the world, that we need to change ourselves. We need new models of what it means to be a leader. We need new models of being a leader and a human in the world. I started life as a banker. Now I don't admit to that to anybody but my very close friends. But for the past eight years, I've done something completely different. My work has taken me around the world, where I've had the real privilege of meeting people like Benki and many others who are making change happen in their communities — people who see the world differently, who are asking different questions, who have different answers, who understand the filters that they wear when they go out into the world. This is Sanghamitra. Sanghamitra comes from Bangalore. I met Sanghamitra eight years ago when I was in Bangalore organizing a workshop with leaders of different NGO's working in some of the hardest aspects of society. Sanghamitra didn't start life as a leader of an NGO, she started her career as university professor, teaching English literature. But she realized that she was much too detached from the world doing that. She loved it, but she was too detached. And so in 1993, a long time ago, she decided to start a new organization called Samraksha focused on one of the hardest areas, one of the hardest issues in India — anywhere in the world at the time — HIV/AIDS. Since that time, Samraksha has grown from strength to strength and is now one of the leading health NGO's in India. But if you just think about the state of the world and knowledge of HIV/AIDS in 1993 — in India at that time it was skyrocketing and nobody understood why, and everyone was actually very, very afraid. Today there are still three million HIV-positive people in India. That's the second largest population in the world. When I asked Sanghamitra, "How did you get from English literature to HIV/AIDS?" not an obvious path, she said to me, "It's all connected. Literature makes one sensitive, sensitive to people, to their dreams and to their ideas." Since that time, under her leadership, Samraksha has been a pioneer in all fields related to HIV/AIDS. They have respite homes, the first, the first care centers, the first counseling services — and not just in urban, 7-million-population Bangalore, but in the hardest to reach villages in the state of Karnataka. Even that wasn't enough. She wanted to change policy at the government level. 10 of their programs that she pioneered are now government policy and funded by the government. They take care of 20,000-odd people today in over 1,000 villages around Karnataka. She works with people like Murali Krishna. Murali Krishna comes from one of those villages. He lost his wife to AIDS a couple of years ago, and he's HIV-positive. But he saw the work, the care, the compassion that Sanghamitra and her team brought to the village, and he wanted to be part of it. He's a Leaders' Quest fellow, and that helps him with his work. They've pioneered a different approach to villages. Instead of handing out information in pamphlets, as is so often the case, they bring theater troupes, songs, music, dance. And they sit around, and they talk about dreams. Sanghamitra told me just last week — she had just come back from two weeks in the villages, and she had a real breakthrough. They were sitting in a circle, talking about the dreams for the village. And the young women in the village spoke up and said, "We've changed our dream. Our dream is for our partners, our husbands, not to be given to us because of a horoscope, but to be given to us because they've been tested for HIV." If you are lucky enough to meet Sanghamitra and ask her why and how, how have you achieved so much? She would look at you and very quietly, very softly say, "It just happened. It's the spirit inside." This is Dr. Fan Jianchuan. Jianchuan comes from Sichuan Province in southwest China. He was born in 1957, and you can imagine what his childhood looked like and felt like, and what his life has been like over the last 50 tumultuous years. He's been a soldier, a teacher, a politician, a vice-mayor and a business man. But if you sat down and asked him, "Who are you really, and what do you do?" He would tell you, "I'm a collector, and I curate a museum." I was lucky; I had heard about him for years, and I finally met him earlier this year at his museum in Chengdu. He's been a collector all of his life, starting when he was four or five in the early 1960's. Now, just think of the early 1960's in China. Over a lifetime, through everything, through the Cultural Revolution and everything afterward, he's kept collecting, so that he now has over eight million pieces in his museums documenting contemporary Chinese history. These are pieces that you won't find anywhere else in the world, in part because they document parts of history Chinese choose to forget. For example, he's got over one million pieces documenting the Sino-Japanese War, a war that's not talked about in China very much and whose heroes are not honored. Why did he do all this? Because he thought a nation should never repeat the mistakes of the past. So, from commissioning slightly larger than life bronze statues of the heroes of the Sino-Japanese War, including those Chinese who then fought with each other and left mainland China to go to Taiwan, to commemorating all the unknown, ordinary soldiers who survived, by asking them to take prints of their hands, he is making sure — one man is making sure — that history is not forgotten. But it's not just Chinese heroes he cares about. This building contains the world's largest collection of documents and artifacts commemorating the U.S. role in fighting on the Chinese side in that long war — the Flying Tigers. He has nine other buildings — that are already open to the public — filled to the rafters with artifacts documenting contemporary Chinese history. Two of the most sensitive buildings include a lifetime of collection about the Cultural Revolution, a period that actually most Chinese would prefer to forget. But he doesn't want his nation ever to forget. These people inspire me, and they inspire me because they show us what is possible when you change the way you look at the world, change the way you look at your place in the world. They looked outside, and then they changed what was on the inside. They didn't go to business school. They didn't read a manual, "How to Be a Good Leader in 10 Easy Steps." But they have qualities we'd all recognize. They have drive, passion, commitment. They've gone away from what they did before, and they've gone to something they didn't know. They've tried to connect worlds they didn't know existed before. They've built bridges, and they've walked across them. They have a sense of the great arc of time and their tiny place in it. They know people have come before them and will follow them. And they know that they're part of a whole, that they depend on other people. It's not about them, they know that, but it has to start with them. And they have humility. It just happens. But we know it doesn't just happen, don't we? We know it takes a lot to make it happen, and we know the direction the world is going in. So I think we need succession planning on a global basis. We can't wait for the next generation, the new joiners, to come in and learn how to be the good leaders we need. I think it has to start with us. And we know, just like they knew, how hard it is. But the good news is that we don't have to figure it out as we go along; we have models, we have examples, like Benki and Sanghamitra and Jianchuan. We can look at what they've done, if we look. We can learn from what they've learned. We can change the way we see ourselves in the world. And if we're lucky, we can change the way our great-grandchildren will answer Benki's question. Thank you. (Applause)

It's important for people to recognize that there have been over 700 men held at Guantanamo since President Bush opened the detention facility in January 2002. The Bush administration released over 500 people. We don't have a lot of transparency on how the decisions that they made. At the moment, there are about 223 left in Guantanamo. And you get different reports on how the administration has sorted through them, and it's very difficult to say exactly and perhaps administration officials will tell you. What I'm hearing is there are about 75 that are slotted for release or transfer. There are about 40 that are slated for prosecution. And there are about 110, depending on who you talk to, where they haven't made a decision about what they're going to do with these people.

First of all, they should understand what is going on in a simple kind of terms. It's only natural and normal to be afraid, so they should accept that. And second, we should explain why, what is happening. We are being, you know, attacked. This is a kind of war. And these are - they're far away, but when they send bombs that makes a loud sound, and this sound is disturbing. But we are safe. It's far away from us, so it's not going to hurt us. And in the practice, of course, of things, whenever something happens, I hold the little one particularly to my chest and give him a sense of security, and my wife would hold the other one also. That is very important, the physical feeling of security and warmth around the children.

And there was an ad for a pink breast cancer teddy bear. Now, I can't tell you how much that freaked me out at that moment. That was kind of an existential turning point for me because I realized I'm not afraid of dying, but I am terrified of dying with a teddy bear tucked under my arm. You know, I'm a grownup. This is the most serious health issue I've ever had. You know, it was this expectation that having breast cancer made you not a full person anymore, not a full adult anymore. And part of the women's movement I came out of was always very concerned with health issues, and what we wanted was to give power to patients. And so that was sort of my theme. And I thought, hey, what happened to that?

You just mentioned Deval Patrick up in Massachusetts. We've got Harold Ford running for the Senate in Tennessee, Michael Steele running in Maryland and so forth. Now we've got in this mix talking about Hillary Clinton as possibly the first female president, Barack Obama as the first black president. It is almost seems as if one of the reactions to the last eight years of, you know, the last of a presidency that has been shaky led by a kind of two traditional white men, is a look at the untraditional and saying hey, maybe it is time to give a chance to put people in office who, you know, who don't look like the usual type.

Also believed to be on the Trump shortlist are other serious conservative judges from the federal appeals courts. Among them Raymond Kethledge of Michigan, who ordered the IRS to turn over a list of conservative groups it had targeted for examination. Judge Thomas Hardiman of Pennsylvania, who dissented when his court upheld a New Jersey law that required citizens to show a demonstrated need for carrying a gun in public. Judge Raymond Gruender of Missouri, who wrote a decision upholding state-mandated suicide warnings before abortions. And Judge Stephen Colleton, who is known for decisions reversing major verdicts that favored whistleblowers and consumers. Judge Colloton is from Iowa, the home state of the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Charles Grassley. Many of these potential nominees are said to have a sympathetic personal story. Judge Sykes, for instance, raised two children as a single mother after her divorce. Judge Gruender, the son of a janitor, had a childhood touched by family violence. In 1986 when he was a law student, His father pointed a gun at him, his sister and a younger brother. Gruender and his sister were shot, but Gruender was able to knock his father to the floor, saving his 12-year-old brother.

Now we do have some limited reporting from inside Syria. Apparently there was a ferocious bombing campaign on a suburb called Daraa. And I saw some videos that emerged from yesterday, and it looks like the end of the Earth. There is nothing standing in some of these neighborhoods. A video also emerged from Aleppo today, where there was a bombing on a school, and you could see people taking the bodies of young children out of that school. They had been killed in the bombing raid. I think we will not know, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, the full extent of what happened.

Jordan, so I think it's a very good question. So the brain is, in some sense, similar to a computer. In both cases, you have information that flows in, in one case through transistors, in the other case through nerve cells in our eyes. For example, if I look at you. And then as you said, we have to track - just like in a computer, we can track so that the electric activity in the various transistors, we can do the same in the brain. We can track the electrical activity, either using the methods that Patricia Kuhl alluded to from the outside, using EG or EMG, or we can put microelectrodes in it or other tools, and we can see how the electric activity moves through the brain and activates language area or activates a part of the brain that's responsible for seeing, or another part of the brain that's responsible for hearing. And then ultimately, it activates part of the brain that's responsible for motion, and then we move our eyes, or we speak.

Well, to put it mildly, she does not know what she's talking about and it has nothing to do with torture convention. Torture convention doesn't even govern this area of the law. Under the laws of war - which again, not anything recent, not anything invented by this administration, it's several hundred years old - there have always been two categories of people: lawful combatants who, upon capture, are treated as honorable POWs, entitled to all sorts of benefits and privileges. And these are people, Neal, who prior to capture, behave themselves in accordance with laws and customs of war, because you want to incentivize people to do that. And then you have unlawful combatants who, upon capture, do not get POW status. Who, in the past, have been treated very harshly, basically killed out of hand. Who are now, certainly, even prior to World War II, begin to get a more humane treatment. But nothing approaching the level of POW protections. Because again, you want to disincentivize, you want to stigmatize the behavior of these people engaged in the battlefield. Because the basic goal in laws of war area, is to ensure that you don't have people who'd kill civilians.

I was skeptical because a lot of the stuff I was seeing on social media was really centered around white women being upset that they didn't get their way. And to me, you know, as a black queer woman navigating the world, it was really clear to me post-election that black folks, immigrants, LGBTQ folks like myself included, are at a higher risk of violence of targeted policies that are meant to take away our rights. And I really wasn't hearing those sorts of things from a lot of white women. Some were articulating that. And some were just like - it was almost like a temper tantrum. And I think, in and of itself, attending a march doesn't do that much. It does something. But if that's all you do and you're also not willing to accept criticisms from people and integrate and respond to their criticisms and pivot, then I think that that's unhelpful to what we're facing in the next four years under a Trump administration.

Just between your chest and abdomen is where you’ll find one of the most important muscles you probably didn't know you had: the lower esophageal sphincter, or LES. When functioning properly, this ring of tissue plays a crucial role in helping us eat. But when the LES malfunctions, it becomes the main player in heartburn —a searing, sometimes sour-tasting chest-spasm that many people will experience at some point in their lives. We know that humans have been battling heartburn for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But recently the incidence has risen, making it a common stomach complaint worldwide. When the symptoms of heartburn become more more regular and intense —such as twice a week or more— it’s diagnosed as Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease, or GERD. But what causes this problem, and how can it be stopped? Heartburn starts in an area called the gastroesophageal junction, where the LES resides. This smooth, muscular ring of the LES is moderated by an intricate tree of nerve roots that connect to the brain, the heart, and the lungs. After food enters the stomach from the esophagus, the muscle’s task is to stop it from surging back up again. The LES contracts, squeezing the stomach entrance and creating a high pressure zone that prevents digestive acids from seeping out. But if the LES relaxes at the wrong moment or gradually weakens, it becomes like a faulty, ill-fitting lid, causing the area to depressurize. That allows burning stomach acid— and even chunks of food—to spurt into the esophagus, sometimes going as far up as the mouth. The cause of all this internal drama has long been put down to diet. Foods like caffeine and peppermint contain ingredients that may have a relaxing affect on the LES, which makes it incapable of doing its job. Other acidic foods, like citrus and tomatoes, can worsen irritation of the esophagus when they leach out with stomach acid. Carbonated beverages can similarly bubble up in the stomach, forcing open the valve. But researchers have discovered that food isn’t the only trigger. Smoking poses a risk, because the nicotine in cigarettes relaxes the LES. Consuming excessive amounts of alcohol may have a similar effect. Pregnant women often experience more heartburn due to the pressure of a growing baby on their stomachs. and the levels of certain hormones in their bodies. Obesity can cause hernias that disrupt the anti-reflux barrier of the gastroesophageal junction that normally protects against heartburn. Numerous medications, including those for asthma, high blood pressure, birth control, and depression can also have unintended effects on the LES. An occasional bout of heartburn isn't necessarily something to worry about. But, if heartburn starts happening regularly, it can weaken the LES muscle over time, letting more and more acid escape. And if it goes untreated, this can cause bigger problems. Over time, constant acid leakage from heartburn may form scar tissue which narrows the esophageal tube, making it harder to swallow food. Ongoing reflux can also damage the cells lining the esophagus—a rare condition called Barrett’s esophagus, which can elevate the risk of esophageal cancer. Luckily, heartburn is often treatable with a range of medicines that can help neutralize or reduce stomach acid. In extreme cases, some people have surgery to tighten the LES to minimize their distress. But we can often stop heartburn before it reaches that point. Reducing the consumption of certain foods, not smoking, and maintaining a healthy weight can all dramatically reduce reflux. With proper care we can help our LES’s keep the chemical fountain of our stomachs in proper order and avoid having to feel the burn.

That's a good question. I think I realized I truly had a passion for it by ninth grade. I started pretty late, playing basketball in the seventh grade, considering, you know, I'm a professional athlete. So I think seventh grade was just kind of like, OK. I'll do it as long as I don't fall down. Eighth grade is where I really had this grueling, like, drills, and really understood what it took to play basketball. Because my cousin would just take me through all these drills like sit on the wall, do push-ups, and I was thinking, OK. I just came to, like, play with the ball. And then I really realized by ninth grade, like wow. If I really perfect this game, I could get a free scholarship and go to college, because my mom couldn't afford to send me to a four-year university. And then maybe I could possibly travel the world. So ninth grade was when I truly realized this is what I wanted to do, and I truly had a passion for it.

And so, you know, the IBG and YBG were - I'll be gone and you'll be gone is one of the reasons where in all of this. And there's no question. You know, I mentioned to - on the show this morning that, you know, I live in Montgomery County, Maryland. My wife's a schoolteacher here. The schoolteachers in Montgomery County, Maryland gave up their contractually, you know, obligated five-percent raise for 2009, for this - for next year, excuse me. And they did it so more teachers wouldn't be fired and more programs wouldn't be cut. It was in their contract. They had it, just like the bonuses of the AIG people had it. But they voluntarily gave it up. And to me, that's what people at AIG are going to have to do.

Hello everyone. I'm Sam, and I just turned 17. A few years ago, before my freshman year in High School, I wanted to play snare drum in the Foxboro High School Marching Band, and it was a dream that I just had to accomplish. But each snare drum and harness weighed about 40 pounds each, and I have a disease called Progeria. So just to give you an idea, I weigh only about 50 pounds. So, logistically, I really couldn't carry a regular sized snare drum, and because of this the band director assigned me to play pit percussion during the halftime show. Now pit percussion was fun. It involved some really cool auxiliary percussion instruments, like the bongos, timpani, and timbales, and cowbell. So it was fun, but it involved no marching, and I was just so devastated. However, nothing was going to stop me from playing snare drum with the marching band in the halftime show. So my family and I worked with an engineer to design a snare drum harness that would be lighter, and easier for me to carry. So after continuous work, we made a snare drum apparatus that weighs only about 6 pounds. (Applause) I just want to give you some more information about Progeria. It affects only about 350 kids today, worldwide. So it's pretty rare, and the effects of Progeria include: tight skin, lack of weight gain, stunted growth, and heart disease. Last year my Mom and her team of scientists published the first successful Progeria Treatment Study, and because of this I was interviewed on NPR, and John Hamilton asked me the question: "What is the most important thing that people should know about you?" And my answer was simply that I have a very happy life. (Applause) So even though there are many obstacles in my life, with a lot of them being created by Progeria, I don't want people to feel bad for me. I don't think about these obstacles all the time, and I'm able to overcome most of them anyway. So I’m here today, to share with you my philosophy for a happy life. So, for me, there are 3 aspects to this philosophy. So this is a quote from the famous Ferris Bueller. The first aspect to my philosophy is that I’m okay with what I ultimately can’t do because there is so much I can do. Now people sometimes ask me questions like, "Isn’t it hard living with Progeria?" or "What daily challenges of Progeria do you face?" And I’d like to say that, even though I have Progeria, most of my time is spent thinking about things that have nothing to do with Progeria at all. Now this doesn’t mean that I ignore the negative aspects of these obstacles. When I can’t do something like run a long distance, or go on an intense roller coaster, I know what I’m missing out on. But instead, I choose to focus on the activities that I can do through things that I’m passionate about, like scouting, or music, or comic books, or any of my favorite Boston sports teams. Yeah, so — (Laughter) However, sometimes I need to find a different way to do something by making adjustments, and I want to put those things in the "can do" category. Kind of like you saw with the drum earlier. So here’s a clip with me playing Spider-Man with the Foxboro High School Marching Band at halftime a couple of years ago. (Video) ♫ Spider-Man theme song ♫ (Applause) Thank you. All right, all right, so — That was pretty cool, and so I was able to accomplish my dream of playing snare drum with the marching band, as I believe I can do for all of my dreams. So hopefully, you can accomplish your dreams as well, with this outlook. The next aspect to my philosophy is that I surround myself with people I want to be with, people of high quality. I’m extremely lucky to have an amazing family, who have always supported me throughout my entire life. And I’m also really fortunate to have a really close group of friends at school. Now we’re kind of goofy, a lot of us are band geeks, but we really enjoy each other’s company, and we help each other out when we need to. We see each other for who we are on the inside. So this is us goofing off a little bit. So we’re juniors in High School now, and we can now mentor younger band members, as a single collective unit. What I love about being in a group like the band, is that the music that we make together, is true, is genuine, and it supersedes Progeria. So I don’t have to worry about that when I’m feeling so good about making music. But even having made a documentary, going on TV a couple of times, I feel like I’m at my highest point when I’m with the people that surround me every day. They provide the real positive influences in my life, as I hope I can provide a positive influence in theirs as well. (Applause) Thank you. So the bottom line here, is that I hope you appreciate and love your family, love your friends, for you guys, love you Bro’s and acknowledge your mentors, and your community, because they are a very real aspect of everyday life, they can make a truly significant, positive impact. The third aspect to the philosophy is, Keep moving forward. Here’s a quote by a man you may know, named Walt Disney, and it’s one of my favorite quotes. I always try to have something to look forward to. Something to strive for to make my life richer. It doesn’t have to be big. It could be anything from looking forward to the next comic book to come out, or going on a large family vacation, or hanging out with my friends, to going to the next High School football game. However, all of these things keep me focused, and know that there’s a bright future ahead, and may get me through some difficult times that I may be having. Now this mentality includes staying in a forward thinking state of mind. I try hard not to waste energy feeling badly for myself, because when I do, I get stuck in a paradox, where there’s no room for any happiness or any other emotion. Now, it’s not that I ignore when I’m feeling badly, I kind of accept it, I let it in, so that I can acknowledge it, and do what I need to do to move past it. When I was younger, I wanted to be an engineer. I wanted to be an inventor, who would catapult the world into a better future. Maybe this came from my love of Legos, and the freedom of expression that I felt when I was building with them. And this was also derived from my family and my mentors, who always make me feel whole, and good about myself. Now today my ambitions have changed a little bit, I’d like to go into the field of Biology, maybe cell biology, or genetics, or biochemistry, or really anything. This is a friend of mine, who I look up to, Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, and this is us at TEDMED last year, chatting away. I feel that no matter what I choose to become, I believe that I can change the world. And as I’m striving to change the world, I will be happy. About four years ago, HBO began to film a documentary about my family and me called “Life According to Sam”. That was a pretty great experience, but it was also four years ago. And like anyone, my views on many things have changed, and hopefully matured, like my potential career choice. However, some things have stayed the same throughout that time. Like my mentality, and philosophy towards life. So I would like to show you a clip of my younger self from the film, that I feel embodies that philosophy. (Video) I know more about it genetically. So it’s less of an embodiment now. It used to be like this thing that prevents me from doing all this stuff, that causes other kids to die, that causes everybody to be stressed, and now it’s a protein that is abnormal, that weakens the structure of cells. So, and it takes a burden off of me because now I don’t have to think about Progeria as an entity. Okay, pretty good, huh? (Applause) Thank you. So, as you can see I’ve been thinking this way for many years. But I’d never really had to apply all of these aspects of my philosophy to the test at one time, until last January. I was pretty sick, I had a chest cold, and I was in the hospital for a few days, and I was secluded from all of the aspects of my life that I felt made me, me, that kind of gave me my identity. But knowing that I was going to get better, and looking forward to a time that I would feel good again, helped me to keep moving forward. And sometimes I had to be brave, and it wasn’t always easy. Sometimes I faltered, I had bad days, but I realized that being brave isn’t supposed to be easy. And for me, I feel it’s the key way to keep moving forward. So, all in all, I don’t waste energy feeling bad for myself. I surround myself with people that I want to be with, and I keep moving forward. So with this philosophy, I hope that all of you, regardless of your obstacles, can have a very happy life as well. Oh, wait, hang on a second, one more piece of advice –- (Laughter) Never miss a party if you can help it. My school’s homecoming dance is tomorrow night, and I will be there. Thank you very much. (Applause)

O'NEIL: Exactly. If you just imagine, like, something that is pretty well-known is that credit scores are being used to deny people jobs. And that actually creates worse credit scores. You know, an individual who doesn't get a job because they have a bad credit score goes on to having even worse credit scores. States are trying to prevent that from happening on a state-by-state basis. But what we have now in the age of big data is something called electronic credit scores, E-scores, that a lot of people don't even know they're being made of them. They're not illegal, they're not regulated. And they could lead to the same kind of drastic and pernicious feedback loops.

And now, the Talk of the Nation Opinion Page. Over the weekend, John McCain warned voters about the dangers of putting Democrats in control of both Congress and the White House. We can't let that happen, he said. For their part, Democrats are thrilled at the opportunity to win the presidency and a filibuster proof majority in Congress. But Jonathan Rauch argues that if liberals hope for historic breakthroughs on issues such as health care and climate change, the best thing to do is to vote for John McCain. One party rule, he says, is ineffective and inefficient. Do you agree? Divided government is best for the country. 800-989-8255. Email us talk@npr.org. Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer for the National Journal and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. His latest column is called "What a perverse voter to do?" And he joins us from the studio at the Brookings Institute. Nice to have you on the program again.

Yeah, you know, and there obviously are already HR questions that off-limits, you know, about sexuality and I believe marriage status. So in asking someone for their Facebook login, in a sense, you're asking that question. I mean, you know, ostensibly those things could be on Facebook, or they could be reflected in your pictures or your status updates. So you are - you know, again, I'm not trying to interpret the law here, that's up to the Department of Justice or a court, but you are in a sense, you know, asking some of those questions in sort of, you know, a quote-unquote, "a backdoor" sort of way.

And so what happened was - like I say - we were involved in gangs and drugs, and so you're talking about monies being exchanged. And so that's what changes. That's where the violence heightens when you talk about drugs and monies and things of a sort. And so at this particular time, we were in what was called a gang war. And so guys would come in and try to shoot us and kill us, and we would kind of go back and forth try to shoot them and kill them. And so one particular night, I was in a home where we were kind engaging in all of this negative activity. I was leaving out and actually prepared to go and put my gear on to go and cause somebody else harm. And so unknowing to myself as I walked down the stairs, there was a guy that was waiting for me on the side of the building in the bushes or what have you. And he could have killed me. I will say that he could have killed me because he could have waited 'til I got to the bottom step and just kind of walk right up on me and shot me in the back of the head, but he didn't. And I thank God for that.

Well, at the prison that we sued when we brought our suit in 2014, there were 1,500 people in the prison. Many people enter prison with substance abuse problems. And at St. Clair prison, there were no drug programs - no AA or NA programs - for the majority of people incarcerated there. But they really had - they had no other programming, as well. And the majority of prisoners spent their time idle in the dorms. They have no structure to their days. And the lack of staff meant that the department had abandoned most security protocols. They weren't doing bed checks. They weren't controlling movement. They're not doing contraband checks. And this led to a drug epidemic in the prison, and hundreds of prisoners then fall into debt to other prisoners. And that debt is enforced through physical and sexual violence.

Machine learning – a kind of sub-field of artificial intelligence (AI) – is a means of training algorithms to discern empirical relationships within immense reams of data. Run a purpose-built algorithm by a pile of images of moles that might or might not be cancerous. Then show it images of diagnosed melanoma. Using analytical protocols modelled on the neurons of the human brain, in an iterative process of trial and error, the algorithm figures out how to discriminate between cancers and freckles. It can approximate its answers with a specified and steadily increasing degree of certainty, reaching levels of accuracy that surpass human specialists. Similar processes that refine algorithms to recognise or discover patterns in reams of data are now running right across the global economy: medicine, law, tax collection, marketing and research science are among the domains affected. Welcome to the future, say the economist Erik Brynjolfsson and the computer scientist Tom Mitchell: machine learning is about to transform our lives in something like the way that steam engines and then electricity did in the 19th and 20th centuries. Signs of this impending change can still be hard to see. Productivity statistics, for instance, remain worryingly unaffected. This lag is consistent with earlier episodes of the advent of new ‘general purpose technologies’. In past cases, technological innovation took decades to prove transformative. But ideas often move ahead of social and political change. Some of the ways in which machine learning might upend the status quo are already becoming apparent in political economy debates. The discipline of political economy was created to make sense of a world set spinning by steam-powered and then electric industrialisation. Its central question became how best to regulate economic activity. Centralised control by government or industry, or market freedoms – which optimised outcomes? By the end of the 20th century, the answer seemed, emphatically, to be market-based order. But the advent of machine learning is reopening the state vs market debate. Which between state, firm or market is the better means of coordinating supply and demand? Old answers to that question are coming under new scrutiny. In an eye-catching paper in 2017, the economists Binbin Wang and Xiaoyan Li at Sichuan University in China argued that big data and machine learning give centralised planning a new lease of life. The notion that market coordination of supply and demand encompassed more information than any single intelligence could handle would soon be proved false by 21st-century AI. How seriously should we take such speculations? Might machine learning bring us full-circle in the history of economic thought, to where measures of economic centralisation and control – condemned long ago as dangerous utopian schemes – return, boasting new levels of efficiency, to constitute a new orthodoxy? A great deal turns on the status of tacit knowledge. On this much the champions of a machine learning-powered revival of command economics and their critics agree. Tacit knowledge is the kind of cognition we refer to when we say that we know more than we can tell. How do you ride a bike? No one can say with any precision. Supervision helps, but a beginner has to figure it out for herself. How do you know that a spot is a freckle and not a cancer? A specialist cannot teach a medical student simply by spelling out her thinking in words. The student has to practise under supervision until she has mastered the skill for herself. This kind of know-how cannot be imparted or downloaded. Can robots assimilate tacit knowledge? Mid-20th-century arguments against centralised planning assumed that they could not. Some of the achievements of machine learning – such as eclipsing specialist doctors at spotting cancer – suggest otherwise. If robots can retain tacit knowledge, AI-powered central planning might well outperform decentralised market interactions in coordinating economic activity. But there is good reason to believe that the mid-century anti-planners were right. Tacit knowledge will probably remain the preserve of human beings – with implications not only for the prospect of a return of the command economy, but also for broader fears and hopes about a future powered by machine learning. Economists have long believed that the market is the most efficient means of coordinating economic activity. The market’s strength is its capacity to aggregate available information and thereby equilibrate supply and demand. No single intelligence could possibly encompass all this information as effectively as the market mechanism. Individual knowledge was divided and fragmentary but, in the aggregate, the volume of information brought to bear upon the coordination of economic activity in and through the market is immense. Governments could know enough to manipulate demand to smooth out fluctuations in the trade cycle – this was the Keynesian wager widely embraced after 1940 – but supply was another matter, better left to the unfettered interaction of individuals and firms. Mid-20th-century arguments against planning focused on the quantity of information that any coordinating authority would need to muster in order to make decisions as effectively as the free market. Planners knew that no one intelligence could know half as much as everyone combined, however imperfect our several perspectives were. But the disparity between what an individual could know and what the whole of a society could see was narrowing. The Polish economist and diplomat Oskar Lange saw that the relations between supply and demand could be formulated algebraically. All the relationships between buyers and sellers in a market for steel, for instance, could be mapped out as a series of simultaneous equations. A capable mathematician with enough time on her hands could solve all the equations to quantify the price at which supply matched demand precisely. A government could then fix that price, signalling optimal quantities for purchase and production to buyers and sellers instantly, eliminating the inefficiencies that precipitated surpluses and shortages. When Lange died in 1965, it was impossible to solve all these equations in time to make centralised price-setting work. The Russian economist and Nobel laureate Leonid Kantorovich spent six years trying to figure out an optimal price for Soviet steel production in the 1960s – far too slow to be useful in practice. But in 1965, the American IT pioneer Gordon Moore observed that the processing power of computers doubled each year; ‘Moore’s law’ has held good ever since. Horizons of possibility soon started shifting. The calculations involved in coordinating an economy might be impracticably laborious for human clerks, but computers changed the game. If Lange was right, and relations between supply and demand in a given market could be formulated algebraically, the exponential growth of computer power made it only a matter of time before determining price centrally by Lange’s method became feasible. The market – Lange wrote shortly before his death – would soon be seen as ‘a computing device of the pre-electronic age’, as outmoded as an abacus. Critics of centralised planning had one more card to play. The Anglo-Austrian economist F A Hayek had argued in 1945 that the need to turn concrete particulars into generic statistics was part of what made central planning inferior. Plotting out market relations algebraically for the convenience of the central planners involved compressing the rich and complex data dispersed among individuals in a given market into a set of statistics. Details about the location or quality of commodities under analysis were abstracted out. The specific, local knowledge through which people filtered price signals in a free market enhanced individual decisions. This in turn helped to ensure that floating prices remained reliable indicators of fluctuations in supply and demand. This specific, local knowledge was irreducible to statistical form. Any centralised planning system would therefore have to do without it. Whatever quantities of information the planners could summon, the quality of their information would never be as good. Are not robots now doing what anti-planners said they could not – assimilating tacit knowledge? During the 1950s and ’60s, the Anglo-Hungarian philosopher-scientist Michael Polanyi took the qualitative argument against centralised planning a step further, reworking Hayek’s observations for the computer age. If local knowledge was irreducible to statistics and thus incomprehensible to central-planning bureaus, tacit knowledge was unspecifiable even in words, and thus impossible for humans to program into computers. Market coordination engaged the tacit dimension of human cognition innately: every manager thinking about hiring and every homemaker sizing up a side of beef drew on inarticulate know-how in making their decisions. But centralised planning through supercomputers would leave all this know-how untapped. The machines could not compute it, however powerful they became. Does the argument against computer-powered centralised planning that Hayek and Polanyi framed still apply? At first glance, machine learning suggests not. Cancer-spotting seems to involve algorithms emulating tacit knowledge. Medical students need years of book-learning and practical instruction by senior doctors before they can make the same discriminations. The inarticulate know-how that enables specialists to apply the relevant learning can be imparted only in person – that’s why, the world over, students follow doctors on ward rounds. A specialist doctor recognises malignant pigmentation but cannot articulate precisely what leads her to that conclusion. Now algorithms can perform the same feats of cognition. Are not robots now doing precisely what earlier anti-planners said they could not – assimilating tacit knowledge? In fact, machine learning does not actually code the cognitive powers that enable humans to know more than they can say into an algorithm. Machine learning equips AI engineers to build applications capable of drawing some of the kinds of conclusions that humans use tacit knowledge to reach. The robots get there by figuring out empirical relationships within quantities of data that no human could process. The apprenticeship that humans go through to learn to tell a freckle from a cancer is not simply a matter of processing piles of empirical information to discern what function of X input (symptoms with which potentially cancerous patients present) Y (cancer) happens to be. The human student learns the equivalent skill – a sense or feel for which spots are innocent, and which spell trouble – in tandem with a whole vocation of which diagnosing melanoma forms only part. In the specific matter of which moles are dangerous, algorithms now outperform the doctors. But some few diagnostic techniques aside, doctors remain entirely irreplaceable by algorithms. Like so many of the cognitive powers that humans possess innately, large parts of the vocation transmitted between specialist and student consists of unspecifiable tacit knowledge. Most of this broader know-how is nowhere near being replicated by AI systems. A great deal of it never will be. Current economic incentives favour the refinement of task-specific AI systems – algorithms such as the mole-spotter that can solve specific problems once trained in them. But even if the incentives shifted to channel investment towards the design of so-called ‘general artificial intelligence’ systems – robots such as Hal in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – nothing in the development of machine learning so far suggests that such investments would bear any fruit. Machine learning works not so much by aping tacit knowledge as by finding reliable shortcuts to the same conclusions that humans reach by exercise of tacit knowledge. Despite appearances, robots that can range like humans across diverse tasks, wielding contextual nous enough to know which capability to deploy, remain the stuff of science fiction. The kinds of AI applications that become conceivable by virtue of machine learning will frequently be able to answer specific, tightly framed questions (‘Is this mole cancerous?’) better than human beings can. But for more general problems – such as, ‘What’s making this person unwell?’ – these new kinds of AI remain useless. By analogy, it is easy to see how machine learning will produce algorithms with any number of immensely beneficial microeconomic and macroeconomic applications. ‘How many bags of rocket will this south London Tesco sell in the second week of March?’ is the kind of question that – given the right data – machine learning can answer better than any human being. Optimising fresh-food supply chains will reduce waste in the passage from farm to table. There might well be specific macro-economic matters that machine learning makes more tractable. In political economy, the crude and increasingly dated concept of gross domestic product (GDP) remains the measure of success. Economists led by Diane Coyle and Mariana Mazzucato have been trying with some success to supplant GDP with more meaningful and nuanced metrics of economic performance. Machine learning might give more strength to their arms. Given the right data, real-time regressions parsing relationships between output statistics and other indexes of wellbeing could be made available, giving new momentum to attempts to shift focus away from GDP. As for the bigger issues – such as which is the better agency of economic coordination between state and market – machine learning is not really likely to force open all the old arguments again. Just as machine learning brings us no nearer the advent of ‘general’ AI systems, it does not shunt us into some new epistemological paradigm where tacit knowledge-based arguments against centralised planning suddenly lose their validity. It is conceivable in principle that algorithms might one day exist that could set a price for every one of the 12 billion or so commodities produced in a modern economy, just as it was in Lange’s time. Most engineers still think that the processing power required to run all these programs simultaneously is inconceivable. Moore’s law is still on the planners’ side. But even if algorithms representing the world in a storm of zeroes and ones recreated the market electronically under centralised control, the price signals that their system sent wouldn’t work as effectively as those generated now. Tacit and otherwise unspecifiable parts of the knowledge that feed into market-based economic decisions would be lost in the translation of currently dispersed information into the new planning tsars’ digital code. Some of this unspecifiable knowledge would survive, because the most advanced applications of machine learning – the kinds of systems that resemble human cognition in their discharge of task-specific functions – depend upon continual oversight by, and interaction with, humans for their success. The most promising machine learning-powered AI systems keep human controllers ‘in the loop’. That is, they interact with human engineers, crunching huge reams of data to frame and reframe problems, and then watching humans solve them once the kinds of cognition called for exceed AI capabilities, growing more adept with each iteration. On the supposition that robots will never assimilate tacit knowledge, humans must remain central to these systems, refining and extending the capabilities of AI systems. And for as long as humans remain ‘in the loop’, centralising control of economic activity by mobilising machine learning and the AI systems it enables would also concentrate power in the hands of the humans who make the systems what they are. By controlling access to data, companies such as Google and Facebook are monopolising a valuable resource The fact that the most promising applications of machine learning keep humans ‘in the loop’ means that, if ever the prospect of an AI-powered revival of the command economy made it out of the pages of academic journals and into mainstream discussion, there would be reason to worry about whom the algorithms really empowered. There would be reason, that is, to keep a very close eye on the humans ‘in the loop’ in any AI-powered programme of centralised economic planning. There might indeed be reason to pay closer attention to who remains ‘in the loop’ and whom they keep out right now, even if the prospect of a revived command economics remains remote. The idea that a clique of mandarins could have a right to unchecked political power on the strength of machine learning, and the supposition that it works at arm’s length from humans, remains far-fetched for now. Yet the economic and political clout that the largest tech companies have amassed by stockpiling market power behind a rhetoric of restless innovation is another matter. These companies control the data without which machine learning goes nowhere. What they do with that power for good or ill is rightly a subject of great concern. These concerns tend to cluster around identity and privacy. It might be not that tech companies are doing too much with customers’ data, but too little. By controlling access to data, companies such as Google and Facebook are monopolising a valuable resource. Lifting the productivity of the major Western economies out of their current rut probably necessitates putting that data to work more productively. To make that happen, the power that Facebook, Google and others enjoy over data needs to be curbed. Too much of the money they make out of that power is rent – private gain extracted through control of a resource without any commensurate contribution to the common economic good. Getting more and different humans ‘in the loop’ to experiment with available datasets and to see what kinds of systems might be built is necessary to realise the promise of machine learning. But, to do that, we need some means of breaking the hold that the tech monopolies hold over data. Finding the human figures embedded in these remote, impersonal systems that are building the future out of zeroes and ones calibrates and to some degree calms certain fears about the import of AI. It also raises hope. Automation can figure as a frightening dystopia where jobs vanish and livelihoods wither. But machine learning will probably create more jobs than it replaces, many of them both well-paid and meaningful. Some people will need to retrain – intendant planners and data monopolists among them. But more – nurses and teachers, for instance; or the men and women who spend their days raising children and making homes – might sense a kind of retraining happening around them. As the limits to AI capabilities become clearer, so too does the peculiar dignity of the kinds of human cognition and action that cannot be automated.

He's a very good - he's a good man. He's a very good man. And to add to that story, his son was also a racer, African-American kid. So I tried it, and I didn't like it at first because it was part of, I guess, a punishment so I didn't look at it as it was fun. But my dad invested about $60 in me. He bought me a jersey and some shorts. When the program was over, I thought that was it for me. But when it came around the next year, my dad pretty much made me go back because he invested $60. And from that day on, I started to enjoy it.

And while many in Congress doubt the wisdom of striking Syria at all, Sen. John McCain wants to do more. He wants to be sure airstrikes and other measures help the Syrian rebels. McCain has downplayed concerns about extremists among the rebels. And he cited the work of Elizabeth O'Bagy, of the Institute for the Study of War who, like McCain, has met with Syrian rebels. [POST-BROADCAST CLARIFICATION: Elizabeth O'Bagy also works on a contractual basis with the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a subcontractor with the U.S. and British governments that advocates on behalf of the Syrian opposition. O'Bagy insists her work is separate from the group's political advocacy.] As she moved around the country with the more moderate rebels, O'Bagy has observed groups like the al-Nusra fighters, who are linked to al-Qaida; and in her view, they have not taken over the fight.

Well, you know, I mentioned before, we've only been in this business for about 13, 15 years. And so invariably in that first decade, the justice initiative was very reactive. You know, we didn't have a kind of international criminal law enforcement system in place, ready to be activated in a preventive mode, and even barely in real time. It was very much after the fact, certainly in the case of Yugoslavia, in the case of Rwanda. I think what we start to hear now, more and more, if you think of Sri Lanka, for instance, where catastrophic attacks on civilian populations are unfolding on a daily basis, as we speak - you heard last week my successor, the high commissioner for Human Rights, warned both the LTT and the government forces that there may come a point where they will have to be made to account for what - on the basis of the limited information that transpire so far - seems to be the perpetration of war crimes and crimes against humanity, attacks on civilians that are totally unjustified.

Mayor Roscoe Warren of Homestead, Florida, thank you very much for joining us. Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee. Congresswoman, please keep us abreast of the efforts of the Congressional Black Caucus, and we will pass those along. And Julianne Malveaux, our best to you as relates to your family. We'll be talking to you next week and keep updated on all of this. And we are going to put on our Web site at npr.org as much information as we can about the NAACP's efforts, Detroit and other cities--their efforts, and we'll keep everybody updated. So I thank you all for joining us.

No, it didn't work. And I know there's been a recent pitch to bring it back. And I'm really saddened about that because I think it's - I can't remember who's doing that, and so I'm not going to take a chance of throwing some channels out there, you know? But the bottom line is is that it's a disservice to the public - getting - I call it politics of fear. You scare people enough, OK, into believing this whether it's for a vote to get elected or whatever the case may be. And all we're doing is lying not only to ourselves, we're lying to the public. And we're going down a road, and we're continuing to hurt ourselves and our kids.

OK, the answer to your second question first is that, yes, the names of the owners do appear on the documents. Generally, as I mentioned, you will find a column where it indicates who the individuals are who are working on the capitol, and certainly, did they - what their rate of pay per a day is, and certainly what they're receiving in terms of pounds, shillings and pence. And in the right-hand corner, they'll have the actual name of the owner who was actually receiving the pay for the work of these individuals. Actually, they - these individuals were being leased or rented to the commissioners who were established to oversee the construction of the capitol city. And so, you find these individuals - the owners, that is - in the right-hand corner. CONAN: And the other question about, how did you find these documents? Now, these records are actually - they've been at the National Archives for years. Some year - back in 2001, we got an inquiry from a researcher who was interested in people - well, former slaves - who were slaves who had been working on the Capitol. And of course, it was less interest in the records for the president's house, but certainly that generated some search in our records. And we found these records in the commissioner's records or the accounts of the commissioners in our Treasury records that we hold at the National Archives. One wants to keep in mind that at the National Archives, we have records of the various agencies and departments of the government...