Brains Behind Talent

Check out the link below that takes you to a short video detailing the brain science behind talent. In this case, the discussion focuses on athletic talent. I am convinced (with no scientific evidence, but nontheless) that it applies to other kinds of learning.

Neuroscientist Doug Fields explains how neural membranes function in developing athletic skills:

http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=4a86810a4af95d30fc40c55377f7fe6cdea9167d

(I tried to embed this video but couldn't figure out how to lift it from the Times.)

Dave Eggers and "What is the What"

Thursday night L. and I attended the culminating event in Notre Dame’s 40^th annual literary festival. The featured author was Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, his memoir (see link below for an extensive list of all his publications). Eggers recently completed a new project that chronicles the life of Valentino Achak Deng, who emigrated with the wave of “Lost Boys” from Sudan.

Eggers was warmly introduced and began his lecture with a flurry of microphone adjustments and a shuffle of papers. After briefly reading from his new work, titled What is the What, and introducing us to his fictional version of Valentino, he introduced us to the real Valentino. If it had been previously announced that both the author and his subject would lecture, I hadn’t been aware of it. It would prove to be a powerful presentation. I went into the lecture mildly curious about Eggers. I emerged with an awakened consciousness (and a commitment to buy his new book).

Several years ago Eggers was invited to meet Valentino, who had decided that his goal was to write a book about his experiences. In the beginning it wasn’t clear if Eggers would help Valentino compose his own memoir or perhaps serve as his scribe. In the end, something brand new was formed. Eggers listened to Valentino’s story—his 800-mile trek with a flock of children from Sudan to Kenya, Valentino’s childhood confrontation with death and violence, the constant concern about the fate of his family left behind in a burning village. Eggers listened, time passed, and their friendship deepened. Eventually trust moved the two men beyond the stark tragedy and allowed them to uncover the profound humanity and tenderness that Valentino experienced despite the inexorable reality of violence that colored his coming-of-age.

Eggers listened and made a crucial realization: he couldn’t write Valentino’s story in the third person. He needed to tell the truth about Valentino. And to tell the truth, he needed to use the tool of fiction. So, after gaining Valentino’s consent, he wrote Valentino’s memoir as fiction, telling his story using a first person narrator. He became Valentino. The readers, in turn, are invited to become Valentino. By living through the terror and injustice of Southern Sudan, we can move beyond an intellectual discussion of totalitarian states and genocides. We bypass the head entirely. We live like Valentino, all heart. Eggers doesn’t go maudlin on us. Valentino’s heart is his organ of survival and decision-making. Think blood, hot and quick in fear, or thin from hunger. Think of a little boy whose heart pumped day after day despite being attacked on all fronts.

It was a powerful presentation. I was already impressed by Eggers writing and his social justice work. I think I am a little bit in love with him too—you will know what I mean if you hear him speak.

And the best news—this really gets my social justice, English teacher blood flowing—all the proceeds from the book go to Valentino’s foundation. He plans to rebuild his village in Sudan and provide college scholarships for other Sudanese immigrants.

Consider this is a strong recommendation to buy a book that I have not yet read.

The Valentino Achak Deng Foundation
849 Valencia St.
San Francisco, CA 94110

For more information, visit valentinoachackdeng.com

Dave Eggers' Biography and List of Books

Protest O.J. Simpson

Last week the YWCA of St. Joseph County made a
public statement (read the statement in the South Bend
Tribune) reacting to the announcement that O.J. Simpson
will appear in a two-part special on the Fox television
network, as well as a soon-to-be-released book detailing
how he "would have" carried out the murders
of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.

The YWCA has received an overwhelming response from
people wanting to join the protest, and they encourage
people to contact the following numbers to request
that booksellers not participate in the book sales, and
that FOX TV not air the special: 

Barnes and Noble - Customer Service Center at
1-800-THE-BOOK (1-800-843-2665).

Amazon - you can send an email via their website
(no really good way to directly connect with them)

HarperCollins (the publisher) - 212-207-7000

ReganBooks - 212-207-7000 (a division of HarperCollins)

FOX - contact the local FOX station 574-679-9758 and/or
fox28news@fox28.com AND the national office
-http://www.fox.com/links/affiliates.htm AND (310)369-3553

You may also contact big box retailers like Target
(again both local and national office) to ensure they do not
carry the book in stores or online (their online book service
is provided by amazon).

Spread the Word!

UPDATE!!!!!

O.J. Simpson book and tv show cancelled!
Read the headline.

Freed from Guantanamo

I know that I have been news heavy these past few blog entries, but I can't seem to help myself. Shouldn't we be concerned about this?

Freed from Guantanamo, 5 face danger in Albania

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | May 18, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Five Chinese Muslims recently released from the Guantanamo Bay prison are living under increasingly dangerous conditions in Albania, the only country to let them in after the United States determined they were not ''enemy combatants," according to their lawyer.

The lawyer, Sabin Willett of Boston, asked in court papers filed yesterday that the Bush administration bring the five men to the United States for their own safety.

The men, who are members of an ethnic group known as Uighurs, were arrested in Afghanistan four years ago. A military tribunal later determined that the men had never been enemies of the United States, and ordered them released.

But because the Chinese government has a history of persecuting Uighurs, who have been seeking greater independence, the men could not be sent back to China.

Two weeks ago, on the eve of a court hearing into their fate, the military announced that it had dropped the men off in Albania, a mostly Muslim country in southeast Europe. Willett, who has been waging a court battle to get the Uighurs brought to the United States as refugees, flew to Albania.

In an affidavit filed yesterday with the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Willett described a harrowing trip to a slum where the five men are living in a refugee processing center. He said he was able to take his clients to a restaurant and get glasses made for one of them, but since he left, they have been afraid to leave the compound.

The men's arrival has caused a sensation in Albania, he said. The Chinese government has called on Albania to extradite the men, whom it calls terrorists. Members of the Albanian parliament have vowed to send them to China. And even if the men are allowed to stay in Albania, Willett said, they would face a bleak future.

''The impoverished country where they were dumped without community, common language, family, or prospects is ill-suited to withstand the strident demands of the most powerful communist dictatorship on earth," Willett wrote. ''These men never wronged the United States in any way. What has happened is shameful."

The Bush administration has asked the court to dismiss the case on the grounds that it is now moot. A Justice Department spokeswoman did not return a call yesterday

Also yesterday, Saudi Arabia's foreign minister announced that 16 captives held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp would be transferred to Saudi jails in coming days -- the first large-scale transfer from this isolated island prison camp in more than a year.

Bush Taps Jesus

WASHINGTON DC--USA Today reported last week that President Bush wiretapped American phone lines to investigate terrorist activity. Capitol Hill sources revealed today that Bush has also tapped his direct phone line from Jesus the Christ.

Bush has maintained a direct line to Jesus throughout his presidency, despite drastic hikes in long distance, to better serve the American people. Initially Bush was able to accept collect calls from the Christ. After 9/11, however, the Lord gave 24/6 (Sundays excluded) access to Bush in an effort to aid Bush fight the good fight against terrorism.

Bush apparently tapped the phone line due to increased suspicion regarding the Lord’s calls into the United States. Increased chatter indicated an imminent in-breaking of divine intervention in American politics. Bush upholds the legality of his actions to monitor Jesus’ phone activity. He did not seek a warrant due to the high probability that Jesus would observe the court proceedings and take preemptive action. The Lord is known to protect his existence at all costs--giving out revelation as he sees fit despite human suffering and global warming. His followers operate in separate enclaves and often do not communicate as they work to transform the word according to their leader's specifications.

Bush is committed to protecting the American people. Jesus is being held in a top-secret facility pending official charges.

GOP senator says judges were told of phone spying

Trying to be a thoughtful citizen, I emailed Larry Tribe, the Harvard professor whose article appeared in yesterday's Globe and asked his advice about how to proceed in light of the information revealed about the NSA and phone data. He replied (which impressed me) and suggested contacting legislators to make my views clear to them. Based on my limited experience on Capitol Hill, he is correct. Representatives and Senators do take into account the letters and phone calls they receive from constituents. So, call now and vote early and often.

Here is the next installment regarding the NSA and phone "spying." Things are still murky. . .

GOP senator says judges were told of phone spying
Verizon, BellSouth deny playing a role

By Katherine Shrader, Associated Press | May 17, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Two judges on the secretive court that approves warrants for intelligence surveillance were told of the broad monitoring programs that have raised controversy, a Republican senator said yesterday, for the first time connecting a court to knowledge of the collecting of millions of phone records.

President Bush, meanwhile, insisted the government does not listen in on domestic telephone conversations among ordinary Americans. But he declined to specifically discuss the compiling of phone records or whether that would amount to an invasion of privacy.

USA Today reported last week that three of the four major telephone companies had provided information about millions of Americans' calls to the National Security Agency. Verizon Communications Inc., however, denied yesterday that it had been asked by the agency for customer information, one day after BellSouth said the same thing.

Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, said that at least two of the chief judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had been informed since 2001 of White House-approved National Security Agency monitoring operations.

''None raised any objections, as far as I know," said Hatch, a member of a special Intelligence Committee panel appointed to oversee the NSA's work.

Hatch made the comment when asked during an interview about recent reports that the government was compiling lists of Americans' phone calls. He later suggested he was also speaking broadly of the administration's terror-related monitoring.

When asked whether the judges somehow approved the operations, Hatch said, ''That is not their position, but they were informed."

The surveillance court, whose 11 members are chosen by the chief justice of the United States, was set up after Congress rewrote key laws in 1978 that govern intelligence collection inside the United States.

The court secretly considers individual warrants for physical searches, wiretaps, and traces on phone records when someone is suspected of being an agent of a foreign power and when making the request to a regular court might reveal highly classified information.

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the court has been led by US District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, and then by US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who succeeded him.

Bush was asked yesterday about the reported lists of calls.

''We do not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval," Bush said.

He appeared to acknowledge the NSA sweep of phone records indirectly, saying that the program referred to by a questioner ''is one that has been fully briefed to members of the United States Congress in both political parties."

''They're very aware of what is taking place. The American people expect their government to protect them within the laws of this country, and I'm going to continue to do just that," Bush said.

Spokesman Tony Snow later said Bush's comments did not amount to a confirmation of published reports that the NSA's surveillance included secretly collecting millions of phone call records.

Verizon, meanwhile, called into question key points of a USA Today story that has led to wide coverage by other news media in the past week.

''Contrary to the media reports, Verizon was not asked by NSA to provide, nor did Verizon provide, customer phone records," the New York-based phone company said in an e-mail statement.

A day earlier, BellSouth Corp. had said NSA had never requested customer call data, nor had the company provided any.

A story in USA Today last Thursday said Verizon, AT&T Inc., and BellSouth had complied with an NSA request for tens of millions of customer phone records after the attacks.

USA Today spokesman Steve Anderson said yesterday, ''We're confident in our coverage of the phone database story, but we won't summarily dismiss BellSouth's and Verizon's denials without taking a closer look."

The Senate Intelligence Committee is to hold a confirmation hearing tomorrow on Bush's nomination of Air Force General Michael V. Hayden to head the CIA. Hayden is sure to face vigorous questioning; as the NSA director from 1999 until last year, Hayden oversaw the creation of some of the government's most controversial intelligence surveillance.

The Senate and House intelligence chairmen -- Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, and Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan -- announced yesterday that their full committees would be briefed for the first time on Bush's warrantless surveillance program. The operations have allowed the government to eavesdrop on domestic calls when one party is overseas and suspected of terrorism.

Democrats have demanded such information for months, saying the administration was violating the law by withholding it from committee members.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and an Intelligence Committee member on the select NSA panel, said the administration had given the public only part of the story.

Bush Stomps on Fourth Amendment

In an effort to be more than a happily ignorant member of the "complacent majority of citizens" described by Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, I read the following brief article in Today's Boston Globe. Read it. Then someone tell me what to do about it. . .

Bush stomps on Fourth Amendment

By Laurence H. Tribe | May 16, 2006

THE ESCALATING controversy over the National Security Agency's data mining program illustrates yet again how the Bush administration's intrusions on personal privacy based on a post-9/11 mantra of ''national security" directly threaten one of the enduring sources of that security: the Fourth Amendment ''right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."

The Supreme Court held in 1967 that electronic eavesdropping is a ''search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, recognizing that our system of free expression precludes treating each use of a telephone as an invitation to Big Brother to listen in. By 2001, the court had come to see how new technology could arm the government with information previously obtainable only through old-fashioned spying and could thereby convert mere observation -- for example, the heat patterns on a house's exterior walls -- to a ''search" requiring a warrant. To read the Constitution otherwise, the court reasoned, would leave us ''at the mercy of advancing technology" and erode the ''privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted." This decision, emphasizing the privacy existing when the Bill of Rights was originally ratified in 1791, was no liberal holdover in conservative times. Its author was Justice Antonin Scalia. Justice Clarence Thomas joined the majority. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the dissent. This issue should not divide liberals from conservatives, Democrats from Republicans.

These two decisions greatly undermine the aberrant 1979 ruling on which defenders of the NSA program rely, in which a bare Supreme Court majority said it doubted that people have any ''expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial," since they ''must 'convey' [such] numbers to the telephone company," which in turn can share them with others for purposes like ''detecting fraud and preventing violations of law." Unconvincing then, those words surely ring hollow today, now that information technology has made feasible the NSA program whose cover was blown last week. That program profiles virtually every American's phone conversations, giving government instant access to detailed knowledge of the numbers, and thus indirectly the identities, of whomever we phone; when and for how long; and what other calls the person phoned has made or received. As Justice Stewart recognized in 1979, a list of all numbers called ''easily could reveal . . . the most intimate details of a person's life."

The Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unconstrained snooping by Big Brother -- made bigger by an onrush of information-trolling technology that few foresaw in 1979 -- is bipartisan. It is a guarantee that cannot tolerate the pretense that numbers called from a private phone, unlike the conversations themselves, are without ''content." That pretense is impossible to maintain now that the technology deployed by NSA enables the agency to build a web with those numbers that can ensnare individuals -- all individuals -- just as comprehensively and intimately as all-out eavesdropping.

Even if one trusts the president's promise not to connect all the dots to the degree the technology permits, the act of collecting all those dots in a form that permits their complete connection at his whim is a ''search." And doing it to all Americans, not just those chatting with Al Qaeda, and with no publicly reviewable safeguards to prevent abuse, is an ''unreasonable search" if those Fourth Amendment words have any meaning at all.

The legal landscape, too, has changed decisively since the court's majority opined that Americans have no expectation of privacy in the numbers they call. Rejecting the accuracy of that description even decades ago, Congress, which was more vigorous then in its protection of privacy, enacted statutes reassuring us that our phone records would not be shared willy-nilly with government inquisitors without court orders. So it can no longer be said, if it ever could have been, that our ''expectations of privacy" about whom we call are groundless or that we ''consent" to reconstruction of our telephone profiles by using one of the phone companies that, unbeknownst to us, have agreed to share such information (although, we're told, not the content of every call) with NSA on demand.

Privacy apart, this president's defiance of statutes by the dozens is constitutionally alarming. But the matter goes deeper still. Even if Congress were to repeal the laws securing telephone privacy, or if phone companies found loopholes to slip through when pressured by government, the Constitution's Fourth Amendment shield for ''the right of the people to be secure" from ''unreasonable searches" is a shield for all seasons, one that a lawless president, a spineless Congress, and a complacent majority of citizens -- who are conditioned to a government operating under a shroud of secrecy while individuals live out their lives in fishbowls -- cannot be permitted to destroy, for the rest of us and our children.

Laurence H. Tribe is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor.