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Greg Gage: If I asked you to think of a ferocious killer animal, you'd probably think of a lion, and for all the wonderful predatory skills that a lion has, it still only has about a 20 percent success rate at catching a meal. Now, one of the most successful hunters in the entire animal kingdom is surprising: the dragonfly. Now, dragonflies are killer flies, and when they see a smaller fly, they have about a 97 percent chance of catching it for a meal. And this is in mid-flight. But how can such a small insect be so precise? In this episode, we're going to see how the dragonfly's brain is highly specialized to be a deadly killer. [DIY Neuroscience] So what makes the dragonfly one of the most successful predators in the animal kingdom? One, it's the eyes. It has near 360-degree vision. Two, the wings. With individual control of its wings, the dragonfly can move precisely in any direction. But the real secret to the dragonfly's success is how its brain coordinates this complex information between the eyes and the wings and turns hunting into a simple reflex. To study this, Jaimie's been spending a lot of time socializing with dragonflies. What do you need to do your experiments? Jaimie Spahr: First of all, you need dragonflies. Oliver: I have a mesh cage to catch the dragonflies. JS: The more I worked with them, the more terrified I got of them. They're actually very scary, especially under a microscope. They have really sharp mandibles, are generally pretty aggressive, which I guess also helps them to be really good predators. GG: In order to learn what's going on inside the dragonfly's brain when it sees a prey, we're going to eavesdrop in on a conversation between the eyes and the wings, and to do that, we need to anesthetize the dragonfly on ice and make sure we protect its wings so that we can release it afterwards. Now, the dragonfly's brain is made up of specialized cells called neurons and these neurons are what allow the dragonfly to see and move so quickly. The individual neurons form circuits by connecting to each other via long, tiny threads called axons and the neurons communicate over these axons using electricity. In the dragonfly, we're going to place little metal wires, or electrodes, along the axon tracks, and this is what's really cool. In the dragonfly, there's only 16 neurons; that's eight per eye that tell the wings exactly where the target is. We've placed the electrodes so that we can record from these neurons that connect the eyes to the wings. Whenever a message is being passed from the eye to the wing, our electrode intercepts that conversation in the form of an electrical current, and it amplifies it. Now, we can both hear it and see it in the form of a spike, which we also call an action potential. Now let's listen in. Right now, we have the dragonfly flipped upside down, so he's looking down towards the ground. We're going to take a prey, or what we sometimes call a target. In this case, the target's going to be a fake fly. We're going to move it into the dragonfly's sights. (Buzzing) Oh! Oh, look at that. Look at that, but it's only in one direction. Oh, yes! You don't see any spikes when I go forward, but they're all when I come back. In our experiments, we were able to see that the neurons of the dragonfly fired when we moved the target in one direction but not the other. Now, why is that? Remember when I said that the dragonfly had near 360-degree vision. Well, there's a section of the eye called the fovea and this is the part that has the sharpest visual acuity, and you can think of it as its crosshairs. Remember when I told you the dragonfly had individual precise control of its wings? When a dragonfly sees its prey, it trains its crosshairs on it and along its axons it sends messages only to the neurons that control the parts of the wings that are needed to keep that dragonfly on target. So if the prey is on the left of the dragonfly, only the neurons that are tugging the wings to the left are fired. And if the prey moves to the right of the dragonfly, those same neurons are not needed, so they're going to remain quiet. And the dragonfly speeds toward the prey at a fixed angle that's communicated by this crosshairs to the wings, and then boom, dinner. Now, all this happens in a split second, and it's effortless for the dragonfly. It's almost like a reflex. And this whole incredibly efficient process is called fixation. But there's one more story to this process. We saw how the neurons respond to movements, but how does the dragonfly know that something really is prey? This is where size matters. Let's show the dragonfly a series of dots. Oh, yeah! JS: Yeah, it prefers that one. GG: Out of all the sizes, we found that the dragonfly responded to smaller targets over larger ones. In other words, the dragonfly was programmed to go after smaller flies versus something much larger, like a bird. And as soon as it recognizes something as prey, that poor little fly only has seconds to live. Today we got to see how the dragonfly's brain works to make it a very efficient killer. And let's be thankful that we didn't live 300 million years ago when dragonflies were the size of cats.

Well, remember that Senator Clinton has a history in the Latino community in Texas going back at least to 1972, when her husband was the co-chair of George McGovern's presidential campaign in Texas. The Latino community in Texas has known the Clintons for years. She comes in with a big advantage. And in fact, the polls suggest that she is doing better in the Latino community here than Senator Obama is. But as the primaries and caucuses have gone on and Senator Obama has gained strength in Latino communities in other states, he is beginning to pick up Latino votes here. There are two weeks as we speak between now and March 4th. In any political year, and especially this political year, that's a lifetime. Anything could happen. My suspicion is she does better than he does. The question is, is it going to be by enough to make a difference in the delegates?

Yes, this is Tom Jessell here. I've already enjoyed many of the events earlier in the week, and it's really inspiring, as Brian mentioned, to see the variety of participants, topics under discussion. I went, and the first person I ran into was a high school teacher at my daughter's high school. So, I think, if the intent of the festival is to reach out not just to technicians and professionals in the field, but in fact people who have the important job of encouraging enthusiasm in science in the young, then it's really doing a marvelous job at achieving that.

Well, no. There's been a, yeah, right, wholesale land grab, actually, you'd call it. It began with the gas fields and now has moved, as we said, to, one by one, to the military bases. And we should say, it's not only the military bases, but it's also all the Ukrainian hardware - the tanks and the guns, missiles, or whatever Ukraine has here. In fact, they had a lot of weaponry here. Yesterday, we saw Russian soldiers just driving off with this stuff. So it shows the illegality, really, of this whole annexation because even if you were to accept Putin's logic for annexing Crimea - it was historically part of Russia, etcetera, etcetera - this did not extend to commandeering Ukrainian military hardware.

Well, we know as many as six, maybe even as many as 10 so-called high-value detainees were interrogated there. The ones we know about for certain are Abdul Nashiri, the man who was accused of masterminding the plot to blow up the USS Cole, and Abu Zubaydah, who at one point was thought to be a top aide to Osama bin Laden. But after a long period of investigation, I think they determined that he may have played no key role at all. And the third person who was there was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and he really is apparently the mastermind of 9/11. It appears if you put a lot of material together from a lot of different sources that this villa and this tiny town in northern Poland may be the place where he was waterboarded 183 times.

It is one of the most interesting questions, like, why is the techie there? So this is their 14th annual conference. They've been around as an organization for about 18 years. And so, now is the time they really start talking about how you can leverage technology. And so I did a presentation to these media executives, talking about everything from - not only how you can start to generate and distribute content on more new media platforms, things like cell phones, things like your video game consoles. I mean, more and more people are acquiring content news and information on more and more devices than ever before.

So for the rest of the hour, we're going to take a look at the immigration of high-skilled workers. Is the shortage real with jobs needing to be filled by foreign workers? Or is the shortage one of the - the money - is the shortage really of money? Or companies are looking for cheaper overseas labor. Our number 1-800-989-8255. Excuse me. 1-800-989-TALK. And you can surf over to our Web site at sciencefriday.com, or look for the avatar in Second Life at SciSchools(ph) over there and we'll take questions there in Second Life. Let me introduce my guests. Martin Lawler is the author of "Professionals: A Matter of Degree," published by the American Immigration Lawyers Association. He's an immigration lawyer with Lawler & Lawler in San Francisco. He joins us today from the studios of KQED. Welcome to the program.

From the welcome he got today in Manchester, you wouldn't know that a party rebellion had just three weeks ago forced Tony Blair to set out a timeline for stepping down. One banner being waved in the conference hall read Too Young to Retire. The 53-year-old Blair delivered the kind of rousing speech that has won him three elections. He went over the successes of the last 10 years - a strong economy, a reduction in child poverty, winning the 2012 Olympics, to name just a few. Take a step back and be proud, he said. This is a changed country. Then he focused on his own departure.

Well, the only thing you can do is to try to get seasoned staff out that are credible in that community, number one, that's going to be a bridge or an ambassador, if you will, between you in that constituency. But also, too, you need to learn up on their issues and to the extent that you agree with them you need to articulate that and to the extent that you don't agree with those issues, you also need to articulate that. But you need to be very sensitive to that. I think that's the main reason why quite frankly that, going back to Mayor Giuliani and immigration, that's where he stumbled a little bit. I think that's where he's going to offend a lot of social conservatives, but also quite frankly a lot of immigrants as well.

Well, I think her priority for a long time was going to college, and then around the time of the beginning of her senior year, both of her parents died. It was horrible. And she was left in a position where she had to make a choice, and her new priority became her two younger siblings who needed to be taken care of. So, yeah, about halfway through her senior year, she became engaged to her first cousin and eventually married him. And as far as I know - we've lost touch a little bit. Actually, we just emailed a couple of days ago, but she is going to college now. And she's earning an associate degree in college. So she's doing well, but she did have to make a compromise and I hope that it's worked out for her.

We're going to begin this hour discussing how President Trump is handling a whistleblower complaint from within his administration. It involves allegations - allegations that he tried to encourage or even pressure a foreign government to investigate a political rival in his family. Yesterday, the president dismissed the complaint as a political hack job. But House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff has reacted strongly, demanding that the acting director of National Intelligence, Joseph McGuire, release the contents of the complaint to Congress. Mr. Schiff has issued a subpoena to obtain the complaint, and Mr. McGuire has not complied. We wanted to understand more about this, why all this matters, so we've called someone who has served in all of these relevant areas. Leon Panetta is a former director of the CIA and a former secretary of defense - that was in the Obama administration - as well as a former chief of staff in the Clinton administration, as well as a former member of Congress and, before that, an Army intelligence officer.

Some are, and some aren't. There's a whole suite and a whole patchwork of approaches, and not one standard. To get back to something Isabel mentioned at the beginning that relates to that is the problem of childcare. We have a cycle of a childcare availability crisis, which has to do with the high expense of childcare compared to the low income of many single parents. And the obvious approach to that is for a government intervention in terms of a childcare subsidy or credit. If you could do that, I think you would ease the scheduling problems and pressures that a lot of single parents face.

This is Talk of the Nation. I'm Neal Conan. We're broadcasting from the Arizona Historical Society Museum in Tempe, just outside of Phoenix, a city that's become one of the centers of Major League Baseball. Of course, the Arizona Diamondbacks are based here and Phoenix is home to the Cactus League, rapidly overtaking Florida as the capital of baseball spring training. We'll talk baseball for much of this hour with two gentlemen closely related to the game in this area and each other, Joe Garagiola, Jr. is the former general manager of the Diamondbacks, now a senior official with Major League Baseball. Joe Garagiola, Sr. is - well, let me use his own words from his new book "Just Play Ball." People refer to me as a legend or one of the greats of the game, he writes. That means two things. One, the only thing that kept me out of the Hall Of Fame is that I had to play, and two, I'm old.

Well, maybe she was just over-exaggerating and trying to tell us the rags to riches arc of her life. And I can understand that. I helped my mother clean houses when I was a kid, and they, the folks we cleaned for, did give away good clothes. So I kind of understand what she's talking about, coming from practically nothing to what she has today. Of course, I have nothing like what she has. But I think it was just an over-exaggeration. Her show does have a number of white experts who were being - are being featured on her new radio program on satellite radio, and maybe over time that will involve her best friend. Gayle King is black, and she has a part in the radio show too. So, as I said, I think Oprah was just getting a little carried away.

Hi, thank you so much. I used to work for Cesar Chavez, the great civil rights leader, environmental leader, excuse me, and social leader. But I didn't get there because I just knew who he was, in fact I didn't know who he was until I heard him give a speech in Illinois after a bunch of students and I had driven 14 hours to get there to a conference. And he said that every dollar you spend is a vote for the world you want, and that every dollar you don't spend is a vote that creates - literally creates and builds - the world you want. And that just blew me away. I was so empowered I couldn't believe it. It just, it made so much sense, like this huge light bulb went on in my head.

We have an email from Michelle Mayer(ph) - and thank you very much for your call. We have an email from Michelle Mayer, who says: My initial reaction to the question was heck no - and again, our question is: Should people be able to use food stamps at fast-food restaurants? She said heck no was her initial reaction. And then after some thought I realized that I myself have eaten a Happy Meal when money was tight and time was short. I realized that often our mom or dad has very limited time to prepare a meal and fast food is a good idea at times. I'm thinking that maybe item choices might be limited. So there, Sherrie, I'm saying that maybe you've changed a mind, but what I find interesting is the overwhelming number of our calls coming in so far are on the other side of this. What do you think that's about? What does that reflect?

Well, I didn't think of myself, you know - I didn't position myself immediately as an Irish poet. Actually, as an Irish student in Belfast in the late 1950s, I studied "Beowulf" for my English literature B.A., so it was part of my memory and I actually liked the Anglo-Saxon poetry when I was at Queens -the melody of it good into my ear. And so when it was suggested that I translate it, I knew it already in a way. Of course, I did begin to think about my position as an Irish writer doing it. So what I did, for better or worse, I put in certain words that had an Irish basis. They're, of course, English dialect, if you like. But they give it, for me, a certain Irish tune. And as a matter of fact, I couldn't have got started on it if I hadn't had the tune of my father's cousins. I mentioned this in the introduction into the book, people called the scullions, who spoke with great solemnity, with, and - they could say simple things and give them a great, again a bit of aura, of majesty and importance. So I thought that that dignified simple utterance, was useful for "Beowulf" in the verse in "Beowulf." This is written in verse. It's not a prose translation.

Yeah. I mean, that's a huge risk. And it really - it's a fine balance. You want to give people as much as possible to entice them, but you don't want to give them such a feast, such an overload that they think, oh, well, you know, you've shown me every single beat, the first act, the second act, the third act, you know, the big climax. You know, that's one thing that always makes me cringe when I'm in a movie theater and I hear - overhear people after the trailer and saying we'll, I won't see that movie, you know, because it's given everything away. But there is pressure - there's so much involved, there's so much money involved with some of the larger big studio films, that I think there is an anxiety about people not quite knowing what to expect. You know, one trailer which I thought was a very well-cut trailer, and there are a couple of trailers for it, but the Marc Webb "Spider-Man" reboot that came out I think last summer had a bunch of different trailers.

Not something that I do in particular, but I'm a seasoned HR director. I'm a vice president of HR in a hospital system. And unfortunately, I've been involved in several terminations of employees who have posted inappropriate things on Facebook. And coincidentally, my daughter happens to be a server at an Applebee's. And I have encouraged all of my kids - one of whom is now a young school teacher, just landed his first job - don't put - just leave Facebook alone. Facebook is extremely dangerous. Helpful in many ways, but it's dangerous. It can get you fired. It can get you sued. It can put you in jail. So what I tell people is you can't post anything. Don't post signatures, anything about social security numbers, anything that violates...

What is mathematics about? We know what biology is about; it’s about living things. Or more exactly, the living aspects of living things – the motion of a cat thrown out of a window is a matter for physics, but its physiology is a topic for biology. Oceanography is about oceans; sociology is about human behaviour in the mass long-term; and so on. When all the sciences and their subject matters are laid out, is there any aspect of reality left over for mathematics to be about? That is the basic question in the philosophy of mathematics. People care about the philosophy of mathematics in a way they do not care about, say, the philosophy of accountancy. Perhaps the reason is that the certainty and objectivity of mathematics, its once-and-for-all establishment of rock-solid truths, stands as a challenge to many common philosophical positions. It is not just extreme sceptical views such as postmodernism that have a problem with it. So do all empiricist and naturalist views that hope for a fully ‘scientific’ explanation of reality and our knowledge of it. The problem is not so much that mathematics is true, but that its truths are absolutely necessary, and that the human mind can establish those necessities and understand why they must be so. It is very difficult to explain how a physical brain could do that. One famous philosopher who finds mathematical necessity an inconvenience is Peter Singer. In one of his best-selling books on ethics, he argues that we cannot rely on intuiting ethical truths, since the most convincing case of intuition, in mathematics, is not correct. ‘The self-evidence of the basic truths of mathematics,’ he says, ‘could be explained… by seeing mathematics as a system of tautologies… true by virtue of the meanings of the terms used.’ Singer is wrong to claim that this philosophy of mathematics, called logicism, is ‘widely, if not universally accepted’. It has not been accepted by any serious philosopher of mathematics for 100 years. But it is clear why anyone who, like Singer, wishes to explain away the strange power of human intuition might want a deflationary philosophy of mathematics to be true. To the question: ‘Is mathematics about something?’ there are two answers: ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. Both are profoundly unsatisfying. The ‘No’ answer, whose champions are known as nominalists, says that mathematics is just a language. On this view, it is just a way of talking about other things, or a collection of logical trivialities (as Singer claims), or a formal manipulation of symbols according to rules. However you cut it, it is not really about anything. Those whose encounter with mathematics at school was less than happy (‘Minus times minus equals plus/The reason for this we need not discuss’) might feel some sympathy with the nominalist picture. Then again, it is also a view that appeals to physicists and engineers who regard serious propositions about reality as their business. They look on tables of Laplace transforms and other such mathematical paraphernalia as, in the words of the German philosopher Carl Hempel, ‘theoretical juice extractors’: useful for getting extra sense out of meaty physical propositions, but not contentful in themselves. Nominalism might have a certain down-to-earth appeal, but further reflection suggests that it can’t be right. Although manipulation of symbols is useful as a technique, we also have a strong sense that mathematics makes objective discoveries about a terrain that is in some sense ‘out there’. Take the subtleties of the distribution of primes. Some numbers are prime, some not. A dozen eggs can be arranged in cartons of 6 × 2 or 3 × 4, but eggs are not sold in lots of 11 or 13 because there is no neat way of organising 11 or 13 of them into an eggbox: 11 and 13, unlike 12, are prime, and primes cannot be formed by multiplying two smaller numbers. The idea is very easy to grasp. But this doesn’t mean there’s nothing to discover about it. It turns out that the way in which the primes are distributed among numbers involves a complex interplay of pattern and irregularity. On the small scale, the latter is most evident: there are long stretches without any primes at all – indefinitely long stretches, in fact. At the same time, it is widely believed that there are infinitely many ‘prime pairs’; that is, pairs of numbers only two apart that are both prime, such as 41 and 43. When we turn to the large scale, the impression of disorder fades and a pattern starts to emerge after all. Primes become gradually less dense as one counts up: the density of primes around a large number is inversely proportional to its order of magnitude. The density of primes around a trillion (1012), for example, is about half what it is around a million (106). More exact information on the intricacies of the distribution of primes is contained in the Riemann Hypothesis, currently the most famous unproved conjecture of mathematics. It seems as if pure mathematics reveals the topography of a region whose truths pre-existed investigation, even language This is typical of the results of pure mathematics, from simple school facts such as the divisibility of numbers by 9 if the sum of their digits is divisible by 9, up to the higher reaches of abstract algebra. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that pure mathematics reveals to us the topography of a region whose truths pre-existed our investigations and even our language. Inspired by that thought, Platonism proposes a philosophy of mathematics opposite to nominalism. It says that mathematics is about a realm of non-physical objects such as numbers and sets, abstracta that exist in a mysterious realm of forms beyond space and time. If that sounds far-fetched, note that pure mathematicians certainly speak and often think that way about their subject. Platonism also fits well with the apparent success of mathematical proof, which seems to demonstrate how things must be in all possible worlds, irrespective of what the laws of nature might be in any particular world. The proof that the square root of 2 is an irrational number does not rely on any observationally established laws. It shows how things must be, suggesting that the square root of 2 is an entity beyond our changeable world of space and time. Still, despite its clean lines and long history, Platonism cannot be right either. Since the time of Plato himself, nominalists have been urging very convincing objections. Here’s one: if abstracta float somewhere outside our own universe of space and time, it’s hard to imagine how can we see them or have any other perceptual contact with them. So how do we know they’re there? Some contemporary Platonists claim that we infer them, much as we infer the existence of atoms to explain the results of chemistry experiments. But that seems not to be how we know about numbers. Five-year-olds learning to count don’t perform sophisticated inferences about abstractions; their contact with the numerical aspect of reality is somehow more perceptual and direct. Even animals can count, up to a point. In any case, the problem with Platonism is not so much about knowledge as about its view of mathematical entities. Surely when we measure, or calculate, or model the weather mathematically, we are dealing with mathematical properties of real things in this world, such as their quantities. Such properties are not abstracta: like colours, they have causal powers that result in our seeing them. The visual system easily detects such properties as the ratio of your height to mine (if we stand next to each other). There is no room for abstracta in other worlds to enter the story, even if they did exist. Nominalists and Platonists have fought each other to a standstill, each convincingly revealing the fatal flaws in their opponents’ views, each unable to establish their own position. Let’s start again. Imagine the Earth before there were humans to think mathematics and write formulas. There were dinosaurs large and small, trees, volcanoes, flowing rivers and winds… Were there, in that world, any properties of a mathematical nature (to speak as non-committally as possible)? That is, were there, among the properties of the real things in that world (not some abstract world), some that we would have to recognise as mathematical? There were many such properties. Symmetry, for one. Like most animals, the dinosaurs had approximate bilateral symmetry. The trees and volcanoes had an approximate circular symmetry with random elements – seen from above, they look much the same when rotated around their axis. The same goes for the eggs. But symmetry, whether exact or approximate, is a property that is not exactly physical. Non-physical things can have symmetry; arguments, for example, have symmetry if the last half repeats the first half in the opposite order. Symmetry is an uncontroversially mathematical property, and a major branch of pure mathematics – group theory – is devoted to classifying its kinds. When symmetry is realised in physical things, it is often very obvious to perception; if you have an asymmetrical face, don’t go into politics, because it makes an immediate bad impression on TV. Symmetry, like other mathematical properties, can have causal powers, unlike abstracta as conceived by Platonists. Another mathematical property, which like symmetry is realisable in many sorts of physical things, is ratio. The height of a big dinosaur stands in a certain ratio to the height of a small dinosaur. The ratio of their volumes is different – in fact, the ratio of their volumes is much greater than the ratio of their heights, which is what makes big dinosaurs ungainly and small ones sprightly. A given ratio is something that can be the relation between two heights, or two volumes, or two time intervals; a ratio is just what those relations between different kinds of physical entities share, and is thus a more mathematical property than the physical lengths, volumes and so on. Ratio is what we measure when we determine how a length (or volume, or time, etc) relates to an arbitrarily chosen unit. It is one of the basic kinds of number. As Isaac Newton put it in his uniquely magisterial language: ‘By Number we understand not so much a Multitude of Unities, as the abstracted Ratio of any Quantity, to another Quantity of the same kind, which we take for Unity.’ Any digression into applied mathematics – rarely undertaken by philosophers of mathematics, who prefer the familiar ground of numbers and logic – will turn up, for the alert observer, many other quantitative and structural properties that are not themselves physical but can be realised in the physical world (and any other worlds there might be): flows, order relations, continuity and discreteness, alternation, linearity, feedback, network topology, and many others. There is a name for a philosophy of mathematics that emphasises the way in which mathematical properties crop up in the actual world. It is called Aristotelian realism. It is based on Aristotle’s view, opposed to that of his teacher Plato, that the properties of things are real and in the things themselves, not in another world of abstracta. A version of it, holding that mathematics was the ‘science of quantity’, was actually the leading philosophy of mathematics up to the time of Newton, but the idea has been largely off the agenda since then. Infants and animals demonstrably do have the ability to recognise pattern and estimate number, shape and symmetry Because Aristotelian realism insists on the realisability of mathematical properties in the world, it can give a straightforward account of how basic mathematical facts are known: by perception, the same as other simple facts. Ratios of heights are visible (to a degree of approximation, of course). Infants and animals demonstrably do have the ability to recognise pattern and estimate number, shape and symmetry. Our developed human intellectual abilities add two things to those simple perceptions. The first is visualisation, which allows us to understand necessary relations between mathematical facts. Try this easy mental exercise: imagine six crosses arranged in two rows of three crosses each, one row directly above the other. I can equally imagine the same six crosses as three columns of two each. Therefore 2 × 3 = 3 × 2. I not only notice that 2 × 3 is in fact equal to 3 × 2, I understand why 2 × 3 must equal 3 × 2. So the Platonists were right to call attention to the ability of the human mind to grasp mathematical necessities; they just failed to notice that those necessities are often realised in this world. The second intellectual ability by which the human mind extends the results of perception is proof. Mathematical proofs chain together a series of insights, individually similar to ‘2 × 3 = 3 × 2’, to demonstrate necessities that cannot be understood at a glance, such as how the density of primes tails off for large numbers. Aristotelian realism stands in a difficult relationship with naturalism, the project of showing that all of the world and human knowledge can be explained in terms of physics, biology and neuroscience. If mathematical properties are realised in the physical world and capable of being perceived, then mathematics can seem no more inexplicable than colour perception, which surely can be explained in naturalist terms. On the other hand, Aristotelians agree with Platonists that the mathematical grasp of necessities is mysterious. What is necessary is true in all possible worlds, but how can perception see into other possible worlds? The scholastics, the Aristotelian Catholic philosophers of the Middle Ages, were so impressed with the mind’s grasp of necessary truths as to conclude that the intellect was immaterial and immortal. If today’s naturalists do not wish to agree with that, there is a challenge for them. ‘Don’t tell me, show me’: build an artificial intelligence system that imitates genuine mathematical insight. There seem to be no promising plans on the drawing board. The standard alternatives in the philosophy of mathematics have failed to account for the simplest facts about how mathematics tells us about the world we live in – nominalism by reducing mathematics to trivialities, and Platonism by divorcing it from the world, the real world of which mathematical truths form a necessary skeleton. Aristotelian realism is a new beginning. It connects the philosophy of mathematics back to the applications that have always been the fertile ground from which mathematics grows. It has a message both for philosophy and for mathematics and its teaching: don’t get blinded by shuffling symbols, don’t disappear into a realm of abstractions, just keep an eye fixed on the mathematical structure of the real world.

Okay, thanks very much. That's NPR's Jamie Tarabay in Baghdad. Speaking to us on a day after the U.S. military said it found the security situation in Baghdad disheartening, and promised to refocus its efforts. Here's one other development from Iraq today: a Shiite militia group has taken over one of the larger cities in the southern part of the country. That's according to witnesses who say the militia is loyal to the Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. He's a critic of the U.S. And today, in the city of Amarah, witnesses say his fighters stormed and blew up three main police stations.

I think the country is desperately looking for leadership of this magnitude, the Ronald Reagans, the Barry Goldwaters, people who stand up and don't test the wind or take a poll, but truly say what's in his heart. And he once told me as a young boy growing up, he said the mark of a true person is somebody that stands up and says what he thinks and is willing to stay with it. And too often times we have a lot of cliches. I was listening to Obama talking in his speech about, we have a new approach. Well, what does that tell you? Tell us what he means by that. Let's fill in the gaps. Let's get some meat in this political - let's ask these candidates what they really are going to do for this country. But...

Absolutely. All of these people, at some point along the way, were on unemployment insurance. In the case of Ray Meyer, it ran out. In the case of Jennifer, it just about ran out. Her husband Brian is in this sort of position where he's only working occasional weekends, and so other times he is getting unemployment. But his is also about to run out. And the threat of unemployment insurance running out, you know, it's tough to say whether that lit a fire under them more or less. I think that the fire was pretty hot all along. They were hustling. They were - you know, Randy would send me these spreadsheets where he listed every contact he made with a possible employer and every application he sent in and every letter. And it was just, like, reams and reams of spreadsheets.

You're listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. I'm Ira Flatow. Imagine a world where evil biotech corporations control the government, where scientists splice animals to make lion-lamb combinations, raccoon-skunk combinations, where the punishment for criminals is a death match. Then, bam, a global pandemic takes over, wipes out the planet population, leaving only a few survivors. Well, that's the world in Margaret Atwood's latest novel, "The Year of the Flood." But she says it's not exactly fiction. Don't call her a science fiction writer. If we're not careful, we could be facing some of these problems. Joining me now to talk about "The Year of the Flood" is Margaret Atwood. If she needs any sort of introduction, she is the author of over 35 volumes of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, including "The Handmaid's Tale," "The Blind Assassin," which won her the Booker Prize. Her latest novel, as I say, "The Year of the Flood," now out in paperback. And she's joining us from Toronto. Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY.

As I think the difficulty here is who are Alaskans? Her partisan supporters, friends, neighbors, from Wasilla and suburban Anchorage and to some degree in Anchorage, they're just with her all the way no matter what happens. These things don't bother them. For the larger electorate, there is a problem when she couldn't provide a sort of amount of intellectual content to her campaign for vice president that so much of it was built on - I'm a person like you. I'm a regular person. I'm a hockey mom. Even here, there were people who were saying, a portion of the election - electorate, you've got to show it's more than that.

I earn my living by writing a daily newspaper column. Each week, I am aware that one column is going to be the worst column of the week. I don't set out to write it, I try my best every day. Still, every week, one column is inferior to all the others - sometimes spectacularly so. I have learned to cherish that column. A successful column usually means I am treading on familiar ground, going with the tricks that work, preaching to the choir or dressing up popular sentiments in fancy words. Often in my inferior columns, I'm trying to pull off something I've never done before, something I'm not even sure can be done. My younger daughter is a trapeze artist. She spent three years putting together an act. She did it successfully for a decade with the Cirque du Soleil. There was no reason for her to change the act, but she did anyway. She said she was no longer learning anything new, and she was bored. And if she was bored, there was no point in subjecting her body to all that stress.

No, no, you would say, though, at least at that point, they were being honest, which they're not being now. I think that their pursuit of nuclear weapons has been something they've been pursuing for 20 years. They've concealed data from the International Atomic Energy Agency. They've lied to the IAEA. They've destroyed buildings and bulldozed hundreds of cubic yards of dirt to try and remove evidence of radioactivity. There's no doubt from publicly available information what the Iranians are up to, and that's one of the reasons why I think they're such a threat to the non-proliferation regime as it currently exists around the world and why we need to take very strong action to prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Well, it's not clear. I mean, the short answer is that the very senior political party leaders in the country--there's maybe 40 or 50 of them--are all crowded into a single room at the moment--Massoud Barzani's house. He's one of the big political leaders here, a former guerrilla fighter from Kurdistan--and they're just--they're hashing it out. And I think what's going to happen--I mean, I'm speculating here, but this is what people have been telling me--is that some of the really difficult issues, like how much federal control various regions are going to have, which really are important, and how oil revenues are going to be shared--some of those issues are going to be kind of kicked down the road, that they won't settle everything about them in the document today. And that's how they'll be able to get past this date.

America's ongoing military campaigns in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Pakistan rely heavily on drones. The use of drones to kill suspected insurgents could be President Obama's most significant legacy in the fight against terrorism. Drones are properly known as unmanned aerial vehicles, but there's always someone at the controls - pilots who are fighting war by remote control for hours at a time from bases in the U.S. An essay in the latest issue of Foreign Policy Magazine poses the question can drone pilots get PTSD? David Morris wrote that essay. He's the author of a history of PTSD and a former Marine infantryman.

And it's because we regulate much of our emotions by holding in our breath or by holding down, literally, our voice, and when you engage in singing, suddenly that gateway is opened, and through singing and deep breathing these patients who really have been trying to stay away from their deep inner feelings are suddenly reconnected with those. And so through singing we are able to work through the trauma of living with chronic pain, as well as trying to learn to manage and cope physically with the pain as well as actually we have a lot of fun singing together, harmonizing together. So it gives them a lot of energy and fun and helps them a bit with their fatigue and their often hopeless mood.

Well, it couldn't be worse, right? Maybe it could. I don't know. I think what they're doing - the things they've done recently to try to improve their systems, which were incredibly sloppy, I think are better. And I think they've met - they really do - they're really leaning into - I hate to use that term - fixing this problem. At the same time, people have had it. And they've become an iconic company for all that's wrong with tech. And it's going to be difficult to shake that without enormous effort by Sandberg and by Zuckerberg and by the entire team of managers there.

Well, if you read the story in the report, there's plenty of blame to go around. And anybody who's read our report can come to those conclusions. But we thought we had two duties. One was to tell the story historically to the best of our ability, and I'm delighted at the fact that it's now used in classrooms, so it's been accepted pretty much by the academic community as a true story of 9/11 as we know up to this point. The second is to learn lessons out of each of those stories, to learn the fact we didn't really know that terrorists were moving around the country, because the intelligence agencies didn't talk to each other, so there was no communications, so we learned that, so we made a recommendation to reform the intelligence agencies and try to force them to talk together. And every one of our recommendations like that one came out of some lesson we learned out of 9/11. We learned 15 of the 19 got in illegally to this country, by using documents that were either forged or didn't have the proper--and so we recommended changing the way people get into this country. I mean--but that was our responsibility: to tell the story to the best of our ability, the blame--there's plenty to be shared, but then to make recommendations to make the American people safer. And we concentrated this last year, frankly, on the recommendations.

It's 4am in the morning. I'm waking up in a Boston hotel room and can only think of one thing: tooth pain. One of my ceramic inlays fell off the evening before. Five hours later, I'm sitting in a dentist's chair. But instead of having a repair of my inlay so that I can get rid of my pain, the dentist pitches me on the advantages of a titanium implant surgery. Ever heard of that? (Laughter) It essentially means to replace a damaged tooth by an artificial one, that is screwed into your jaw. Estimated costs for the implant surgery may add up to 10,000 US dollars. Replacing the ceramic inlay I had before would come in at 100 US dollars. Was it my health or the money that could be earned with me that was the biggest concern for my dentist? As it turned out, my experience wasn't an isolated case. A study by a US national newspaper estimated that in the United States, up to 30 percent of all surgical procedures — including stent and pacemaker implantations, hip replacements and uterus removals — were conducted although other nonsurgical treatment options had not been fully exploited by the physician in charge. Isn't that figure shocking? Numbers may be slightly different in other countries, but what it means is that if you go to a doctor in the US, you have a not-insignificant chance to be subjected to a surgical intervention without there being an immediate need for it. Why is this? Why are some practitioners incentivized to run such unnecessary procedures? Well, perhaps it is because health care systems themselves incentivize in a nonideal way towards applying or not applying certain procedures or treatments. As most health care systems reimburse practitioners in a fee-for-service-based fashion on the number and kind of treatments performed, it may be this economic incentive that tempts some practitioners to rather perform high-profit surgical treatments instead of exploring other treatment options. Although certain countries started to implement performance-based reimbursement, anchored on a quality and efficacy matrix, overall, there's very little in today's health care systems' architecture to incentivize practitioners broadly to actively prevent the appearance of a disease in the first place and to limit the procedures applied to a patient to the most effective options. So how do we fix this? What it may take is a fundamental redesign of our health care system's architecture — a complete rethinking of the incentive structure. What we may need is a health care system that reimburses practitioners for keeping their customers healthy instead of almost only paying for services once people are already sick. What we may need is a transformation from today's system that largely cares for the sick, to a system that cares for the healthy. To change our current "sick care" approach into a true "health care" approach. It is a paradigm shift from treating people once they have become sick to preserving the health of the healthy before they get sick. This shift may move the focus of all those involved — from doctors, to hospitals, to pharmaceutical and medical companies — on the product that this industry ultimately sells: health. Imagine the following. What if we redesign our health care system into one that does not reimburse practitioners for the actual procedures performed on a patient but rather reimburses doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical and medical companies for every day a single individual is kept healthy and doesn't develop a disease? In practical terms, we could, for example, use public money to pay a health fee to an insurance company for every day a single individual is kept healthy and doesn't develop a disease or doesn't require any other form of acute medical intervention. If the individual becomes sick, the insurance company will not receive any further monetary compensation for the medical interventions required to treat the disease of that individual, but they would be obliged to pay for every evidence-based treatment option to return the customer back to health. Once the customer's healthy again, the health fee for that individual will be paid again. In effect, all players in the system are now responsible for keeping their customers healthy, and they're incentivized to avoid any unnecessary medical interventions by simply reducing the number of people that eventually become sick. The more healthy people there are, the less the cost to treat the sick will be, and the higher the economic benefit for all parties being involved in keeping these individuals healthy is. This change of the incentive structure shifts, now, the attention of the complete health care system away from providing isolated and singular treatment options, towards a holistic view of what is useful for an individual to stay healthy and live long. Now, to effectively preserve health, people will need to be willing to share their health data on a constant basis, so that the health care system understands early enough if any assistance with regard to their health is needed. Physical examination, monitoring of lifetime health data as well as genetic sequencing, cardiometabolic profiling and imaging-based technologies will allow customers to make, together with health coaches and general practitioners, optimal and science-guided decisions — for their diet, their medication and their physical activity — to diminish their unique probability to fall sick of an identified, individual high-risk disease. Artificial intelligence-based data analysis and the miniaturization of sensor technologies are already starting to make monitoring of the individual health status possible. Measuring cardiometabolic parameters by devices like this or the detection of circulating tumor DNA in your bloodstream early on after cancer disease onset are only two examples for such monitoring technologies. Take cancer. One of the biggest problems in certain oncological diseases is that a large number of patients is diagnosed too late to allow them to be cured, although the drugs and treatments that could potentially have cured them are already existing today, if the disease had only been detected earlier. New technologies allow now, based on a few milliliters of blood, to detect the presence of circulating tumor DNA and thus, the presence of cancer, early on in a really convenient manner. The impact that this early-stage detection can have may be dramatic. The five-year survival rate for non-small cell lung cancer when diagnosed at stage one, which is early, is 49 percent. The same, when diagnosed at stage four, which is late, is below one percent. Being potentially able to prevent a large number of deaths by something as simple as a blood test for circulating tumor DNA could make certain cancer types a manageable disease, as disease onset can be detected earlier and positive treatment outcomes can likely be increased. In 2012, 50 percent of all Americans had a single chronic disease, resulting in 86 percent of the $3 trillion US health care budget being spent for treating such chronic diseases. Eighty-six percent. If new technologies allow now to reduce this 86 percent, why have health care systems not reacted and changed already? Well, a redesign of what today is a sick care system into a true health care system that focuses on prevention and behavioral changes requires every actor in the system to change. It requires the political willingness to shift budgets and policies towards prevention and health education to design a new set of financial and non-financial incentives. It requires creating a regulatory framework for the gathering, using and sharing of personal health data that's at the same time stringent and sensible. It needs doctors, hospitals, insurers, pharmaceutical and medical companies to reframe their approach and, most important, it can't happen without the willingness and motivation of individuals to change their lifestyle in a sustained way, to prioritize staying healthy, in addition to opening up for sharing the health data on a constant basis. This change may not come overnight. But by refocusing the incentives within the health care industry today to actively keep people healthy, we may not only be able to prevent more diseases in the first place but we may also be able to detect the onset of certain preventable diseases earlier than we do today, which will lead to longer and healthier lives for more people. Most of the technologies that we need to initiate that change are already existing today. But this is not a technology question. It is primarily a question of vision and will. Thanks a lot. (Applause)

Well, the students arrive near Iguala. The army, the Federal Police, the state police were waiting for them. Then the students decide to move the two buses where they were transportating (ph) inside to the city to be able to take three more buses. The objective was take more buses to go to the protest to Mexico City. So they went to bus station. They took the other three buses. And when the students were trying to escape on board of these five buses from Iguala when the army, the Federal Police, the municipal police and the state police - they start to shoot against the buses to stop them. The objective of the attack were two buses. From these two buses disappeared all the 43 students.

That seems to be gone. Although - I mean, there's two schools of thought on this. One is that in the end, the Republican Party, and conservatives especially, so dislike President Obama that no matter who the nominee is, they will turn out, they will be energized. They will want to work to try to deny the president a second term. The other theory is some of what we are seeing at this point, which is that there does seem to be lack of enthusiasm for this field. And any number of states' turnout has been lower this time than it was in 2008. And yet it is a competitive race. So, we don't quite yet know the answer to that. But if you're a Republican, there are some troublesome signs that they're beginning to see. And I think it's one of the reasons that people are worried about whether this will go on indefinitely.

And I would say that just yesterday I was at a meeting of this organization with the secretary of transportation, Ray LaHood, and his deputy, and the individual that they have nominated to be the new regulator of truck safety, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, who comes from the trucking industry in Maryland. And a number of people that you know and would expect to know who have been - who've lost loved ones in truck crashes were there and are very disturbed about why the Obama administration would nominate somebody from the trucking industry to regulate the trucking industry. And it was (unintelligible) and we don't know what the outcome is going to be. But what we raised were the issues of having limited number of hours that truck drivers can drive, having enforceability of those hours through a black box on the truck, not having an increase in truck size and weight and not getting rid of this freeze, which the trucking industry wants to do on these longer combination vehicles. So we're there, Julie, and help us if you can.

You know, I don't know that that's the case. I really don't. I think that both planes can land at 75, 80 percent of the airfields that need to be landed at. More importantly, there were five important capabilities or requirements that the Air Force looked at. In four out of those five criteria, Northrop Grumman was rated as superior. We tied in one. The Air Force determined that in terms of the costs we provided, we were also superior as well. So it's easy to take one or two things - you can show a replay of a basketball game and show a shot that was blocked and maybe it was a foul and it wasn't a foul. Another guy may have stepped out of bounds. At the end of the day, you play a game by the rules. When the game is over, there is a decision and you move on.

I'm saying that the best thing that we can do is we can tell patients what patients ought to know and let doctors be doctors. Those, you're exactly right. Those so-called brief summaries, and I think Bob Temple at, one of the heads of policy at FDA, said it best. It's neither, it's like the Holy Roman Empire, it's neither brief nor a summary. But those summaries are designed for doctors, the kind of information that doctors need to know to make a prescribing decision. That's very different information from the kind of information that patients need to know in an ad so that they can think about whether or not this drug might be right for them, and then, if so, they'll maybe begin an investigation further and at some point talk to their doctors about it intelligently.

That isn't to say that in all cases, this methodology is going to work and that we shouldn't have a little pause and let the reality speak for itself and not only, you know, the strong assumption that something is going to happen, particularly when we're dealing with two unknown phenomena. We've never had a woman running for president as a frontrunner. We've never had an African-American running at this level of standing in the polls. And look, this is, for me, this is hindsight. I wasn't up there screaming and saying, whoa, these polls are probably going to be wrong. But this poll - this experience, as the caller suggests, has taught us a lesson. It's not refreshing for the polling community. And you enjoy it, please. But we're not enjoying it, but hopefully we're going to learn from it.

Oh, I think my fans don't know what the hell to think of me no more. It's been a blessing, and it's been a problem. All my career I've been trying to, you know, really figure out who David Banner's going to be, because Lavell Crump happens to be such a complex person. And for those who don't know who Lavell Crump is, that's my real name. ..TEXT: In order to be successful, it seems, in especially the market now, when, you know, everything going to hell, you know, from the banks to the record companies, you know, in order to really - I tell people all the time, you know, you can be the most spiritual, you can be the most political rapper, but if don't nobody hear you, and nobody buying your records, so you're not getting played on the radio, does it matter?

But while the Supreme Court granted Mitchell immunity in this instance, it did not grant the blanket immunity that the Justice Department fought for. The justices said there's a danger that if federal officials are given absolute immunity, they'll disregard constitutional rights. The most recent document drop also provided fodder for the debate over Alito's position on civil rights. In two briefs to the Supreme Court, Alito and other lawyers for the solicitor general's office argued for a narrow interpretation of the law that bars employment discrimination on the basis of race. Charles Cooper was at Justice when the briefs were written, and he's now a partner at Cooper & Kirk law firm. Here's how he describes the Reagan administration's philosophy.

Well, actually, Neal, there's a interesting context there. The tweet where they said we've obtained encrypted video and could use some help, it came in a string of tweets at a time that the most straightforward reading would be that they were going to release video of a aerial attack in Afghanistan that may have killed up to a hundred civilians. And in the end, obviously, what we saw on Monday was an Iraq video. And Ive spoken with Julian Assange since then and he told me that that was actually somewhat deliberate, that they were trying to - they weren't interested in dispelling rumors that might lead people to think they were releasing a different video than the one they actually were. So that when they did get it out there, the U.S. government and the military wouldn't have a response ready right off the bat.

Let me tell you what I think it meant for Reverend Jackson and Congressman John Lewis and Dorothy Height and Julian Bond, and other luminaries who made that moment possible. In their lifetime, Scott, they saw Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney, two Jews and an African-American, get killed for trying to register people to vote in Mississippi. They saw Dr. King get shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. They were right there when they were talking to him. They saw Viola Liuzzo, a white, Italian housewife, get killed. And so for them to see, and for us to see, Barack Obama emerge as the president-elect and the 44th president of the United States, that had to be an extraordinary moment. And it truly was. I think all Americans can share in the progress that we've made as a nation.

Hi. We had - I mean, both my husband and I served in the Army National Guard, and although neither of us was deployed overseas, I did see the problems that arose when a National Guard unit is deployed. Those people may be from all over the state of Iowa, not just from that area. So their family support groups, you may have to drive 300 miles to get the same services that an active Army post has right there for the active troops. So that's a problem that I think a lot of people don't understand, especially for the National Guard troops that are deployed quite frequently.

Yeah, I mean, you definitely feel a difference in the city. Cairo was always a very lively, fun city, chaotic. And even under Mubarak, who was an authoritarian leader, there were always known red lines - what you could say and what you couldn't say. And nowadays, that's really changed. People don't really know what they can and can't say anymore. And one of the biggest examples of that was the death and torture of an Italian Ph.D. student here who was found on the side of the road with stab wounds and cigarette burns on his body, signs of awful torture. And that is being attributed to security forces. And it's not unusual to have people disappear and then show up dead. But it is unusual for it to happen to a foreigner from a country that's closely allied with the Egyptian government. And so people just don't know where the red lines are now.

Well, it was one of the tougher days in our marriage, but the fact was is that I helped her put a corset on, and she went running, and by the next day she felt almost totally better, and she'd had an MRI, she had a herniated disk, she was in severe pain. And you know, it's hard. When your own wife doesn't want to listen to you, how can I expect my patients to listen to me? But I really think this study shows that patients can get better. And surgery is not a bad procedure for those who can tolerate it.

I think that's absolutely true. But I think the - what they didn't see, in my article, was if you teach to a high level, if you assume that you're trying to reach everyone at a level that they can understand, how can you possibly not bring them along? I mean, I think the idea is to get a class that's engaged, and let that be the ship that's going to pull those people with it. And so the problem is, if you spend too much time on those students that are not engaged, the students that are engaged become bored. And in today's society, that's one thing I'll state about our learners is they get bored easily. And so you really can't spend too much of your energy and time on the student that really doesn't want to be there, and let the rest of the class - that is trying to work along - fall by the wayside.

Well, Hope VI targets public housing projects, to revitalize them, to turn them into mixed-income dwellings. People aren't displaced. The people who live there are given the first opportunity to stay. But they're physically renovated so they look like more conventional, modern town homes, which draws young professionals, which draws families back into the community, and which also creates a basis for businesses to relocate near the area. So what you get from a Hope VI project is an area that's often been blighted and neglected is physically transformed into a vibrant center of city life. We think it's important to get Hope VI funded at some level so that we keep the program going and that we get additional projects in the pipeline.

I will make a prediction. Yeah, look, I think that simply the number of House seats that are in play, if this is a wave election, which obviously the Gallup numbers and other things indicate and if you look at a lot of the race-by-race data, I think the House is definitely in play. I think the real question now, in light of the generic numbers that have come out, is whether the Senate is actually in play or not. I, for one, have been saying for a long time it wasn't. That that kind of a pick-up was just, you know, impossible. Now, I think it's, while still not likely, is within the realm of the possible.

You made the point a moment ago, Greg, that the Iranians, at one point, had mutual interests with us in Afghanistan. And indeed, earlier on, not too long after 9/11, many people don't know this, the Iranians were extremely helpful in the fight against al-Qaeda and in the fight against some of the fundamentalist forces in Afghanistan. Is it not time to stop threatening the Iranians? Is it not time to stop warning the Iranians about what's going to happen or about sanctions? We have far more that we could get from them, I think, if we were to engage them, and ironically it - unless I'm forgetting some of these echoes from the past, I thought that's what Senator Obama had in mind earlier in the campaign.

My next guest really needs almost no introduction. He's former vice president of the United States. He's one of the most well-known communicators of the risks of climate change. He shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for those efforts. I'm guessing a lot of you have read his book, "An Inconvenient Truth," or you've seen the movie. His latest book, "The Future," is, as the title suggests, a lot broader than that, a look at how everything from ultra-fast stock trading and genetic engineering, food shortages and Internet freedom, all these things, how will they shape the future. It's quite a tome. And don't worry. There's a chapter in there on climate change too.

Now, the anniversary issue looks at women who've broken the gender barrier over the last 35 years, one of them is Carol Moseley Braun. She became America's first black female senator in 1992, served Illinois in that post for six years. She later became ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa. A few years ago, Braun took a big interest in sustainable farming and she found it, and now had the company called Good Food Organics. The business stems from her passion for producing organic foods through a process called biodynamic farming, and it's a way of farming in close harmony in connection with the natural environment. Here to explain more is the former senator, Ambassador Carol Moseley Braun.

I have two little kids. And I have a nephew who was at 17 at the time who got caught feeling up my kids. And because it was family and because he was underage, nothing came of it. But I'll tell you what, I wish his name was on this list and I don't want to see it come off because contrary to what she's saying about recidivism rate, it's been my experience - and I have a degree in sociology, I studied this stuff pretty thoroughly at one point - most people who have poor impulse control don't all of a sudden get impulse control because they went to treatment or they went to therapy. This isn't something to take chances with. These are kids. We're not talking about, you know, adults who are doing date rape necessarily. We're talking about kids being molested. I just I wanna see the offenders' name on the list for the rest of their lives and hope that nobody else's kids get - put were mine were.

It's shifting dramatically by saying, you know, we you know, the jargon of No Child Left Behind was teacher quality. Now it's become teacher effectiveness, and there's a lot of money there for states to examine and re-examine and rethink how they train teachers, how they create those pipelines to attract the best teachers, the most talented teachers, and I think that in the end, more than class size, more than, you know, the latest pedagogy on how to teach math or science, I think that the quality and the effectiveness of that teacher is going to be an enormous lynchpin to the rest of where this administration goes with school reform, because I think that's going to be the key.

And you know - but we know the full story of Malcolm and that he did have distain or dislike for whites early on just because he hadn't evolved, just like Lincoln had evolved in - had natural biases for himself early on and he had this pressure around him with slavery that was something that was very common. To go against that makes him even a greater man to have reached the level to know that it was not just and it was not right, just as Malcolm, later in his life, had, you know, found that his beliefs were not right and not just, but he evolved to come to the understanding that it was about equality for all people.

I mean, I've had reports of officers out there wrestling with wanted felons being surrounded by crowds of people, none of whom rendered assistance, but all of whom had their cellphone recordings on. But certainly there is a sense that the average officer there feels that they're going to be judged unfairly in ambiguous circumstances. The essence of the job is dealing with ambiguity, stress and violence all at the same time, hoping to make the right decision. And sometimes you may be wrong trying to do the right thing. Officers do not believe that they're going to get even the slightest benefit of the doubt right now.

I grew up and went to one of the apartheid schools in Alabama, and so I'm a little older there, and so I experienced what the young man is talking about in terms of the nurturing and the caring. And as Professor Cashin said, the place where I grew up was in fact economically integrated though originally segregated based upon an apartheid system. The one thing that was necessary in order to tear that system down was fundamental structural changes of the society. It wasn't black people and white people coming to love each other or even wanting to live next to each other. It was a fundamental, constitutional redefinition. Who can vote? Who can join parties? Who can participate on juries, etc.? And so what I'm suggesting is that we're not going to address the kind of absence of integration--'cause we don't have segregation of the type that we had judicially--is that you're going to have to ask the same structural questions of our nation today. Martin King and others who fought and who died, if you will, to structurally change America--we must now have people who will ask the same tough questions. And I believe those tough questions are how you structurally redefine wealth in America, which to me structurally moves away from people of color and lower-income white people, how you redefine questions of access to health and income and education, and those are structural issues that I think are inherently--result in separation in our society based upon the very structure of our society. It's not going to be any easier now than it was then, and I think if we're looking for people to one day wake up in church or in synagogue or in whatever--in a mosque--on Sunday to say, `We love each other now,' they didn't do it 50 years ago and they're not going to do it now.

(Unintelligible) happen - I mean, there are like (unintelligible) specific laws in this country, and so there's something called the Fair Credit Reporting Act which governs some of that. And so I think it's an open question whether that would be permitted or not, although there are - but for things that are really important like credit or insurance. But prices (unintelligible) could be an issue, right? If they look at your car, they see you driving around the fancier parts of town, they might charge you different prices, right? When you go to buy an airline tickets, they say this guy has money, so let's charge him a higher price. I mean, look, you might like that, right? You might like ads targeted to who you are. You might want people to watch what you're doing and to send you content based on that, but you might not, right? And all we're asking for is to give people from basic controls over that.

I've heard - again, I've heard nothing but good things. He really seems to have taken his shine to Parcells, even though Bill is not coaching the team. He's definitely mentoring him. He's being positive with him. And by all accounts, Ricky has shown up. He's worked hard. I think Ricky realizes that some of the moves he made back in 2004, with the retirement and the, "I'd rather smoke weed," and all the other stuff, it's - is really impacting his legacy. Plus, I mean, it's still about a bottom line business. He still is in tremendous debt, and I think he understands that this is his last shot. And by all accounts, he's giving it his best. And the Dolphins are happy about this because Ronnie Brown is still coming off that knee injury. So they may very well need - they very may well need Ricky. I mean, we all know the Dolphins are probably not going to be very good, but it's an advantage for Ricky if he can perform, whether he's going to be a Dolphin long-term or be a trade asset. I mean, it seems like no news from Ricky is good news at this point.

Well, if that is the sentiment, then I certainly would agree, but I think also that Jeff makes a great point. I think a lot of our actions are still reactionary. I'm not really seeing where we are looking forward and making plans that deal with the issues of economics, human rights and education. I think that a lot of our actions are motivated by something catastrophic happening. Then there's a protest. Then there is an outcry. And then, you know, in a couple of weeks, a month later, you know, we're back to the same saga. So I think if we've learned anything from the past, we--is to build on those successes, build on those struggles, but we have to update the model to deal with our current realities, which are no longer even domestic. We have a global environment that we also have to deal in, whether we're talking employment or education or whatever, other challenges that face us in the 21st century.

Well you know, Scott, I've sort of - not surprisingly, I mean I've been thinking about places I've been in times of great crisis, being in Manhattan on 9/11 or going down to New Orleans after Katrina, and I think that while I - there may be things I learned about the Chinese, but I think that we are more alike at times like this than we are different. They're putting up with tremendous tragedy. They are presented with tragedies by the millions. I'm just impressed with the way that they bear up under the whole thing. It's an extraordinary test of a people's will.

I say the Yankees. You say the Red Sox. I say the Yankees. You say the Red Sox. Economists and philosophers have fought very hard about whether there's any way out of this conclusion, whether there's not some way in which each of us could honestly trust our own opinions more than everybody else's. And again, it seems pretty plausible that you ought to be able to do that, but when you actually try to write down, very carefully, a description of the way people seek truth and the way we learn from our arguments with each other, it's very hard to write down a description that does not lead you to the conclusion that we should be agreeing all the time.

I wouldn't expect the Trump team to come out and say, you know, by the way, we're going to just delete all of the work that you guys have done for the last decades. I think the most likely scenario is that there will be across-the-board budget cuts in the realm of climate science across multiple parts of the government. NASA and the EPA and the Department of Energy come to mind. People that work there are going to have to make tough choices, and maybe that means not being able to maintain data sets in the same way that they have over the last several years.

Well, it is not what I want her role to be. It is what the two can get together and decide about what here role will be. I think they need room to breath. I think that they need some time to talk. She obviously brought to the table some constituencies that are going to be needed in order to win the presidency. Obviously, there are a lot of women out there who were just as excited about her as others were about Barack Obama. And they need to make sure that they are feeling comfortable that she's had her say, and she's been dealt with. So I think it is a matter of days. And they will get together, and they will begin to work this out.

Yeah. I mean, look. Families thrive on negotiation. That can often be very messy. And so to have it kind of sanitized in this really a corporate way can be off-putting, and I get that. But I think, you know, families that are communicating in these really overly corporate emails, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're talking less. None of the parents that I interviewed or people in relationships that were using this system said that they felt like it had really taken away from the intimacy of their family. The ones who stopped adopting it did so usually just because they found it wasn't useful or it was just another kind of task to manage.

Newspapers are dying for a few reasons. Readers don't want to pay for yesterday's news, and advertisers follow them. Your iPhone, your laptop, is much more handy than New York Times on Sunday. And we should save trees in the end. So it's enough to bury any industry. So, should we rather ask, "Can anything save newspapers?" There are several scenarios for the future newspaper. Some people say it should be free; it should be tabloid, or even smaller: A4; it should be local, run by communities, or niche, for some smaller groups like business — but then it's not free; it's very expensive. It should be opinion-driven; less news, more views. And we'd rather read it during breakfast, because later we listen to radio in a car, check your mail at work and in the evening you watch TV. Sounds nice, but this can only buy time. Because in the long run, I think there is no reason, no practical reason for newspapers to survive. So what can we do? (Laughter) Let me tell you my story. 20 years ago, Bonnier, Swedish publisher, started to set newspapers in the former Soviet Bloc. After a few years, they had several newspapers in central and eastern Europe. They were run by an inexperienced staff, with no visual culture, no budgets for visuals — in many places there were not even art directors. I decided to be — to work for them as an art director. Before, I was an architect, and my grandmother asked me once, "What are you doing for a living?" I said, "I'm designing newspapers." "What? There's nothing to design there. It's just boring letters" (Laughter) And she was right. I was very frustrated, until one day. I came to London, and I've seen performance by Cirque du Soleil. And I had a revelation. I thought, "These guys took some creepy, run-down entertainment, and put it to the highest possible level of performance art." I thought "Oh my God, maybe I can do the same with these boring newspapers." And I did. We started to redesign them, one by one. The front page became our signature. It was my personal intimate channel to talk to the readers. I'm not going to tell you stories about teamwork or cooperation. My approach was very egotistic. I wanted my artistic statement, my interpretation of reality. I wanted to make posters, not newspapers. Not even magazines: posters. We were experimenting with type, with illustration, with photos. And we had fun. Soon it started to bring results. In Poland, our pages were named "Covers of the Year" three times in a row. Other examples you can see here are from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and central European countries. But it's not only about the front page. The secret is that we were treating the whole newspaper as one piece, as one composition — like music. And music has a rhythm, has ups and downs. And design is responsible for this experience. Flipping through pages is readers experience, and I'm responsible for this experience. We treated two pages, both spreads, as a one page, because that's how readers perceive it. You can see some Russian pages here which got many awards on biggest infographic competition in Spain. But the real award came from Society for Newspaper Design. Just a year after redesigning this newspaper in Poland, they name it the World's Best-Designed Newspaper. And two years later, the same award came to Estonia. Isn't amazing? What really makes it amazing: that the circulation of these newspapers were growing too. Just some examples: in Russia, plus 11 after one year, plus 29 after three years of the redesign. Same in Poland: plus 13, up to 35 percent raise of circulation after three years. You can see on a graph, after years of stagnation, the paper started to grow, just after redesign. But the real hit was in Bulgaria. And that is really amazing. Did design do this? Design was just a part of the process. And the process we made was not about changing the look, it was about improving the product completely. I took an architectural rule about function and form and translated it into newspaper content and design. And I put strategy at the top of it. So first you ask a big question: why we do it? What is the goal? Then we adjust the content accordingly. And then, usually after two months, we start designing. My bosses, in the beginning, were very surprised. Why am I asking all of these business questions, instead of just showing them pages? But soon they realized that this is the new role of designer: to be in this process from the very beginning to the very end. So what is the lesson behind it? The first lesson is about that design can change not just your product. It can change your workflow — actually, it can change everything in your company; it can turn your company upside down. It can even change you. And who's responsible? Designers. Give power to designers. (Applause) But the second is even more important. You can live in a small poor country, like me. You can work for a small company, in a boring branch. You can have no budgets, no people — but still can put your work to the highest possible level. And everybody can do it. You just need inspiration, vision and determination. And you need to remember that to be good is not enough. Thank you.

It's still a bit hard to read. There's an atmosphere of fear in the kingdom, and the palace is hanging tough. The king has clearly backed his son. He's given him a job of reorganizing the intelligence service after some top officials were fired after this event. That's a strong vote of confidence. You know, the Saudis say that these 18 men who were arrested will face justice in a Saudi court, but it's not altogether clear that they'll be allowed to properly defend themselves or if their testimony will be public. These are high-ranking military and security officials. You know, if they're seen as scapegoats, there could be a backlash. What hasn't changed in the kingdom is there are still dissidents in jail, including a group of women activists who haven't been charged. So this atmosphere of crackdown continues.

I think that the president has done some things for the African-American community. I think there has been a miscommunication to the African-American community, exactly what they have done. I don't think it's because he's afraid as an African-American descent president to say, hey, give a high-five up to the African-American community. I don't believe that at all. But then you look at - you know, let's look at the teabaggers. The reason why they can press their, people think(ph) , predominantly white party about their issues is because they raise their voices, which made the Republican Party move in a certain direction that maybe, unintentionally, it really didn't want to go, to the extreme right. But it's because they raised their voices and no one says, look, all those white people are criticizing the white Republican Party or a white president, you know, or the gays, you know, bombarding Obama, which they did, or the Latino community, raising their voices to Obama.

Over the years, Arangi successfully led a campaign to reduce rental fees at his apartment building. The effort took months and even brought about a rent boycott. The next phase of his dream was to improve the neighborhood's relations with the black ruling party. He held an ANC membership drive in his apartment, but there weren't many takers - a little more than 700 in an area of 14,000. The majority of voters here support the overwhelmingly white Democratic Alliance Party. Arangi says he's out of politics now, but he's proud of what he was able to do for the area. Standing together and doing things together. We've got a lot of that honestly. We've got a lot.

Absolutely. So maybe economic growth is running a quarter-point faster than it otherwise would. I suspect economic growth right now is round about 3 percent. Maybe without the weather, it'd be running at two and three quarters. And it's one of the reasons why I've been watching the early March data so closely. Definitely seeing sun in January and February was a surprise for all of us. Seeing the sun in March is less surprising, and so therefore the boost is less big. But so far, the early numbers for March and all we're really seeing so far are initial unemployment claims and consumer confidence, but they all still look really good. So it looks like it wasn't just an unseasonably warm winter.

Yeah. Well, the allegations are always highly publicized. The Department of Justice will put out a press release trumpeting the charges. The U.S. attorney will stand there with uniformed agents by his side. That is done in a very public way. And I agree with the caller that the media reports it as if it's fact because the allegation has been made. And it's a lot easier for the media to repeat those allegations than it is to invest two years to follow the story and to report the outcome. And the audience may be less interested two years later. So, I think the responsibility is both with the media and with the audience. I think the audience should be just as hungry for how the case actually comes out when a jury decides it as they are for the salacious allegations that are made at the beginning of the case.

You know, Ira, that, I think is a critical point. And one of our recommendations in terms of asking the volunteers prior to them engaging in the experiment, we asked them to refrain from listening to their favorite music for at least two weeks. You know, there's this effect called emotional desensitization. So you know, if you listen to the same song that you hear on the radio, which of course is the problem with playing top 40 songs. So you like the song, you get a high, if you will, from it. But they played it over and over again and then you become desensitized. And so, you know, if we were going to make a recommendation about listening to music on a regular basis as part of an overall heart healthy program, we would say to listen to your favorite song, then put it away for a couple of weeks and then switch off with other songs.

The whole, a lot of the art-house movies and sort of small independent movies weren't making it to Winston-Salem, and still really aren't making it here. So essentially we were reviewing a lot of blockbusters that quite often, you know, people were getting decisions about somewhere else or getting information about from another source. And it seemed like something we could replace, and again, you know, all things being equal, I'd rather have a local movie critic. We were probably the smallest newspaper that had, essentially, a dedicated movie critic, and I hated to give it up but it was the best of several bad alternatives.

Now this isn't about fixing the culture. I mean the culture is long-established and will be established for a long time. We're talking about trying to make refinements that move us towards the outcomes that we've articulated. I think the Women's Initiative was an extremely comprehensive approach to understanding the conditions of women at Duke, and I think we've made great progress in that first wave of efforts. We did several new programs with undergraduate students. We're proud of a particular program called the Baldwin Scholars. I think in this latest effort, we've gone beyond the efforts of the Women's Initiative to look at the faculty culture, the curriculum, and many other aspects. One of the I think exciting opportunities that we had was really to look in a much more interconnected way at the variety of circumstances that contribute to the culture. So I think this is, you know, this is not something that we started with the Women's Initiative, it's not something that will end with the Campus Culture Initiative, and it's not something that's unique to Duke. What is unique is our willingness, as evidenced by both of those processes, to step up and figure out what we can do to continue to move to a much better environment for our students.

It's Tuesday, the day we read from your emails and blog comments. Judging from the raft of emails we got on our show on procrastination, Talk of the Nation is feeding a nation's habit. So many of you wrote in to tell us you were procrastinating while listening to the show, we started to feel self conscious, but not all of you were goofing off. Some of you were philosophizing. Lucas wrote us from the Ivory Tower. I am a philosophy student. I find that even when I think I am procrastinating now, my mind is working on solving or thinking through problems that I'm trying to avoid even subconsciously. Philosophy is a kind of procrastination in and of itself.

I was just wondering from - I am definitely a Christian and I'm a heterosexual, and I was wondering how you reconcile certain verses with your lifestyle; because you are saying that you feel like God likes the way you're living your life and I know, like for me, if I was having sex outside of marriage, heterosexual or homosexual, it doesn't matter, I know scripturally that would be wrong. Not that God would dislike me or that I wasn't a Christian anymore, but I would have a hard time saying I felt at peace with my lifestyle, because it does say, scripturally, that that isn't right. So I was wondering how you interpreted those verses or how you were seeing that situation?

From NPR News, this is News & Notes. I'm Farai Chideya. Out with the old; in with the new. Plenty of people are hoping that 2009 could give us some relief from high unemployment rates, the home-foreclosure crisis and the struggling auto business. And President George W. Bush is stepping out of the Oval Office, as President-elect Barack Obama prepares for his inauguration. We'll talk to our reporters about what the coming months might bring economically and politically. With us on today's Reporters' Roundtable we've got Detroit Free Press columnist, Rochelle Riley, and Marcus Mabry. He's the international business editor for the New York Times. Hi, guys.

This is the first Sunday of Lent, observed by Christians all over the world and all branches of the faith. It's a time of reflection when many people forgo certain foods or luxuries and put a special emphasis on good works and charitable giving. But for many, this comes at a time of deep disquiet in their religious communities as sexual abuse and serious misconduct, including covering up abuse, has been revealed in churches around the world. Just this past week, a French Catholic cardinal was found guilty of covering up sexual abuse in his diocese. So on this first Sunday of Lent, we wanted to get a sense of how Catholics and other Christians might be grappling with these issues right now.

I think he was already retired... (laughing) In effect. Roland Burris had - he's been in office for decades. He was the first African-American to be elected statewide. That was as state comptroller. Later, he was state attorney general. He has run for the governorship three times as I recall, once for mayor, once for the Senate. He's lost all five. He's 71 years old. He had pretty much been out of politics for the last few years. But this gives him a chance to jump back in again. As he puts it, I'm senator right now, he says. He is senator designate and hasn't been certified and hasn't been - he hasn't been given the right to enter the Senate or to have a seat. All of that has yet to be worked out. But he's on his way. He could possibly win this whole debacle.

As the death toll in Syria climbed over the past two years, many critics charge that President Obama has not done enough to aid the opposition. In an op-ed in today's New York Times, former Ambassador Christopher Hill argues that the administration has made a serious mistake, but, quote, "The real shortcoming of the administration's policy on Syria has not been an unwillingness to engage militarily, but the ill-advised decision in August 2011 to preclude the possibility of a diplomatic resolution involving all sides." In other words, says Ambassador Hill, the error was to call for the removal of President Bashar al-Assad. Christopher Hill joins us now from his office at the University of Denver, where he's dean of the School of International Studies. He's former ambassador to Iraq, Macedonia, Poland and South Korea, a former assistant secretary of state as well. Nice to talk with you again.

Some young people will go to community colleges as opposed to going to a four-year institution. Some will just sit out and say, I'm not going to be able to do it. Parents are using their home equity and, you know, with the mortgage crisis that we have right now, there is less home equity to use. Some folks are looking at - some parents dedicated to their young people's success are actually raiding their retirement accounts, which is something that many financial analysts, myself included, do not advise. However, if you want to look ahead, the question is how you do it, community college? But there is another thing. There is a young woman out of Louisiana who wrote a book called "How to Get Money for College." She was about a three-point student at a Louisiana high school. She found over a hundred thousand dollars by just working it. By just going in and looking for those grants, those loans, those other things. Uncf.com, the United Negro College Fund, has lots of money available; you've got to apply for it. And my experience in the past year as president of Bennett, reminds me to tell students, you've got to be aggressive, we are going to meet you halfway, but get aggressive. Your church has money, your mother's sorority has money, your dad's lodge has money, just get aggressive because you have got to bring it, you really got to bring it.

Saudis say they expect King Abdullah to continue the late King Fahd's efforts to modernize this insular kingdom. Abdullah's reputation as a reformer was confirmed for Saudis in January of 2003 when he met with advocates of political, economic and social change and told them he supported many of their ideas. Now that Abdullah is king and no longer under the traditional restraints placed upon the crown prince, Saudis are wondering if the pace of reform will accelerate. In recent years, women have been permitted to join men in certain jobs, although the controversial ban on women driving remains in place. Professor Khalid al-Dakhil at King Saud University says the driving ban is a good example of an issue that could be solved the Saudi way: through dialogue and consensus. He says it depends on Abdullah's willingness to find a solution with the conservative clerics who support the ban.

So there's a lot to talk about here. I mean, first of all, in recent years, a lot of people have - they have concerns about the reality show genre - first of all, that it's fake, but also that it encourages behavior that maybe makes for good television but perhaps isn't that productive in the real world. Like, for example, there's evidence that one reason women are doing well as executives is that they know how to cooperate and they know how to put some ego to the side. So the concern I have is, you are now a person who has run complex organizations. And what I'm asking you is, as a person who really has done this, are the lessons people are drawing from the show the ones that really make a difference?

Well, there's probably something to that. Maybe I should take the old Will Rogers line about the Democratic Party. `I belong to no organized political party. I'm a Democrat,' and apply it to my own faith. But there is certainly precedent, if I can use a judicial term, in Judaism, but you're absolutely right, that that probably was a factor. But I do think there's something else to be said, which is that President Kennedy broke a barrier, and I think over time, the country has become more accepting and tolerant of all faiths, and I--you know, I don't want to re-litigate the results of the much disputed 2000 election, if I make this comment, that it does say something that Al Gore and I got a half a million more votes, and by that I mean to say, it says to me that certainly the American people weren't turned off because, for the first time, somebody Jewish ran for a national office.

Malcolm X was an extraordinary individual: talented, charismatic, a brilliant statesman and orator. But one of the things that's interesting and ironic about what happened in his life after death is that his intellectual legacy and the things he wrote became diffused, and there's something like 73 libraries who have a little chunk of Malcolm memorabilia; there are about 2 or 300 what I call kind of Malcolmites out here, Malcolmologists, who have dozens of audiotape lectures or different memorabilia of Malcolm. But many people have been extremely reluctant to let go of that material and place it in an archive. And ironically, because of their love for him, they have helped to destroy him. I've encountered people with audiotapes that are 50 years old, clutching them, saying, `I have this important speech of Malcolm X's,' and I remind them that an audiotape, based on magnetic tape technology, last about 40 or 45 years. And what they may have is a useless piece of tape.

But they don't agree on which one. You know, the Republicans think that the big Obama victory of 2008, with the Democrats taking 60-40 majorities in both House of Congress, president winning by the largest margin of any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson. They think that was the aberration. And now, we're getting back to normal. Democrats, Nancy Pelosi specifically, think exactly the opposite. They think that the 2010 election was the aberration. That we turned the page on a new progressive era in 2008 and soon we will get back to their version of normal. And, you know, both sides are going to be sorely disappointed. I don't think that the country does not want to either turn dramatically to the left or dramatically to the right. And it's - but we have two caucuses that kind of believe that that's the case, and it's going to be hard to get them to work together.

Lt. Col. SOLIS: Well, I don't know too many Marines, but the - too many reserve Marines, but those that are in the IRR - the ready reserve - are not happy about it. I know one gent who has a friend who has a flower shop, and it almost went over when he was on active duty, but his wife managed to run it. And now he knows that he's just going to have to give it up if he's called. So you have situations where Marines' lives are going to be severely disrupted - business plans, college plans are just going to have to be put on hold for an indefinite period. Well, it's not an indefinite period. It's probably a year to a year and a half, but that's a considerable time.

In this case, I would have to agree with the brother that first commented. I think honestly, I think that's a separate issue. Look, basically, if you owe taxes, you need to pay for them - you need to pay it. I'm not, you know, but I will say this. I haven't got my income tax return check, so I'm not trying to say too much right now. Let me wait until I get my check and then I can give you the real deal, OK? No, but seriously, you've got to pay your taxes. Look, Wesley Snipes went all the way to Africa, out of all places, trying to escape from the IRS. He found himself a little hut and everything. Now where is he now? Signing an autograph on a lunch tray belong to a guy named Little Hennesey.

Exactly. And I would just add to that that there's a difference, a difference between sort of, you know, the occasional satellite going overhead or aircraft coming by once a year to take a snapshot, and the notion of kind of, as Peter said, 24/7, the real time, you know, panopticon, the eye in the sky. You know, right now, of course, you can go to Google Maps and you can see your backyard. And if you were, you know, sunbathing nude that particular day, you know, 18 months ago or whenever the plane came by, then there you are in hopefully grainy form. The notion of that being always there and at much higher resolution is what changes the privacy picture.

"The Book of Daniel" is noted in the Parents Television Council's report, but not in a flattering light. You see, the PTC doesn't count just how many times religion was represented, but also how it was represented. The report classifies each individual mention of God or religion in one of four categories: positive, negative, neutral, or mixed. Much to the chagrin of the PTC, only 34 percent of the references were labeled positive. But when I dug deeper into the study and looked at how specific examples were categorized, the study seemed kind of absurd. I mean I don't expect a drug-addicted clergyman to get a gold star, but virtually any instance where religion is not depicted in the most flattering light draws a red flag.

I think there's no doubt, but the changes that are happening now are interacting and are creating just immense stresses on most life in the oceans. I don't think it's hopeless, though. I think that there is increasing awareness that there are problems, and there are some active attempts to reverse some of the degradation. I think we're really facing - society is facing a very fundamental choice today. We can either go down the path that we're on, which Jeremy Jackson has called the slippery slope to slime, where we have no bluefin tunas, no wonderful coral reefs. We just have weedy algae and bacterial growth. Or, we can choose a different path, which I like to call the mutiny for the bounty. And there are in fact ways to transition to this other path.

Pollinator decline is a grand challenge in the modern world. Of the 200,000 species of pollinators, honeybees are the most well-understood, partly because of our long history with them dating back 8,000 years ago to our cave drawings in what is now modern-day Spain. And yet we know that this indicator species is dying off. Last year alone, we lost 40 percent of all beehives in the United States. That number is even higher in areas with harsh winters, like here in Massachusetts, where we lost 47 percent of beehives in one year alone. Can you imagine if we lost half of our people last year? And if those were the food-producing people? It's untenable. And I predict that in 10 years, we will lose our bees. If not for the work of beekeepers replacing these dead beehives, we would be without foods that we rely upon: fruits, vegetables, crunchy almonds and nuts, tart apples, sour lemons. Even the food that our cattle rely upon to eat, hay and alfalfa — gone, causing global hunger, economic collapse, a total moral crisis across earth. Now, I first started keeping bees here in Cape Cod right after I finished my doctorate in honeybee immunology. (Laughter) (Applause) Imagine getting such a degree in a good economy — and it was 2009: the Great Recession. And I was onto something. I knew that I could find out how to improve bee health. And so the community on Cape Cod here in Provincetown was ripe for citizen science, people looking for ways to get involved and to help. And so we met with people in coffee shops. A wonderful woman named Natalie got eight beehives at her home in Truro, and she introduced us to her friend Valerie, who let us set up 60 beehives at an abandoned tennis court on her property. And so we started testing vaccines for bees. We were starting to look at probiotics. We called it "bee yogurt" — ways to make bees healthier. And our citizen science project started to take off. Meanwhile, back in my apartment here, I was a bit nervous about my landlord. I figured I should tell him what we were doing. (Laughter) I was terrified; I really thought I was going to get an eviction notice, which really was the last thing we needed, right? I must have caught him on a good day, though, because when I told him what we were doing and how we started our nonprofit urban beekeeping laboratory, he said, "That's great! Let's get a beehive in the back alley." I was shocked. I was completely surprised. I mean, instead of getting an eviction notice, we got another data point. And in the back alley of this image, what you see here, this hidden beehive — that beehive produced more honey that first year than we have ever experienced in any beehive we had managed. It shifted our research perspective forever. It changed our research question away from "How do we save the dead and dying bees?" to "Where are bees doing best?" And we started to be able to put maps together, looking at all of these citizen science beehives from people who had beehives at home decks, gardens, business rooftops. We started to engage the public, and the more people who got these little data points, the more accurate our maps became. And so when you're sitting here thinking, "How can I get involved?" you might think about a story of my friend Fred, who's a commercial real estate developer. He was thinking the same thing. He was at a meeting, thinking about what he could do for tenant relations and sustainability at scale. And while he was having a tea break, he put honey into his tea and noticed on the honey jar a message about corporate sustainability from the host company of that meeting. And it sparked an idea. He came back to his office. An email, a phone call later, and — boom! — we went national together. We put dozens of beehives on the rooftops of their skyscrapers across nine cities nationwide. Nine years later — (Applause) Nine years later, we have raised over a million dollars for bee research. We have a thousand beehives as little data points across the country, 18 states and counting, where we have created paying jobs for local beekeepers, 65 of them, to manage beehives in their own communities, to connect with people, everyday people, who are now data points together making a difference. So in order to explain what's actually been saving bees, where they're thriving, I need to first tell you what's been killing them. The top three killers of bees are agricultural chemicals such as pesticides, herbicides, fungicides; diseases of bees, of which there are many; and habitat loss. So what we did is we looked on our maps and we identified areas where bees were thriving. This was mostly in cities, we found. Data are now showing that urban beehives produce more honey than rural beehives and suburban beehives. Urban beehives have a longer life span than rural and suburban beehives, and bees in the city are more biodiverse; there are more bee species in urban areas. (Laughter) Right? Why is this? That was our question. So we started with these three killers of bees, and we flipped it: Which of these is different in the cities? So the first one, pesticides. We partnered up with the Harvard School of Public Health. We shared our data with them. We collected samples from our citizen science beehives at people's homes and business rooftops. We looked at pesticide levels. We thought there would be less pesticides in areas where bees are doing better. That's not the case. So what we found here in our study is — the orange bars are Boston, and we thought those bars would be the lowest, there would be the lowest levels of pesticides. And, in fact, there are the most pesticides in cities. So the pesticide hypothesis for what's saving bees — less pesticides in cities — is not it. And this is very typical of my life as a scientist. Anytime I've had a hypothesis, not only is it not supported, but the opposite is true. (Laughter) Which is still an interesting finding, right? We moved on. The disease hypothesis. We looked at diseases all over our beehives. And what we found in a similar study to this one with North Carolina State is: there's no difference between disease in bees in urban, suburban and rural areas. Diseases are everywhere; bees are sick and dying. In fact, there were more diseases of bees in cities. This was from Raleigh, North Carolina. So again, my hypothesis was not supported. The opposite was true. We're moving on. (Laughter) The habitat hypothesis. This said that areas where bees are thriving have a better habitat — more flowers, right? But we didn't know how to test this. So I had a really interesting meeting. An idea sparked with my friend and colleague Anne Madden, fellow TED speaker. We thought about genomics, kind of like AncestryDNA or 23andMe. Have you done these? You spit in a tube and you find out, "I'm German!" (Laughter) Well, we developed this for honey. So we have a sample of honey and we look at all the plant DNA, and we find out, "I'm sumac!" (Laughter) And that's what we found here in Provincetown. So for the first time ever, I'm able to report to you what type of honey is from right here in our own community. HoneyDNA, a genomics test. Spring honey in Provincetown is from privet. What's privet? Hedges. What's the message? Don't trim your hedges to save the bees. (Laughter) I know we're getting crunchy and it's controversial, so before you throw your tomatoes, we'll move to the summer honey, which is water lily honey. If you have honey from Provincetown right here in the summer, you're eating water lily juice; in the fall, sumac honey. We're learning about our food for the first time ever. And now we're able to report, if you need to do any city planning: What are good things to plant? What do we know the bees are going to that's good for your garden? For the first time ever for any community, we now know this answer. What's more interesting for us is deeper in the data. So, if you're from the Caribbean and you want to explore your heritage, Bahamian honey is from the laurel family, cinnamon and avocado flavors. But what's more interesting is 85 different plant species in one teaspoon of honey. That's the measure we want, the big data. Indian honey: that is oak. Every sample we've tested from India is oak, and that's 172 different flavors in one taste of Indian honey. Provincetown honey goes from 116 plants in the spring to over 200 plants in the summer. These are the numbers that we need to test the habitat hypothesis. In another citizen science approach, you find out about your food and we get some interesting data. We're finding out now that in rural areas, there are 150 plants on average in a sample of honey. That's a measure for rural. Suburban areas, what might you think? Do they have less or more plants in suburban areas with lawns that look nice for people but they're terrible for pollinators? Suburbs have very low plant diversity, so if you have a beautiful lawn, good for you, but you can do more. You can have a patch of your lawn that's a wildflower meadow to diversify your habitat, to improve pollinator health. Anybody can do this. Urban areas have the most habitat, best habitat, as you can see here: over 200 different plants. We have, for the first time ever, support for the habitat hypothesis. We also now know how we can work with cities. The City of Boston has eight times better habitat than its nearby suburbs. And so when we work with governments, we can scale this. You might think on my tombstone, it'll say, "Here lies Noah. Plant a flower." Right? I mean — it's exhausting after all of this. But when we scale together, when we go to governments and city planners — like in Boston, the honey is mostly linden trees, and we say, "If a dead tree needs to be replaced, consider linden." When we take this information to governments, we can do amazing things. This is a rooftop from Fred's company. We can plant those things on top of rooftops worldwide to start restoring habitat and securing food systems. We've worked with the World Bank and the presidential delegation from the country of Haiti. We've worked with wonderful graduate students at Yale University and Ethiopia. In these countries, we can add value to their honey by identifying what it is, but informing the people of what to plant to restore their habitat and secure their food systems. But what I think is even more important is when we think about natural disasters. For the first time, we now know how we can have a baseline measure of any habitat before it might be destroyed. Think about your hometown. What risks does the environment pose to it? This is how we're going to save Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. We now have a baseline measure of honey, honey DNA from before and after the storm. We started in Humacao. This is right where Hurricane Maria made landfall. And we know what plants to replace and in what quantity and where by triangulating honey DNA samples. You might even think about right here, the beautiful land that connected us, that primed us, all the citizen science to begin with, the erosion, the winter storms that are getting more violent every year. What are we going to do about this, our precious land? Well, looking at honey DNA, we can see what plants are good for pollinators that have deep roots, that can secure the land, and together, everybody can participate. And the solution fits in a teaspoon. If your hometown might get swept away or destroyed by a natural disaster, we now have a blueprint suspended in time for how to restore that on Earth, or perhaps even in a greenhouse on Mars. I know it sounds crazy, but think about this: a new Provincetown, a new hometown, a place that might be familiar that's also good for pollinators for a stable food system, when we're thinking about the future. Now, together, we know what's saving bees — by planting diverse habitat. Now, together, we know how bees are going to save us — by being barometers for environmental health, by being blueprints, sources of information, little data factories suspended in time. Thank you. (Applause)

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: This nation is asking for action and action now. Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. And he did. He - in those first hundred days, he called Congress into a special session that lasted just about a hundred days and passed 15 major, major pieces of legislation that essentially changed the role of the federal government in American life. And Congress was willing to do anything that he wanted because they were desperate. Will Rogers joked that Congress just waved at bills as they flew by rather than passing them.

Yeah. I mean, I would maybe talk about an example maybe from another community that might be instructive or a way of understanding this issue that I am trying to bring up. Obama himself is not just - doesn't have just the Muslim background in the sense that his father was a Muslim but he also is, of course, African-American. But we don't see any attacks against him from conservative groups or the right wing about his African-Americaness. We see them coming about his Muslim background and that's because it's certainly unthinkable in the world today or, at least, in America today to attack someone counted - based on their African-American background and in fact, only recently, we Don Imus lose his job very quickly over a radio show where he made some comments - untoward comments- towards African-Americans. Now that's not just because people are not racist against African-American because certainly there is some racism in America but at the same time, African-American community over the years on over many centuries, have developed a number of institutions including things like the NAACP but also, you know, popular perceptions of African-Americans like "The Cosby Show" and other kinds of institutions that have made it very difficult for kind of public, you know, racist remarks to be made openly. And in the case of Muslims who have been here for now almost 34 years and if you consider the African-American community to be 30 percent of the Muslim community they've been here from years beyond that, and we still don't have some of those basic institutions.

Thanks, Mark, very much for the call. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And let me reintroduce our guests. You just heard Steven Erlanger, Paris bureau chief for the New York Times, and with us here in the studio, Ivan Vejvoda - I'll get it right. He's the vice president of programs at the German Marshall Fund. And as we sit, the demographic bomb and the more short-term crises that are bound to come up as Athens struggles to resolve its political dispute, we could be seeing another election in Greece within a month if they cannot arrive at a new government. In the meantime, important decisions have to be made about whether they're going to pick up the next segment of the bailout package. Can austerity be backed down enough to reassure voters in Greece within that timeframe, Ivan?

Let me give you two bellwethers in the Senate. Let's look at Missouri. This is a late-popping race, and the incumbent there is Republican Senator Roy Blunt. And his Democratic opponent is secretary of state Jason Kander. Blunt is an establishment Republican in a year when Republican voters are looking for outsiders. Kander is younger, he doesn't have a voting record. And if he wins there, it probably means Democrats are having a very good night and winning the Senate. In the House, California Republican Darrell Issa, a familiar incumbent that I don't think a lot of people were thinking about having a competitive race. Recent polls have shown that race tightening. You know, of course, he's very well-funded and he's an established incumbent, two things that normally make a candidate very hard to beat. But his Democratic opponent is a retired Marine. He's a political newcomer. If Republicans lose that seat, it is likely Democrats are having a very good night.

Well, our main concern is not the impact of the death penalty on the offender, but the impact on the victim, the potential impact, because of the fact that most child rapists are someone that the child knows and cares about. It's a family member, a caretaker of some sort, someone that has access to that child, and has a relationship with the child, as was the case in the Kennedy case. And our concern comes from the fact that we know that child sexual abuse is already very underreported. We know that from adults who come forward and say, you know, this had happened to me, and I never told anyone. There's a lot of research around this. And our concern is that if the possibility of the death penalty is out there, which the offenders will make sure that their child victims know, that that will increase underreporting.

‘This is supposed to be about my job, not the meaning of life,’ says Peggy to Don toward the end of the US TV series Mad Men. Don has been gathering ideas for a speech to the McCann Erickson advertising agency that he says has to be visionary, like the Gettysburg Address. Peggy tries to bring him down to earth. Remember, she says, this is just a job. There is a lot to be said for the ‘it’s just a job’ perspective. We all know people who seem to think that what they do every day is in the same league as conferring a new birth of freedom on a nation torn apart by slavery and Civil War. (From time to time, we might even be such people ourselves.) We also know that confusing your job with the meaning of life encourages you to forget how little freedom most people have for anything else, and how many socially valuable tasks (taking care of small children or elderly relatives, for example) don’t get the respect or remuneration they merit. The innocent moral imperative to stand on your own two feet helps sustain structures of inequality that have come to seem – no lesser word will do – barbaric. The work ethic has a lot to answer for. Considering how often the nature and meaning of work comes under fresh and vital scrutiny – see for example Kathi Weeks’s The Problem With Work (2011) or James Livingston’s forthcoming Fuck Work – it seems plausible that we might one day actually try to come up with social arrangements that are more rational and equitable than the work-centered ones we now have. Or is this just a utopian daydream? Evidence to the contrary comes from an unlikely source: television. Although associated with the freedom to mute, surf, and binge-watch, TV pays attention not only to what we do when we’re on the clock, it also asks philosophical questions about work and the meaning of life, urging us to demand more meaning (whatever that might be) from what we do for a living. One might expect TV to say about work what The Office says: that what you are obliged to do all day is pointless. Even more awful than its pointlessness is the grandiloquent and opaque managerial psychobabble in which the pointlessness is draped. Television would thus be propagandising for itself, reminding us how much better off we are in our leisure time (which we are spending watching TV). TV also plays a large role in teaching us our place in society – certainly a larger role than school. So one might also expect that it would propagate a work-centred worldview, helping us get out of bed in the morning by erasing from our minds the burdensome question of why we should. There are no doubt shows that do just this. But in our much-discussed era of high-quality TV, it’s worth discussing the shows that are not so simple, nor so predictable. Shows such as Mad Men, for example. As fans will recall, Don’s success in advertising has always come from his ability to talk like a visionary. There’s that scene with the Kodak slide projector that Don names the Carousel and sells by explaining what memory means to a family. It might not be the most nuanced answer ever proposed to the riddle of life’s meaning, but life’s meaning was definitely the topic Don was taking on. At the heart of Mad Men lies the question of whether work might be, or might become, something more than what you do to survive. In this sense the series is more representative than not. Consider a quick selection of pilots. In the opening episode of Scandal, we see Olivia Pope’s crisis management operation in Washington, DC through the eyes of the ‘new girl in the office’, a ‘stray dog’ who has been ‘taken in’, and maybe (she thinks) in more than one sense. Caught crying in the ladies’ room, she is told that she’s there because she needs to feel there’s something more than a 9-to-5 job, that life can have more meaning than that, and that she doesn’t have to feel lost. Such concerns will, as the show’s producers have calculated, be widely shared. In answer to those concerns, the recruiter feeds the new girl two lines. First: ‘I’m a gladiator in a suit.’ And second: ‘We’re the good guys.’ Are we supposed to be satisfied by these lines? A gladiator does not necessarily fight on behalf of truth and justice, whatever those terms might have meant in the Roman Empire. An imagefixer such as Olivia works outside the law and, it would appear, outside morality as well. Or does she? The pilot takes some time and trouble to establish, firstly, that intense work pressure need not mean the exclusion of a private life; and, secondly, that Olivia’s conscience is on full alert: the company she works for, though very profitable, is also, morally speaking, on the side of the angels. It’s the equivalent of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer pilot: there are demons walking the earth, and in every generation there is a Chosen One born to slay them, even if the slaying takes time away from homework. But Scandal is arguably more successful in making us wonder whether, as society is presently arranged, we really can be the good guys while we’re at work. What if being a slacker gets you nicer clothes and a better house than you’ll get by following the rules? In terms of meaningful work, rescuing people from burning buildings would seem to rate high. If a firefighter is not on the side of the good guys, then who is? But in the pilot of Rescue Me, as in any number of police procedurals, the point seems to be that society’s rewards are distributed in inverse proportion to the social significance of the work done. The wife of the firefighter protagonist has left him because she wants a more upscale life: she can do better with a guy who works in finance. The allegory is rough but inevitable. The work ethic used to mean putting yourself on the line. Today, physical risk has been replaced by speculative risk. The hero is supposed to be traumatised by the loss of his fellow firefighters on 9/11, but it’s as if it were the performance of his occupation itself that has traumatised him. Maybe I am a fool to believe in the fundamental rightness of rescuing people or catching the bad guys. The pilot of White Collar doesn’t quite say so, but it comes close. Like Rescue Me, it asks if we’re being conned when we agree to care so much about undercompensated jobs, when those around us see them as less meaningful than we do. The show sets up a buddy relationship between a cop and a robber. Since James Fenimore Cooper and Leslie Fiedler first speculated about Hawkeye and Chingachgook in the forest, and Huck and Jim on the raft, we in the US have learned to look at buddy relationships as the embodiment of contradictions (such as the racial divide) that our culture half-recognises and is trying to resolve. In TV shows such as White Collar, work has upstaged race. The headline-grabbing contradiction is between the cop’s work ethic and the charming, slacker, ‘something-for-nothing’ ethos of the robber. What if being a slacker gets you nicer clothes and a better house than you’ll get by following, indeed enforcing, the rules? Look around you, says the crook to the cop: the financiers are making out like the bandits they are. Even if some of them do work extremely hard, their success is collective, and dependent on the incomes of both bad and good players being beyond the reach of the cop who protects their property. Can doing something that’s incontrovertibly good make you a sucker? The question helps to account for the popularity of TV shows in which the audience roots for a murderer who kills only other killers (Dexter), or for criminals robbing other criminals (Leverage). You don’t have to worry about whether you’re working for the good guys when everyone out there is a criminal. One would not have thought advertisers would pay for shows that present everyday work under capitalism as indistinguishable from criminality. Yet that proposition illuminates a surprising swath of contemporary TV. Mad Men occasionally reminds us that an agency such as Sterling Cooper is paid to enhance the image of Lucky Strike cigarettes, which are hard to dissociate from Betty’s terminal cancer, as well as Dow Chemical, the maker of napalm, indelibly associated with the photo of the burned, naked Vietnamese girl, running and screaming. How different is the situation of big oil today? How much of what we call respectable work is something that nobody under any circumstances should be allowed to do? Such subversive questions are actively provoked by the long-running gangster shows The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire and Breaking Bad. These particular series are all about men, and all a man wants to do is provide for his family. But given the rules of the game, providing for your family might entail committing acts you can’t tell your family about, including murder. That’s just how it is. It’s not your fault. You’re just doing your job. It’s strange to find the ‘just doing my job’ defence popping up in the 21st-century US, even as an implicit myth of our collective entrapment in a system we didn’t choose for ourselves. It’s a defence that didn’t work well for the Nazis at Nuremberg. Looking at the full run of these series rather than just the pilots, you’d say it works a bit better for these difficult men. Their situation is not quite tragic. On the one hand, you’re waiting to see when and how the guy’s misdeeds will catch up with the family for whom he performed them. On the other, there is the prospect that the show might throw up its hands and refuse to judge. Perhaps we’ve decided that work, like capitalism, is beyond good and evil. a woman can be a doctor, a lawyer, a detective, a POTUS. But can she do so and have kids? Not according to Mad Men This would seem to be the intended conclusion of shows where the protagonist is a woman who has been denied a chance to compete with men, or to compete at all. By the Cinderella principle, all viewers are thereby authorised to identify with and endorse her striving for professional success without any nagging afterthoughts about the nature or consequences of her success. Underdog status hands you an ethical get-out-of-jail-free card. TV’s strong women pay a high price for the positions of responsibility and power they now increasingly occupy. In these shows, a woman can be a doctor, a lawyer, a detective, a POTUS. But can she do so and have kids? Not according to Mad Men. Don’s talent in advertising is part and parcel of his being good with children (children being inseparable from the meaning of life). Don’s great Carousel campaign, for example, is addressed to the feelings that link kids and parents. Peggy seems to have much the same advertising talent as Don. Why, then, is she portrayed as someone who doesn’t like kids and is awkward with them? Like Carrie in Homeland and Sarah Linden in The Killing, Peggy is punished for her extraordinary public competence with some degree of private unhappiness, or at least ineptitude. But from the perspective of work, the punishment of women is not really the point. The New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley argued that Peggy’s love for her work redeems the whole series. But is she right to love it? Even viewers who have rooted whole-heartedly for Peggy through seven seasons would be hard-pressed to argue that her success in her work, with or without the final reward of a boyfriend, has much to say about the meaning of life. It doesn’t quite reassure us that advertising, or perhaps professional success at all, is worth the costs. Television keeps asking such delicate questions. Six Feet Under is about a family that runs a funeral home. It makes the profession of undertaker seem socially valuable not by reminding us that it’s necessary but by entering into an argument with advertising about which profession is more meaningful. In the pilot episode, advertising is shown as farce: dancers in a TV spot for funeral home products sing: ‘We put the fun back in funeral.’ Meanwhile, the slacker older brother, drawn back into the business by his father’s death, literally gets his hands dirty flinging fistfuls of earth onto his father’s coffin. The suggestion is that, if he were to take over this company, his work might offer a more meaningful relationship with the truths of life and death – truths that (the show suggests) advertising induces us to forget. Real-work-is-dirty-work is the signature formula of the documentary Dirty Jobs, whose pilot sends the TV personality Mike Rowe to accompany a bat biologist as he trudges through deep bat guano and flesh-eating beetles in order to make sure the bats are all right. Like preparing corpses for burial, this form of work involves putting up with extreme physical disgust. The show looks like a valiant rearguard defence of manual labour, and to some extent it is. But it’s not what the bat caretakers have to put up with – for example, blending mealworms into a fish milkshake to feed injured bats – that really makes the case. The biologist’s work is mental as much as manual labour; the same could be said about the host. The key here is the aim, which is not maximising profit. Though bats eat a lot of insects, we can imagine a world without bat biologists, as we can imagine a world without literature professors like me. The work is meaningful not because of the dirt and disgust, but because its point is care for the animals. The pilot of Grey’s Anatomy tells the interns beginning their seven-year residency ordeal that not all of them will make it Care for others, human or non-human: this too seems like a truth capable of making work, and life, meaningful. Of course, it’s a tough standard to apply to work as it is currently structured. Many of those who do it – home health attendants for example – are the lowest compensated members of the workforce, or not considered part of the workforce at all. They are not stage-centre in the prime-time narrative. At prime-time, work is more often portrayed as cut-throat competition, usually within an organisational structure as likely to punish or thwart as to reward merit. While competition has no place on Dirty Jobs, it’s everywhere else in mainstream representations of work, often as an immovable fact of human nature rather than the provisional result of how work is organised. The pilot of NCIS devotes a great deal of its time to a turf war between various criminal-investigative agencies. The pilot of CSI: Las Vegas foregrounds the (friendly) competition of two agents trying to be the first to solve 100 cases. The pilot of Grey’s Anatomy informs the interns beginning their seven-year residency ordeal that not all of them will make it and that (Survivor-like) they are in competition with each other. At the same time, these are not game shows – or at least they demand that competition be balanced by, even transformed into, cooperation. Cooperation sets a moral standard for work that’s higher than winning. It’s not for nothing that so many of these workplaces are firehouses, laboratories, hospitals. Work here is in the unquestionable service of public good. The pilot of CSI: Miami starts with an attempt to rescue the victims of a plane crash, and ends with the realisation that the crash was caused by a crooked capitalist trying to murder a whistleblowing accountant. The pilot of Grey’s Anatomy ends with the line: ‘It’s a beautiful night to save lives. Let’s have some fun.’ There is a utopian aspect to the presumption that competition and cooperation can be reconciled, and that’s not entirely a bad thing. Remember utopia when you see a post-apocalyptic show such as The Walking Dead or, for that matter, Survivor. Zombie apocalypses eliminate the advanced division of labour. And one outcome might have been intended all along: a vacation from the office. The end of the world as you knew it also means realising why you do whatever work you now do for nothing. Simple tasks are no longer drudgery when the alternative is to be devoured by the undead. Abolishing specialised labour brings a regression to the always ideological ideal of self-reliance. But it turns out that the zombie apocalypse also involves a need for impassioned conversation (often on screen) about what we collectively think meaningful work might be. And when was the last time that happened at your job? TV does get goggle-eyed about the division of labour. CSI-style teams of specialists, each with magical gadgets and equally magical expertise, seem engineered to make specialisation look like a social ideal where everyone has a vital skill and an indispensable niche. Inequality seems inconceivable, and certainly invisible. This is one way in which TV makes us want to go to work in the morning. John Rogers, the co-creator of Leverage, has coined the term ‘competence porn’ to describe the way audiences adore briefing scenes in which ‘competent people banter and plan’. The term certainly applies to the Sherlock Holmes-style knowledge of the material world, from door hinges to the price of expensive shoes, which offers much of the pleasure on these crime shows. Think of the good-natured discomfort of the host of Dirty Jobs as he is instructed in the yucky, nether side of labour. What’s crucial is not merely that he participates as well as observes, but that he banters all the way through it. The jokes in the bat cave are all about this being a kind of date. You really know how to show a guy a good time, he tells the biologist, and then: ‘I bet you say that to all the guys.’ Serial buddydom with the people who do the dirtiest jobs is about the forging of emotional bonds that are in some sense comparable to erotic ones. What would you call such bonds? Collegiality doesn’t seem like an adequate name. It’s closer to how the 18th century used the word ‘condescend’ as a compliment; a man who could talk with ease to those of lower social stations was said to ‘condescend well’. It’s the ability to create a kind of comfortable, working relationship without transgressing into familiarity or intimacy. The Dirty Jobs host is an unlikely avatar of the Durkheimian intellectual but, here he is, showing us why what they do matters The pioneering French sociologist Émile Durkheim argued that specialisation within an advanced division of labour did not necessarily tear society apart, as those who were nostalgic for homogeneous community (Gemeinschaft) feared. But the less that society is held together by common occupations and beliefs, the more it needs the help of what he called corps intermédiaire: intellectuals dedicated to explaining to others that all these different jobs do belong to a common enterprise. That’s how you avoid what Durkheim baptised anomie – literally, the absence of norms or moral guidance, but, as he used it, a depression-inducing mismatch between the individual’s aspirations and the needs of others, or the job market. The Dirty Jobs host, who has since been involved in similar work-themed TV ventures, might be thought of as an unlikely avatar of the Durkheimian intellectual, but here he is, showing us other people’s jobs, bonding with them, and telling us why what they do matters. Telling others why their work matters is not quite what Don Draper had in mind when he imagined making a Gettysburg Address-style speech to the firm’s new owners, and thus determining whether his labours would perish from the earth. But it’s moving in that direction. In order to believe that specialisations belong to a common enterprise and not just to free enterprise, you’d have to take the step from banter to politics. Television is not comfortable with politics. Consider the workplace comedy Parks and Recreation, which takes The Office’s reality-TV format and its slightly hysterical satire, and applies them to municipal government. The opening scene of the opening episode shows our puffed-up, clipboard-carrying heroine-to-be trying to interview a small child in a sandbox about how good a time she is having, on a scale of 1 to 10. Bureaucracy could not look more asinine. And yet this is not just a joke on the protagonist’s self-importance. Whatever their personal motives, she and her co-workers are taking an abandoned building site and making a park out of it. The project might not be gargantuan, but it promises to do something for the wellbeing of their neighbours. On a nobler scale, Lincolnesque concern for the fate of the republic finds its paradigmatic expression in The West Wing. In retrospect, it seems clear that the show was always about the ideal of work. ‘This is a great job,’ President Bartlet announces charmingly. And it is, although the series also presents work as all-consuming enough that, for most of the characters most of the time, private life simply disappears. Bartlet is an ideal boss and, not coincidentally, a champion banterer. Even with perhaps the most high‑pressure, impossible job in the world, he never stops stopping to make small talk with the staff, important and less important, picking up on how life looks to them, and sustaining his interest in what they have to say. It has often been noted that television warms the lives of the lonely by offering them an artificial family. What is not usually added is how often the artificial family inhabits a workplace and is populated by co-workers. Thus work is asked to give back, emotionally speaking, much of the meaningfulness that long hours away from home have sacrificed. You probably shouldn’t start thinking of your 9-to-5 job as if you were President Bartlet, let alone Abraham Lincoln. Don Draper’s Gettysburg fantasy leads only to the Coca-Cola I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing commercial – a tawdry vision of unity (this time global rather than national) and a much less savory version of US patriotism, though a triumphant professional accomplishment. Still, in the interest of getting to better social arrangements, something like the fate of the republic, or the public good, ought to be allowed to hover above what we presently do for a living. The economy is strong enough to invite that kind of scrutiny. I would feel better about delivering refrigerators, or designing software, or teaching English, or whatever, if I knew that the staff in the real West Wing were giving their full devotion to ensuring that, say, the care of the very young and the very old does not fall on people who are underpaid or not paid at all. ‘Get a job!’ is usually shorthand for a multi-step exhortation: toughen up, take responsibility for yourself, get out in the world, and start by picking yourself up from the sofa and turning off the television. But in addition to being routinised, deadening and alienating, many of the jobs on offer also fail to build character, at least if character includes the courage to ask hard questions about what is, or isn’t, worth doing. Yet television very often does ask those questions. So in the interest of character-building, we might advise the hesitant to stay on that sofa.

Among them, Warren says, the Obama administration has fought to retain the state secrets privilege that was used broadly during the Bush administration, and has appealed a federal court ruling allowing detainees held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to challenge their incarceration in federal court, much like the Guantanamo detainees have been allowed. On many other issues, President Obama is holding off on making important decisions until he's heard results of wide-ranging reviews that he ordered. Analysts say his pragmatic approach extends to the world of foreign relations. Shortly after taking office, Mr. Obama dispatched envoys on listening tours to places like the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan. And he was careful not to make demands on leaders during his own, recent, overseas tours.

I don’t quite remember what it’s like to wake up on Earth. Five months after ‘landing on Mars’, my day begins in a white dome in the middle of a red lava field, and I wonder: do we have enough power to turn on the heat? Will the weather let us suit up and check the greenhouses? Are my air fans going to work? These thoughts circle in my brain as I pad downstairs for that first cup of something warm. The news that awaits me there will be in watts, percentage humidity and degrees Celsius, telling me what happened in and around our habitat overnight, and how much power we’re likely to have for the rest of today. I will hear water churning in the hydroponic systems, along with the hum of the lurid pink growing lights in the biology lab. I will see the same crewmates, kitchen and two-foot round porthole I’ve seen every morning for five months. That view of the jagged rocks beyond is a constant reminder that our world – this world we’re sharing for one year as a test run for life on Mars – is hostile and mysterious. Let’s be clear: simulated Mars (or sMars) is technically your world. The six of us landed on the big island of Hawaii in late August 2015. A few days of training later – this is how you use the power systems, that is the right way to tap on the water tank, here is how to get into a spacesuit without dislocating anything – the door to the airlock shut, and we were ‘off planet’ for a year and a day, camped on the slopes of Mauna Kea. As simulated astronauts, we are a deliberately diverse crew: a space architect, an engineer, three scientists and a crew doctor (me). When we emerge on 28 August 2016, we’ll be veterans of the longest NASA-funded Mars simulation in history. At first, our mission garnered only modest attention. Then The Martian was released, and all heck broke loose on sMars. The media came calling, only to be stymied by our mission’s inability to use a telephone. For this entire year, we are on a 20-minute communication delay, which applies in each direction, reflecting the maximum light-time travel between Mars and Earth – essentially, how long it takes a message from one planet to reach the other when the two are as far apart as they can be. For good and ill, we can’t take calls or have Skype interviews; we can’t do live media appearances; can’t be filmed, photographed or recorded in any way, except by ourselves. Chief Scientific Officer Christiane Heinicke enters the main area of the dome from the airlock during a HI-SEAS resupply. Photo by Andrzej Stewart Not only is the light-time delay an effective filter, it is also a critical part of the psychological construct that keeps us, and everyone back on Earth, behaving as though the six of us really are on Mars. Simulating the time gap created by millions of miles of space allows researchers to study how communication works, or doesn’t, when every message between the crew and mission control takes 40 minutes for a response. Think about how a delay like that affects the classic space-movie scenario: ‘Houston, we have a problem, and.... we’ll hear back from you about it in three-quarters of an hour.’ Though it spares us certain headaches, the light-time delay makes life here more precarious than it would be otherwise. The 20-minute communication gaps might be technically artificial, but in many ways they are as real to us as the dome we live under. Take the way we’d deal with medical disasters. Unlike in deep space, on sMars, I can dial 911. Even so, it will be hours before we get a response. So, what happens in a medical disaster? It’s on me, the space doc, to fix it, if possible. The same goes for engineering problems. We’ve had water leaks in the airlock; as they are wont to do anywhere in the known Universe, appliances have self-destructed; and our hydrogen fuel cells have never worked quite right. For such issues, the chief engineer and crew take care of it, if we can. For food and water, we get periodic supply drops. In between, we subsist on what we have, just as the eventual Mars crews will, and we do our best to live within our limits. That needful sense of independence from Earth – and interdependence on each other – is the huge upside to the long, dark, 20-minute delay. Plus, without a phone or internet to distract us, we get lots of work done. Also, without those familiar lines of connection, it’s almost like we’re alone together on another planet – which, when you live in a dome at 8,000 feet above sea level on the barren side of a volcano, is sort of the idea. We’ve learned to repair, repurpose and rebuild things we never would have otherwise. For months, a blue latex tourniquet has been holding parts of my electricity-producing bicycle’s motor in place. We’ve learned that a two-gallon plastic pretzel jar is perfect for growing certain species of bacteria, as well as for filtering water through volcanic rock. On sMars, where there is neither money nor anywhere to spend it, value is based almost solely on usefulness: of an object, a task, even a person. Life on sMars, like on Mars itself, is elemental. Our chief concerns revolve around sun, air, water and rock – specifically, what we can and can’t do with those four basics in the right combinations. The Sun creates our energy. We, in turn, transform that energy into artificial light, in colours of the spectrum that most please our plants. The plants take up water, and set their roots in rocks that we’ve gathered from the surface. Their stems reach up towards the light, and our hopes grow with them: exhaled by the green leaves, born in the flowers that will bloom into fruit. if our French astrobiologist placed a bowl of that green bacteria before me, I’d try it All of that has to take place inside our dome – an analogue of what life on Mars might be one day. The analogue is necessarily imperfect. On real Mars, the air is extremely thin and composed mostly of carbon dioxide. Because it is not shielded by big radiation belts like Earth’s, Mars’s atmosphere is constantly being blown away by the Sun. According to MAVEN, a Mars-orbiting satellite built by NASA, the solar wind is stripping away 9.6 tons of atmosphere a day. To make matters worse, the surface of Mars is being irradiated in a way that Earth has probably never had to deal with – not since life began, anyway. Here on sMars, we fare far better: we have breathable air at a comfortable temperature and pressure, held by full Earth gravity. We have comfy, natural radiation shielding, and regular robotic supplies of food and water. Not frequent, mind you, but often enough to keep us going. In between visits from the robots, we make the most of the resources we find. When conditions are right, we can pull water from the ground using small plastic tents. Future Mars crews will have to figure out some equivalent way to access their own local water source. We brought along seeds, soil, and a special kind of bacteria. Cyanobacteria, as the name suggests, are green. In the bottle, they look thin and luminescent, like jello before it congeals. These versatile little creatures can convert carbon dioxide into breathable air. They can purify water. They can feed off the sparse Martian menu, using nitrogen from the air and minerals from the ground, or they can consume urine and break down our waste. Purely by living, breathing, eating and excreting, these little bacteria turn soil that’s been dried and fried under the pink Martian sky into a useful growing medium, and in the process make everything from biofuel to proteins – proteins by the ton, potentially – for future Martian colonists. Wait, you say: you’re eating green bacteria? The answer is not yet, but if our French astrobiologist placed a bowl of them before me, I’d try them. When every morsel of food in storage is some shade of just-add-water, anything fresh – even bacteria – becomes vastly more appealing, not just for taste but for health reasons. We need to eat living things to continue living ourselves. So we operate like a collective of scientist-farmers, each taken to growing or culturing something: herbs, sweet peas, grass (surprisingly tasty), tomatoes, bread, yoghurt. Without our crops and cultures, healthy food would be on the endangered list, and so would we. Collaboration is one of the key motivations behind the sMars project: to find out what people need to live, work and survive together on other planets, and how to give it to them. The idea sounds simple in principle, but is difficult in practice. To work together effectively, people need more than just food, water and energy. Shared mission goals help, but they still aren’t enough to keep people happy for months on end. So what is enough? The belief – the hope – is that there’s a recipe for making it work: that the right people, given the right tools, can live together in a small space under stressful circumstances for years and continue to perform at near-peak levels, the way that astronauts do when in low-Earth orbit aboard the International Space Station. Our jobs as simulated astronauts is to test out potential ingredients for that recipe. What this means is that life up here is eclectic, experimental, and occasionally unpredictable. There are scheduled tasks, unscheduled time for play and rest, experimental communication methods, virtual-reality trips to beaches and forests on Earth, and a lot of negotiation among the crew. Moving into the dome is a bit like suddenly having five spouses. You rapidly discover that what’s clean, polite, or acceptable to you won’t necessarily be clean, polite, or acceptable to someone else. Since we’re all here for the long haul – breaking up is not an option during a space mission – we’ve each had to adapt in five different directions at once as quickly as possible, while also doing our jobs. I have all the time in the world. I only had to leave the planet to get it Learning how to do that has been the most challenging part of the adventure. On the surface, it’s straightforward. I’m the space doctor. I keep everyone healthy while we run through the physical, psychological and emotional mazes before us. That sounds pretty futuristic, and it is, sort of. But without a hospital, pharmacy or medical laboratory, space medicine turns out to be pretty old-school. Healthcare on sMars resembles the time when doctors were trained scholars with some tools and a few supplies who made house calls. Space medicine, as it will be practised on Mars and beyond, is a trip into the unknown. Not only can’t you take all the machinery, drugs and tests with you, but when you have six people in a habitat the size of a modest apartment, you have to quickly make some unorthodox choices. For example, where to treat people when every square inch is either reserved for science or functionally used as common workspace? I keep the bulk of my supplies in the biology lab, but there is no privacy there for an exam. So, like my father, a psychiatrist who maintained a home office, I treat people in my crew quarters. My room, at least, has a place to lie people flat, and a door that closes so we can chat freely about whatever ails them, be it mental or physical. Turning my quarters into a doctor’s office solved one issue, but many more aren’t so easy. I am most troubled by my limited treatment options. Again, I fall back on the past to make a go of it in the present, and look for something I can dispense in lieu of pills, powders and poultices. In the places of those scarce or non-existent resources, I offer something I have in abundance: my medical insights about what they’re experiencing, why, and how to manage it until it heals itself. This mode of operation can sometimes leave me feeling inadequate. Then, I remember: since before the dawn of civilisation, healers in all societies have fallen back on these same techniques. Maybe here, at civilisation’s edge, is as good a place as any to go back to the traditional regimen of sitting, listening, asking and explaining. Maybe I can’t write a prescription and make it all go away but, for once, I’m not expected to. There’s no line of patients waiting to see me. I have all the time in the world. I only had to leave the planet to get it. In that way, sMars is sort of a dream come true. In several other ways – the minimal medicines, tests, and treatments among them – it’s a daily nightmare. In this white dome on this red planet we all come face to face with what we love, what we lack, what we need to live, and what we fear the most. I’m a skydiving, worlds-travelling, motorcycle-riding doctor. I’m not accustomed to needing much or fearing much. After college, I bummed across Australia with only a backpack. I camped on a beach for more than a week, living off beans and what I found in the bush, and was fine. Even as a kid, I was afraid of just one thing: Jupiter. I had a recurring dream that I was flying toward that gas giant, skimming over the fractured ice surfaces of Europa and Ganymede. Closing in on Io, with its spotted mask of volcanoes, I would think: ‘Too close! Too close!’ and wake up. Those were the only nightmares I ever had until medical school, when, napping on a cot in some dark corner, my fear of a giant planet morphed into a terror of missing hospital pages. I would wake with a start, convinced that I’d slept through a call to a bedside consultation, an emergency surgery, or my last chance to say goodbye to a patient. On sMars, I have a new fear as a constant companion. My worry about this mission, and about any space venture, is that the emergency call will come and I’ll be right there, but totally unable to help. There will be no ventilators, no ICUs and no blood transfusions, unless we staff the mission only with type-O astronauts (not a bad idea). Thankfully, I haven’t had to find out yet. The only surgery I’ve done so far is wart-removal. As much as I enjoy suiting up and going in with a syringe of anaesthetic and a scalpel, I’ll be happy if my Martian edge-wielding ends at that big toe. That’s another strange thing about space: what would have been a boring day at the office back on Earth is almost too much excitement. On Earth, heart attacks and strokes are routine parts of a day’s work. Here, life is so precious and precarious to begin with that having to stitch up a crewmate after a fall on the rocks is a high-level manoeuvre. Replicating the Martian experience means no direct sunlight or wind on our faces for an entire year Nothing I’ve ever done – not even night shifts in ER – has drawn more attention to the frailty of the human form than donning a space suit. On sMars, you have to suit up every time you leave, just as humans will when we get to Mars. A space suit is an entire ecosystem that follows you around, feeding and watering and warming you. It marks you as a tenderfoot from a gentle world. You are wrapped and padded to the point where you can visit places where our form of life was never designed to go and return in one piece. Five months into our expedition, we are missing parts of the terrestrial environment we used to take for granted. Replicating the Martian experience means no direct sunlight or wind on our faces for an entire year. No rainfall, either. Even those of us from Southern California are used to seeing rain once in a while. Water falling from the sky – the sky! – hasn’t happened on Mars in… hundreds of millions of years. In the future we’re trying to build, we will have to learn how not to fear the various deprivations. We’ll have to learn to embrace them instead, beginning with our own, very real, human limitations. It is a given that the success of a future Mars colony will depend on developing the right technology, but a crucial lesson from sMars is that technology is the lowest common denominator. Mechanical solutions for getting a crew there and back alive will take shape as time and money allow. What cannot be engineered is people. Physically and mentally, emotionally and spiritually, we are the black boxes in this white dome bound for the red planet. Physiology is tough to outwit, though we’re making some progress. With artificial gravity and good radiation shielding, we might dodge some of the worst of what happens to the body in space. What will then remain, standing between us and our goal of becoming an interplanetary species? The same forces that drive our most basic behaviour on this planet: individual psychology and group dynamics. How we get along with each other (and with ourselves) is what allows our exploratory missions to succeed, or what dooms them to failure. Unlike temperature, humidity and power supply, mental states cannot be fully accounted for beforehand. Or can they? What if there is some secret to living in harmony that we can discover by practising beforehand on sMars? This is what the six of us came here for: to get along and, in the process, help press humanity outward into the Universe. To hasten the day when people put boots on Mars, and probe its surface for signs of past or present life. In the meanwhile on this barren hillside, we are also finding something of our essential natures. True, whenever we venture into the wilderness, we confront the limits of self-sufficiency and a heightened dependence on those around us. Also true: most of us never experience anything more intense than a camping trip, where you can only get so lost before you run into civilisation again, or it comes looking for you. On Mars and beyond, the experience will be taken to a new level. Ponder this: how would it change your worldview if every person you laid eyes on for years was utterly necessary for your survival? That’s life on sMars, and that will be life on real Mars: distant and inhospitable, populated entirely by people you cannot live without, and who cannot live without you. I imagined many things about this trip. I practised for a long time to go to Mars. It turns out that Mars is just a place on whose surface rests a dome. The dome itself is just a fancy box. With the hatch closed, the world contracts not into 1,200 square feet of storage, scientific equipment and medical supplies, but into six human bodies. We form a single unit, unmappable but not unknowable, with vast minds and complex pasts; with disparate beliefs, preferences and desires. The contents of the whole world is them – is us. When I wake up tomorrow, the entire world will be within earshot. I’ve never been able to say that before. No matter where I go on Earth, I’ll never be able to say it again.