WORLD IN BRIEF (1/9/07)

Bush’s legacy likely to change over time By Wayne Slater and G. Robert Hillman, The… Bush’s legacy likely to change over time By Wayne Slater and G. Robert Hillman, The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS – Having cast himself as a wartime president, George W. Bush assured that war – and the deepening problem of Iraq – will mark his legacy.

For the designers of the Bush library apparently headed to Southern Methodist University, depicting that legacy will pose a balancing act between politics and history.

“Presidential libraries are to some degree beyond the question of what scholars want,” said Stephen Hess, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. “They’re what presidents want and how presidents want to be remembered.”

But however the depiction starts out, it’s likely to change as the myopia of the moment recedes.

Interpreters of history cite two models: Harry Truman, whose reputation rose after leaving office, and Lyndon Johnson, whose legacy remains tarnished by Vietnam.

Harry Middleton, director of the LBJ Library at the University of Texas from 1971 until 2002, said the library now spends more time on Vietnam than it did at the beginning.

“Right now, maybe a fifth of the exhibitory is devoted to the Vietnam War. You see how it divided the country and how controversial it was,” Middleton said. “Had you gone into the LBJ Library the day after it was dedicated, you would not have found that.

“The first one, we did endeavor to show the controversy, but we relied more on what was in the president’s mind when he made the decisions,” Middleton said. “I’m sure that’s the way the Bush people are going to face it. They’re bound to.”

New study shows cramming college students pay price By Lisa Black, Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO – College freshman Edie Weiner arrived home for winter break on a Saturday night, fell into her childhood bed and didn’t get up for 20 hours.

By the time the 18-year-old stumbled out from hibernation at 5 p.m. the next day, her parents were growing a bit anxious.

Weiner, like many of her classmates, was recovering from a sleepless, caffeine-fueled week of cramming for finals – a sort of celebrated ritual that has long played out on college campuses.

But while some parents may be annoyed about their teenagers’ unusual sleep patterns when they return home for break – the word “lazy” might even be muttered on occasion – medical experts describe the students as sleep-deprived and say new research provides cause for concern.

A study published in the Dec. 18 issue of the Nature Neuroscience journal examined how memories are processed in the brain during sleep. During the non-dreaming portion of sleep, the brain replays the day’s events, helping people reflect on recent happenings and learn from them, said Matthew Wilson, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.

The bottom line: Information crammed into the brain during a sleepless night has less chance of sticking. When deprived of sleep, students may be able to regurgitate information they’ve memorized overnight, but they have decreased their ability to understand its meaning or to apply it to future experience.

“Sleep isn’t just a passive event,” said Wilson, co-author of the study, which interpreted the memories of rats by inserting electrodes into their brains.

“The best way to take advantage of sleep is to have it interspersed between periods of wakefulness in a regular way,” he said.