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Page 4 • Cognotes 2012 Annual Conference Preview — Anaheim

Speakers 

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in Cambodia, and is currently spearheading a Japan relief effort with children around the world. Through the nonprofit organization Random-Kid, frequent speaking engagements, and now a new book, Leman provides tools that equip kids for life-changing philanthropic activities. A former national ambassador for UNICEF, she is a recipient of the National Jefferson Award, World of Children's Founder's Youth Award, regarded as the "Nobel Prize" for efforts that serve the world's children, and the International Youth Talent Award from the European Union and the Spanish government of Extremadura.

Gaby Rodriguez (now 18 and a college student) made national headlines in 2011 as the 17-year-old high school senior from Toppenish, WA, who revealed she had faked a pregnancy for a class project—a story that became the book and Lifetime movie "The Pregnancy Project." In it, she shares her experience growing up in the shadow of low expectations, reveals how she was able to fake her own pregnancy, and what she learned from the experience. Raised by a single mother, with seven brothers and sisters, Rodri-guez was told growing up that she would end up a teen mother, like her own mother and older sisters had. She had other ambitions, and the question that sparked her project was: how would she be perceived if she "lived down" to others expectations about the path her life would take? She received the regional ACLU award for Youth Activist.  

Leman and Rodriguez's appearances are sponsored by Simon and Schuster; Kamkwamba's is sponsored by Penguin Young Readers.

Gaby Rodriguez

CHRIS COLFER
Saturday, June 23
3:30 - 4:30 p.m.  

Chris Colfer can currently be seen starring in the critically acclaimed, Golden Globe® and SAG award winning comedy Glee. Colfer's performance as 'Kurt Hummel' has earned him a Golden Globe®, two Emmy® nominations, a SAG nomination, and inclusion in the 2011 TIME 100, Time Magazine's annual list of the one hundred most influential people in the world.

Colfer recently completed his first children's book, The Land of Stories,a fast-paced adventure that uniquely combines our modern day world with the enchanting realm of classic fairytales. In the book, twins Alex and Conner Bailey leave their world behind through the mysterious powers of a cherished book of stories, and find themselves in a foreign land full of wonder and magic where they come face-to-face with the characters they grew up reading about. The Land of Stories will be published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers on July 17.

Sponsored by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Chris Colfer  

DAN ARIELY
Sunday, June 24
8:00 - 9:00 a.m.  

Dan Ariely is The New York Times bestselling author of Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality. He is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University, with appointments at the Fuqua School of Business, the Center for Cognitive

Neuroscience, and the Department of Economics. He has also held a visiting professorship at MIT's Media Lab. Ariely has appeared on CNN and CNBC, and is a regular commentator on NPR's Marketplace. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his wife and two children.  

Sponsored by Harper Collins Publishers

Dan Ariely  

SAPPHIRE
Sunday, June 24
10:30 - 11:30 a.m.  

Sapphire is the author of two collections of poetry and the best-selling novel Push. The film adaption of her novel, Precious (2009) received the Academy Award for Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress, in addition to the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Awards in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at Sundance. In 2009, she was a recipient of a United States Artist Fellowship. She lives in New York City. In THEKID (The Penguin Press; July 5, 2011), celebrated writer Sapphire brings her readers deep into the interior life of Abdul Jones, son of her unforgettable heroine, Precious. We meet Abdul at age nine, on the day of his mother's funeral. Left alone to navigate in a world where love and hate are often indistinguishable, forced to confront unspeakable violence and his own dark history, Abdul claws his way toward adulthood and toward an identity he can stand behind. THE KID delivers a generational story that moves with the speed of thought from a Mississippi dirt farm to Harlem in its heyday; from a troubled Catholic orphanage to downtown artist's lofts, as it tells of a twenty-first century young man's fight to find the path to his future. A testament to the ferocity of the human spirit, the nourishing power of love and of art, THE KID becomes a young man about to take flight. Intimate, terrifying, deeply alive in Abdul's journey we are witness t o an artist's birth by fire.

Sponsored by Penguin

ALTAFF
President's Program Featuring DAN RATHER
Monday, June 25
8:30 - 9:30 a.m.  

Dan Rather is an award winning journalist who anchored CBS Evening News for decades. He is one of America's most decorated news journalists of all time. A complete and thorough memoir from famed newsman Rather, who looks back over his storied and sometimes controversial career and reveals his personal thoughts and reflections.

This memoir by Rather is told in a straightforward and conversational voice, and covers all the important moments of his journalistic career, including (but certainly not limited to) a frank accounting of his dismissal from CBS, the Abu Ghraib story, the George W. Bush Air National Guard controversy, new insights on the JFK assassination, the origin of "Hurricane Dan" as well as inside stories about all the top personalities Rather has either interviewed or worked with over his distinguished career.

Sponsored by Hachette Book Group

Wrap Up Rev Up Celebration
Monday, June 25
2:15-3:15 p.m. 

Come celebrate the wrap up of the Annual exhibits and rev-up for a spectacular 2013 Midwinter Meeting in Seattle, at our popular Wrap Up Rev Up celebration! Keep the party going, as we move from the exhibit hall to the Ballroom for entertainment and prize giveaways! The party starts in the exhibits hall and ends in the Ballroom.

MacKinnon

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legislated, programmed and engineered away. MacKinnon works on global Internet policy as a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. She is co-founder of Global Voices, a citizen media network, and a former fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Sudden changes in Facebook's features and privacy settings have exposed identities of protestors to police in Egypt and Iran. Apple removes politically controversial apps at the behest of governments as well as for its own commercial reasons. Dozens of Western companies sell surveillance technology to dictatorships around the world. Google struggles with censorship demands from governments in a range of countries—many of them democracies—as wellas mounting public concern over the vast quantities of information it collects about its users.

Every day, the corporate sovereigns of cyberspace make decisions that affect our physical freedom—but without our consent. Yet the traditional solution to unaccountable corporate behavior—government regulation—cannot stop the abuse of digital power on its own, and sometimes even contributes to it.

A clarion call to action, MacKinnon's Consent of the Networked shows that it is time to stop arguing over whether the Internet empowers people, and address the urgent question of how technology should be governed to support the rights and liberties of users around the world.

She is on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists and worked for twelve years as a journalist in Asia, including as CNN's Bureau Chief in Tokyo and Beijing.

Sponsored by Basic Books

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