Investing in Our Future at Community Colleges

In the article, David Brooks mentions the human capital component in President Obama’s plan to make community colleges free: return on investment. A national policy to offer free community college tuition is a crucial investment in and commitment to our social contract. America prospers because we invest in people, ideas, infrastructure, research, design, education and health care because of the confirmed two-year participation in a national service corps. David Brooks recommends on focussing on a student’s living expenses, mentoring relationships and the “remedial education mess” rather than tuition, which is likely to benefit those for whom community college is already affordable, are on target.

Read an excerpt of the article written by David Brooks:

There is a human capital component to President Obama’s plan to make community colleges free: return on investment. The $60 billion that would be spent over a decade is an investment in our civic future. Our return for that financial commitment should be service to the country, which could include work as a teacher, nurse, engineer, firefighter or police officer. A national policy to offer free community college tuition is a crucial investment in and commitment to our social contract. But let’s be clear about the cost. The tuition isn’t “free”; our citizens cover the cost of “free.” I propose a simple plan: When students agree to accept the tuition (and complete their education), that contract confirms their two-year participation in a national service corps. America prospers because we invest in people, ideas, infrastructure, research, design, education and health care. This is the fabric of the social contract that each generation knows: Invest early, often and with compassion, and watch your returns build the future. MICHAEL G. SIEVERS Portland, Ore., Jan. 21, 2015 To the Editor: “The important task is to help students graduate,” David Brooks says, noting that community college dropout rates now hover somewhere between 66 and 80 percent. Setting graduation as the ultimate goal, however, may be a mistake when technology is changing education and work. Diplomas based on college-mandated credits are becoming anachronistic as online courses become better and more pervasive. ..read more

Uber model may point to work’s future

Farhad Manjoo writes abut the ‘uberization’ of work, referring to the introduction of new technology in various fields, just like Uber did.  Uberization will have its benefits: Technology could make your work life more flexible, allowing you to fit your job, or perhaps multiple jobs, around your schedule. Even during a time of renewed job growth, Americans’ wages are stubbornly stagnant, and the on-demand economy may provide novel streams of income.The complication, here, though, is that most taxi drivers are also independent contractors, so the arrangement isn’t particularly novel in the ride business. The larger worry about on-demand jobs is not about benefits but about a lack of agency: a future in which computers, not humans, determine what you do, when and for how much. The author concludes by saying that the on-demand economy may be better than the alternative of software automating all our work, but that isn’t necessarily much of a cause for celebration

Read an excerpt of the article written by Farhad Manjoo:

As Uber has grown to become one of the world’s most valuable start-ups, its ambitions often seem limitless. But of all the ways that Uber could change the world, the most far-reaching may be found closest at hand: your office. Uber, and more broadly the app-driven labor market it represents, are at the center of what could be a sea change in work, and in how people think about their jobs. You may not be contemplating becoming an Uber driver any time soon, but the Uberization of work may soon be coming to your chosen profession. Just as Uber is doing for taxis, new technologies have the potential to chop up a broad array of traditional jobs into discrete tasks that can be assigned to people just when they’re needed, with wages set by a dynamic measurement of supply and demand, and every worker’s performance constantly tracked, reviewed and subject to the sometimes harsh light of customer satisfaction. Uber and its ride-sharing competitors, including Lyft and Sidecar, are the boldest examples of this breed, which many in the tech industry see as a new kind of start-up — one whose primary mission is to efficiently allocate human beings and their possessions, rather than information. ‘‘I do think we are defining a new category of work that isn’t full-time employment but is not running your own business either,’’ said Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s business school who has studied the rise of the so-called on-demand economy and who is mainly optimistic about its prospects. Uberization will have its benefits: Technology could make your work life more flexible, allowing you to fit your job, or perhaps multiple jobs, around your schedule. Even during a time of renewed job growth, Americans’ wages are stubbornly stagnant, and the on-demand economy may provide novel streams of income. ‘‘We may end up with a future in which a fraction of the work force would do a portfolio of things to generate an income — you could be an Uber driver, an Instacart shopper, an Airbnb host and a Taskrabbit,’’ Dr. Sundararajan said. But the rise of such work could also make your income less predictable and your long-term employment less secure. And it may relegate the idea of establishing a lifelong career to a distant memory. ‘‘I think it’s nonsense, utter nonsense,’’ said Robert B. Reich, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was a labor secretary in the Clinton administration. ‘‘This on-demand economy means a work life that is unpredictable, doesn’t pay very well and is terribly insecure.’’ After interviewing many workers in the on-demand world, Dr. Reich said he had concluded that ‘‘most would much rather have good, well-paying, regular jobs.’’ It is true that many of these start-ups are creating new opportunities for employment, which is a novel trend in tech, especially during an era in which we’re all fretting about robots stealing our jobs. Proponents of on-demand work point out that many of the tech giants that sprang up over the last decade minted billions in profits without hiring very many people; Facebook, for instance, serves more than a billion users, but employs only a few thousand highly skilled workers, most of them in California. To make the case that it is creating lots of new jobs, Uber recently provided some of its data on ridership to Alan B. Krueger, an economist at Princeton and a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Krueger’s report, which he said he was allowed to produce without interference from Uber, paints Uber as a force for good in the labor market. ...read more

3-D printers are transforming medical care

Are 3-D printers transforming medical care? Karen Weintraub writes that they offer doctors the huge advantage of practicing operations beforehand. Such 3-D-printed models are transforming medical care, giving surgeons new perspectives and opportunities to practice, and patients and their families a deeper understanding of complex procedures. Though there has been little research so far into the benefits of 3-D printing or surgical simulations, Department of Veterans Affairs researchers have shown that teamwork exercises in operating rooms reduced patient deaths or injuries by as much as 18 percent. ‘‘Solve one problem, remove one error, identify one latent safety threat, save one life,’’ and it will reduce both personal and financial costs, Dr. Weinstock said.

Read an excerpt of the article written by KAREN WEINTRAUB:

The surgeon held a translucent white plastic eye socket in each hand. Gently moving them away from each other, Dr. John Meara showed the distance between Violet Pietrok’s eyes at birth. He slid the sockets closer to demonstrate their positions 19 months later, after he had operated on her. Violet, now nearly 2, was born with a rare defect called a Tessier facial cleft. Her dark brown eyes were set so far apart, her mother says, that her vision was more like a bird of prey’s than a person’s. A large growth bloomed over her left eye. She had no cartilage in her nose. The bones that normally join to form the fetal face had not fused properly. Her parents, Alicia Taylor and Matt Pietrok, sought out Dr. Meara at Boston Children’s Hospital, thousands of miles from their home in Oregon, because the plastic surgeon had performed four similar operations in the previous three years. Before he operated on Violet, Dr. Meara wanted a more precise understanding of her bone structure than he could get from an image on a screen. So he asked his colleague Dr. Peter Weinstock to print him a three-dimensional model of Violet’s skull, based on magnetic resonance imaging. That first model helped him to decide what might need to be done and to discuss his treatment plan with her family. Three more 3-D printouts closer to the surgery allowed Dr. Meara to rotate the model skull in directions he could not manage with a picture and would not attempt with a patient on the operating table. Then he was able to cut and manipulate the plastic model to determine the best way to push her eye sockets more than an inch closer together. Such 3-D-printed models are transforming medical care, giving surgeons new perspectives and opportunities to practice, and patients and their families a deeper understanding of complex procedures. Hospitals are also printing training tools and personalized surgical equipment. Someday doctors hope to print replacement body parts. ‘‘There’s no doubt that 3-D printing is going to be disruptive medicine,’’ said Dr. Frank Rybicki, chief of medical imaging at the Ottawa Hospital and chairman and professor of radiology at the University of Ottawa. He is the former director of the applied imaging science lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a few blocks from Boston Children’s. ‘‘It makes procedures shorter, it improves your accuracy,’’ said Dr. Rybicki, who uses 3-D printing in his work with face transplants. ‘‘When bioprinting actually hits, it will change everything.’’ For now, the printer extrudes a layer of liquid plastic instead of ink. It adds a second layer, and then another, and a skull or rib cage — or whatever the surgeon dials up — slowly emerges. The same process can also print layers of human cells. So far, researchers have also printed blood vessels, simple organs and bits of bone. A Utah boy’s life was saved last year by a 3-D-printed plastic splint that propped open his windpipe. Dr. Weinstock, director of the Pediatric Simulator Program at Boston Children’s, sees 3-D models as part of a larger program to improve surgical craft. ...read more

The emotional benefits of a lunchtime walk

What are the benefits of lunchtime strolls? More Importantly, emotional benefits. Gretchen Reynolds writes that a recent study showed that on the afternoons after a lunchtime stroll, walkers said they felt considerably more enthusiastic, less tense, and generally more relaxed and able to cope than on afternoons when they had not walked and even compared with their own moods from a morning before a walk. ‘There is now quite strong research evidence that feeling more positive and enthusiastic at work is very important to productivity,’’ Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani said. She also suggests that managers might wish to acquaint themselves with the latest science.

Read an excerpt of the article written by GRETCHEN REYNOLDS:

A new study finds that even gentle lunchtime strolls can perceptibly — and immediately — buoy people’s moods and ability to handle stress at work. It is not news, of course, that walking is healthy and that people who walk or otherwise exercise regularly tend to be more calm, alert and happy than people who are inactive. But many past studies of the effects of walking and other exercise on mood have focused on somewhat long-term, gradual outcomes, looking at how weeks or months of exercise change people emotionally. Fewer studies have examined more-abrupt, day-to-day and even hour-by-hour changes in people’s moods, depending on whether they exercise, and even fewer have focused on these effects while people are at work, even though most of us spend a majority of our waking hours in an office. So, for the new study, which was published in The Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports this month, researchers at the University of Birmingham and other universities began by recruiting sedentary office workers at the university. Potential volunteers were told that they would need to be available to walk for 30 minutes during their usual lunch hour three times a week. Most of the resulting 56 volunteers were middle-aged women. It can be difficult to attract men to join walking programs, said Cecilie Thogersen-Ntoumani, the study’s lead author and now a professor of exercise science at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. Walking may not strike some men as strenuous enough to bother with, she said. But she and her colleagues did attract four sedentary middle-aged men to the experiment. The volunteers completed a series of baseline health and fitness and mood tests at the outset of the experiment, revealing that they all were out of shape but otherwise generally healthy physically and emotionally. Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani and her colleagues then randomly divided the volunteers into two groups, one of which was to begin a simple, 10-week walking program right away, while the other group would wait and start their walking program 10 weeks later, serving, in the meantime, as a control group. To allow them to assess people’s moods, the scientists helped their volunteers to set up a specialized app on their phones that included a list of questions about their emotions. The questions were designed to measure the volunteers’ feelings, at that moment, about stress, tension, enthusiasm, workload, motivation, physical fatigue and other issues related to how they were feeling about life and work at that immediate time. A common problem with studies of the effect of exercise on mood, Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani said, is that they rely on recall. ...Read more

Connected devices need tighter safety

Natasha Singer writes about how connected devices need tighter safety. She recommends use of advancements like in-car sensors, glucose monitors, etc. However, they also raise some concerns like protection from criminals who can hijack and misuse intimate information recorded by Internet-connected devices. Natasha concludes by following the agency’s report and recommending that companies should consider putting limits on the amount of information their devices collect from consumers and on the amount of time they retain that data

Read an excerpt of the article written by Natasha Singer:

As more consumers adopt devices that can collect information and transmit it to the Internet, the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday called on technology companies that sell those products to institute comprehensive measures to protect users’ data security and privacy. Advancements like in-car sensors, which can record vehicle location and speed, or glucose monitors that can send information on diabetic patients to their doctors, have huge potential benefits, like reducing traffic accidents or improving public health. But the agency said the devices, which make up the so-called Internet of Things, also raise serious security and privacy risks that could undermine consumers’ confidence. ‘‘We believe that by adopting the best practices we’ve laid out, businesses will be better able to provide consumers the protections they want and allow the benefits of the Internet of Things to be fully realized,’’ Edith Ramirez, the chairwoman of the commission, said in a statement on Tuesday. One concern is that criminals could potentially hijack and misuse intimate information recorded by Internet-connected devices. ...Read more

Parenting Advice From ‘America’s Worst Mom’

Helicopter parenting? Lenore Skenazy, America’s worst mom for sending her 9-year-old by the subway alone? Overprotective parents tend to shield their children. Yet, according to Peter Gray, a research psychologist at Boston College, ‘‘the actual rate of strangers’ abducting or molesting children is very small.’’ ‘‘It’s more likely to happen at the hands of a relative or family friend. ‘‘Students are prepared academically, but they’re not prepared to deal with day-to-day life, which comes from a lack of opportunity to deal with ordinary problems,’’ Dr. Gray said. Ms. Skenazy, screened by Discovery Life Channel, tries to give parents the confidence to loosen the reins on their kids, and give the kids the wings they need. 

Read an excerpt of the article written by JANE E. BRODY:

Lenore Skenazy, a New York City mother of two, earned the sobriquet ‘‘America’s Worst Mom’’ after reporting in a newspaper column that she’d allowed her younger son, then 9, to ride the subway alone. The damning criticism she endured, including a threat of arrest for child endangerment, intensified her desire to encourage anxious parents to give their children the freedom they need to develop the self-confidence and resilience to cope effectively with life’s challenges. One result was the publication in 2009 of her book ‘‘Free Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry).’’ A second result is the Free Range Kids Project and a 13-part series, starting on Thursday on the Discovery Life Channel, ‘‘World’s Worst Mom’’ In it, Ms. Skenazy, to whom the title applies, intervenes to rescue bubble-wrapped kids from their overprotective parents by guiding the children safely through a sequence of once-forbidden activities and showing their anxious parents how well the children perform and how proud they are of what they accomplished. The term ‘‘helicopter parents’’ applies to far more than those who hover relentlessly over their children’s academic and musical development. As depicted in the series’ first episode, it applies to 10-year-old Sam’s very loving mother who wouldn’t let him ride a bike (‘‘she’s afraid I’ll fall and get hurt’’), cut up his own meat (‘‘Mom thinks I’ll cut my fingers off’’), or play ‘‘rough sports’’ like skating. The plea from a stressed-out, thwarted Sam: ‘‘I just want to do things by myself.’’ In an interview, Ms. Skenazy said, ‘‘Having been brainwashed by all the stories we hear, there’s a prevailing fear that any time you’re not directly supervising your child, you’re putting the child in danger.’’ The widespread publicity now given to crimes has created an exaggerated fear of the dangers children face if left to navigate and play on their own. Yet, according to Peter Gray, a research psychologist at Boston College, ‘‘the actual rate of strangers’ abducting or molesting children is very small.’’ ‘‘It’s more likely to happen at the hands of a relative or family friend,’’ Dr. Gray said. ‘‘The statistics show no increase in childhood dangers. If anything, there’s been a decrease.’’ Experts say there is no more crime against children by strangers today — and probably significantly less — than when I was growing up in the 1940s and ’50s, a time when I walked to school alone and played outdoors with friends unsupervised by adults. In 1979 when my own sons were offered the opportunity to attend private school to escape their crime-ridden public middle school, they said, ‘‘What would we learn about life in private school?’’ So they stuck out those three years and emerged street smart and confident in their ability to cope, lessons far more valuable than any they might have acquired in a safer school. ‘‘The world is not perfect — it never was — but we used to trust our children in it, and they learned to be resourceful,’’ Ms. Skenazy said. ‘‘The message these anxious parents are giving to their children is ‘I love you, but I don’t believe in you. I don’t believe you’re as competent as I am.’’’ ...Read more

Smartphones don't make us dumb

Do smartphones make us dumb? Author Daniel T. Willingham disagrees. Paying attention requires desire, not just ability. Internet doesn’t shorten our attention span but fixes a persistent thought in the back of my mind: Isn’t there’s something better to do than what I’m doing? Given the amount of time people spend with digital devices that sounds ominous; will we actually lose our ability to daydream? The author hopes not. But there’s little evidence that attention spans are shrinking.

Read an excerpt of the article written by DANIEL T. WILLINGHAM:

As much as we love our digital devices, many of us have an uneasy sense that they are destroying our attention spans. We skitter from app to app, seldom alighting for long. Our ability to concentrate is shot, right? Research shows that our intuition is wrong. We can focus. But our sense that we can’t may not be a phantom. Paying attention requires not just ability but desire. Technology may snuff out our desire to focus. The idea that gadgets corrode our attention span sounds logical. Screen-based activities can take upward of 11 hours of a teenager’s day, and many demand rapid shifts of attention: quick camera cuts in videos, frenetically paced games, answering questions in multiple apps, not to mention web design that invites skimming. And we often do all this simultaneously, so attention bounces between two (or three or eight) fast-paced tasks. The theory is that the brain’s plasticity turns this quick mental pivoting into a habit, rendering us unable to sustain attention. But there’s little evidence that attention spans are shrinking. Scientists use ‘‘span’’ to mean two separate things: how much we can keep in mind, and how well we can maintain focus. They measure the former by asking people to repeat increasingly long strings of digits in reverse order. They measure the latter by asking people to monitor visual stimuli for occasional, subtle changes. Performance on these tests today looks a whole lot as it did 50 years ago. Scientists also note that although mental tasks can change our brains, the impact is usually modest. For example, practice with action video games improves some aspects of vision, but it’s a small boost, not an overhaul of how we see. Attention is so central to our ability to think that a significant deterioration would require a retrofitting of other cognitive functions. Mental reorganization at that scale happens over evolutionary time, not because you got a smartphone. But if our attention span is not shrinking, why do we feel it is? Why, in a 2012 Pew survey, did nearly 90 percent of teachers claim that students can’t pay attention the way they could a few years ago? It may be that digital devices have not left us unable to pay attention, but have made us unwilling to do so. The digital world carries the promise of amusement that is constant, immediate and limitless. If a YouTube video isn’t funny in the first 10 seconds, why watch when I can instantly seek something better on BuzzFeed or Spotify? The Internet hasn’t shortened my attention span, but it has fixed a persistent thought in the back of my mind: Isn’t there’s something better to do than what I’m doing? Are we more easily bored than we were 20 years ago? Researchers don’t know, but recent studies support the suggestion that our antennas are always up. People’s performance on basic laboratory tests of attention gets worse if a cellphone is merely visible nearby. In another experiment, people using a driving simulator were more likely to hit a pedestrian when their cellphone rang, even if they had planned in advance not to answer it. ...Read more

Finding a new key to ancient scrolls

Researchers expect to unlock hidden treasures using the recently found key that may unlock the library in the town of Herculaneum (destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius). The library is expected to give them access to scrolls, which would give crucial information once deciphered. Researchers have also found newer techniques to read through wrapped scrolls and understand what is written. While "the scrolls that have been opened pertain mostly to Greek philosophy and contain several works by Epicurus and his adherent Philodemus. But the library may also have had a Latin section. This could contain some of the many lost works of Roman history and literature."

Read an excerpt of the article written by Nicholas Wade:

Researchers have found a key that may unlock the only library of classical antiquity to survive along with its documents, raising at least a possibility of recovering vanished works of ancient Greek and Roman authors such as the lost books of Livy’s history of Rome. The library is that of a villa in Herculaneum, a town that was destroyed in A.D. 79 by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that obliterated nearby Pompeii. Though Pompeii was engulfed by lava, a mix of superhot gases and ash swept over Herculaneum, preserving the documents in a grand villa that probably belonged to the family of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. Though the hot gases did not burn the many papyrus rolls in the villa’s library, they turned them into cylinders of carbonized plant material. Many attempts have been made to unroll the carbonized scrolls since they were excavated in 1752. But all were highly destructive, and scholars eventually decided to leave the scrolls alone in the hope that better methods would be invented. More than 300 scrolls survive more or less intact, with many more fragments. Researchers led by Vito Mocella, of the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems in Naples, Italy, now say that for the first time, they can read letters inside the scrolls without unrolling them. Using a laserlike beam of X-rays from the European Synchrotron in Grenoble, France, they were able to pick up the very slight contrast between the carbonized papyrus fibers and the ancient ink, soot-based and also made of carbon. The contrast has allowed them to recognize individual Greek letters from the interior of the roll, Dr. Mocella’s team reported on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. ‘‘At least we know there are techniques able to read inside the papyri, finally,’’ Dr. Mocella said in an interview. His team is considering several ways to refine the power of their technique. ‘‘If the technology is perfected, it will be a real leap forward,’’ said Richard Janko, a classical scholar at the University of Michigan who has translated some of the few scrolls that can be read. ...Read more

Need online spying? Hackers are for hire online

There are many interesting career options and a professional hacker is definitely one of them. The job encompasses hacking personal email ids as well as large business accounts. Relatively new website, hackerslist.com is an easy way for people to connect with a hacker for any work that they may have and are always willing to pay the hacker well. The article written by Matthew Goldstein highlights the growth of this small scale industry and questions its legal legitimacy.

Read an excerpt of the article written by MATTHEW GOLDSTEIN:

 A man in Sweden says he will pay up to $2,000 to anyone who can break into his landlord’s website. A woman in California says she will pay $500 for someone to hack into her boyfriend’s Facebook and Gmail accounts to see if he is cheating on her. The business of hacking is no longer just the domain of intelligence agencies, international criminal gangs, shadowy political operatives and disgruntled ‘‘hacktivists’’ taking aim at big targets. Rather, it is an increasingly personal enterprise. At a time when huge stealth attacks on companies like Sony Pictures, JPMorgan Chase and Home Depot attract attention, less noticed is a growing cottage industry of hackers hired by ordinary people for much smaller acts of espionage. A new website, called Hacker’s List, seeks to match hackers with people looking to enter email accounts, take down unflattering photos from a website or gain access to a company’s database. In less than three months of operation, over 500 hacking jobs have been put out to bid on the site, with hackers vying for the right to do the dirty work. It is done anonymously, with the website’s operator collecting a fee on each completed assignment. The site offers to hold a customer’s payment in escrow until the task is completed. In just the last few days, offers to hire hackers at prices ranging from $100 to $5,000 have come in from around the globe on Hacker’s List, which opened for business in early November. For instance, a bidder who claimed to be living in Australia would be willing to pay up to $2,000 to get a list of clients from a competitor’s database, according to a recent post by the bidder. ‘‘I want the client lists from a competitors database. I want to know who their customers are and how much they are charging them,’’ the bidder wrote. Others posting job offers on the website were looking for hackers to scrub the Internet of embarrassing photos and stories, retrieve a lost password or change a school grade. The rather matter-of-fact nature of the job postings on Hacker’s List shows just how commonplace low-profile hacking has become and the challenge such activity presents for law enforcement at a time when federal and state authorities are concerned about data security. Hacking into individual email or social media accounts occurs on a fairly regular basis, according to computer security experts and law enforcement officials. In September, the Internet was abuzz when hackers posted nude photos of female celebrities online. It is not clear just how successful Hacker’s List will prove to be. A review of job postings found many that had yet to receive a bid from a hacker. Roughly 40 hackers have registered with the website, and there are 844 registered job posters. From the posts, it is hard to tell how many of the offers are legitimate. ...Read more

How to get over a breakup

How to get over a breakup? Journaling? Does it make hurt feelings worse or better? Psychologist James W. Pennebaker feels that when people are given the opportunity to write about emotional upheavals, they often experience improved health.’’ Talking about it? Ms. Larson and Dr. Sbarra performed a few exercises. The speaking exercise helped people  because ‘‘it improved their sense of self-independent of their former partner. Dr. Sbarra explained, ‘‘and so you touch on it, you think about it, you put it out there, you reflect, and then you sort of create some distance. 

Read an excerpt from the article written by Anna North:

Writing about your feelings, a practice long embraced by teenagers and folk singers, is now attracting attention as a path to good health. And a recent study suggests that reflecting on your emotions could help you get over a breakup. But, one of its authors says, journaling can have its downsides. Is structured self-reflection, as some suggest, a healthy tuneup for the heart and head — or can it make hurt feelings worse? For a study published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, Grace M. Larson, a graduate student at Northwestern University, and David A. Sbarra, a psychology professor at the University of Arizona, Tucson, looked at self-reflection through a speaking exercise. They recruited 210 young people (they ranged in age from 17 to 29) who had recently broken up with their partners, and then split this brokenhearted sample into two groups. One filled out a questionnaire on how they were feeling, then completed a four-minute assignment in which they were asked to talk into a recording device, free-associating in response to questions like, ‘‘When did you first realize you and your partner were headed toward breaking up?’’ This group repeated the same exercise three, six and nine weeks later. The second group filled out the questionnaire only at the beginning and at the end of the nine-week study period (they also did the speaking exercise, but only after filling out their final questionnaires). Ms. Larson and Dr. Sbarra found that the breakup sufferers in the first group experienced greater improvements in ‘‘self-concept clarity’’ than those in the second. Dr. Sbarra defines self-concept clarity as ‘‘the degree to which you understand yourself as a person.’’ He and Ms. Larson measured it by asking subjects how much they agreed with statements like ‘‘I do not feel like myself anymore’’ or ‘‘I have regained my identity.’’ Much of our understanding of ourselves can be bound up in our relationships with our partners, Dr. Sbarra explained. And the speaking exercise helped people because ‘‘it improved their sense of self independent of their former partner.’’ That improved sense of self, in turn, led to reductions in loneliness and ‘‘emotional intrusion.’’ ...Read more

Publisher moves into web courses

The article by Alexandra Alter shows the attempts of a publishing company, Simon and Schuster to try and gain ground in the field of online videos and courses. The company acknowledges the significant fall in sales of books. It offers paid services with personal video sessions as well as live question and answer, hoping to attain supremacy in the market. 

Read an excerpt of the article written by  Alexandra Alter:

Simon & Schuster is making a push into paid online video, with a new website offering online courses from popular health, finance and self-help authors. The cost of the first batch of online courses ranges from $25 to $85 and includes workbooks and access to live question-and-answer sessions with three authors: Dr. David B. Agus, the best-selling author of ‘‘The End of Illness’’; Zhena Muzyka, who wrote the self-help book ‘‘Life by the Cup’’; and Tosha Silver, the author of the spiritual advice book ‘‘Outrageous Openness.’’ The courses will be available on the authors’ individual websites and on the company’s new site, SimonSays. ‘‘Today’s consumers have made it plain that they want and expect more from authors than just books,’’ Carolyn Reidy, president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster, said in a statement. ‘‘This initiative is also another way for us to expand what Simon & Schuster can provide to our authors, building audiences for their books and creating new revenue streams.’’ With the online courses, Simon & Schuster aims to tackle two problems facing authors and publishers: finding new business opportunities in a sluggish book market and grabbing the attention of readers who are increasingly distracted by social media and free online content. And book sales have flagged. ...Read more

The curse of early marriage

Is an early marriage a boon or bane? What’s the difference between getting married early and getting married too young? The society in Dhaka, among other cities, believes that a daughter-in-law is someone to be scrutinized and a son-in-law to be exalted. Whether married early or late, a daughter-in-law’s status is reduced in her own house and her husband’s house once she is married. Young brides often lose out on their careers, education etc. once they tie the knot. It also gives rise to a series of social and health issues. Tahmima Anam feels that there is long way to go to reverse the age-old assumption that an adolescent girl is a problem to which the solution is marriage.

Read an excerpt of the article written by TAHMIMA ANAM :

It’s wedding season in Dhaka. The invitations have gone out — thick, gilded envelopes inviting people to functions at fancy hotels. Apartment buildings, sometimes even entire city streets, are festooned with fairy lights. A school friend of mine (I can’t use her name) married when we were both in our 20s. It was, by all accounts, a thoroughly modern love match. She had known the groom since high school; they had both attended college on the East Coast of the United States, and returned to Dhaka after completing their degrees. It was a fancy wedding, with imported flowers, D.J.s, matching outfits for the entire wedding party, a hotel reception, a three-tiered wedding cake and a honeymoon in Bali. As wedding gifts, they received a car and a furnished apartment. A few weeks after the wedding, my friend told me a story I’ve never forgotten. She said she had gone to her in-laws’ house for lunch and that her mother-in-law had cooked shrimp curry, a favorite of the newlywed couple. As the dishes were served, her husband’s mother announced: ‘‘Make sure you give the biggest shrimp to my son.’’ This surprised my friend, but she smiled obediently, as one is supposed to do in these situations, and served up the biggest shrimp to her husband. A week later, they were invited to lunch at her parents’ house. Shrimp curry was again on the menu. This time, it was her own mother who said, ‘‘Give the biggest shrimp to your husband.’’ In my view, this was the beginning of the end of my friend’s claim to equality. Perhaps that sounds petty — what’s a couple of shrimp? — but the story hints at a greater injustice. When my friend went to her in-laws’ house, she was asked to make a show of serving her husband when he was perfectly capable of serving himself, in a house where, technically, she was the guest and he the host. And then, even in her own home, her status was reduced. Equality, it seems, ends at the wedding gate. You couldn’t call her match an ‘‘early marriage’’ — that term is reserved for women who marry below the legal age of 18 (as a majority here do, some as young as 12) — but I believe she married too young. She was educated, chose her own husband, and went on to have a successful career. Yet there is a subtle form of hegemony masked by the pomp of a lavish wedding and a pretense of equality. And it dictates that a daughter-in-law is someone to be scrutinized and a son-in-law to be exalted. A recent study by the development organization Plan Bangladesh and the nonprofit International Center for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, showed that 64 percent of women aged 20-24 were married before the age of 18.  ...Read more

Ukraine's Facebook warriors

Ms. Anna Sandalova is a rising star of Ukraine and its soldiers. She uses facebook as a source to reach out to fellow Ukrainians to raise money and buy equipment for their underfunded army. David Patrikarakos writes that social Media, not so surprisingly, is the most trusted source of events and recent occurrences in Ukraine. It is also a means to take action. In its 2013 Corruption Perceptions Index, the independent research organization Transparency International ranked Ukraine 144th. The key is to fund the people, not just the government.

Read an excerpt of the article written by David Patrikarakos :

At an army checkpoint near the occupied city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, Lt. Col. Natalia Semeniuk approached a convoy of two minibuses that had just arrived from Kiev. Slung over her shoulder was an AK-47 assault rifle. Clumps of long, brown hair poked out from beneath the beanie she wore to guard against the cold, which had dropped to about minus-20 degrees Fahrenheit. Colonel Semeniuk was meeting with Anna Sandalova, a former public relations executive and a founder of Help the Army of Ukraine, a foundation that uses Facebook to raise money to buy equipment for Ukraine’s desperately underfunded army. Ms. Sandalova has become something of a star in her country, especially to its soldiers. She supplies them with everything from body armor to night-vision goggles, to sleeping bags and food. Since her group was established in March, it has raised over $1.3 million, Ms. Sandalova told me, for the fight against the pro-Russian separatists who have occupied large parts of eastern Ukraine. An overwhelming majority of the money is crowdfunded from the Ukrainian people through Facebook. The process is simple: Ms. Sandalova liaises with army divisions fighting in the field. They tell her what they need and she posts their requests to Facebook. People donate via bank transfer into the foundation’s account, and Ms. Sandalova and her colleagues then drive the goods to eastern Ukraine personally. That day, the minibuses were filled to bursting. Clad in body armor and a helmet, Ms. Sandalova followed Colonel Semeniuk to a Ukrainian Army camp in the forest near Donetsk to make her first delivery. Canvas tents dotted the area, erected among thickets of trees covered with snow. Soldiers huddled together, talking and smoking. Some helped unload several mobile shower units. Dozens of these volunteer groups have sprung up as the fighting has intensified. ‘‘It’s all about networks,’’ Ms. Sandalova explained. ...Read more

The problem with meaning

What does a meaningful life even mean? John Gardner believes that meaning is something that we build into our life, out of our past, affections, loyalties, experiences etc. Is a meaningful life full of material wealth or inner happiness? David Brooks writes that happiness is about receiving and meaningfulness is about giving. It is built of emotion and one cannot judge another person’s emotions, hence their concept of meaningfulness. The author concludes by stating that meaningfulness is a pure and self-regarding feeling, the NutraSweet of the inner life. 

Read an excerpt of the article written by David Brooks:

Not long ago, a friend sent me a speech that the great civic leader John Gardner gave to the Stanford Alumni Association 61 years after he graduated from that college. The speech is chock-full of practical wisdom. I especially liked this passage: ‘‘The things you learn in maturity aren’t simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You learn not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions. You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent but pays off on character. ‘‘You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you; they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.’’ Gardner goes on in this wise way. And then, at the end, he goes into a peroration about leading a meaningful life. ‘‘Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you. ... You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life.’’ Gardner puts ‘‘meaning’’ at the apogee of human existence. His speech reminded me how often we’ve heard that word over the past decades. As my Times colleague April Lawson puts it, ‘‘meaning’’ has become the stand-in concept for everything the soul yearns for and seeks. It is one of the few phrases acceptable in modern parlance to describe a fundamentally spiritual need. Yet what do we mean when we use the word meaning? The first thing we mean is that life should be about more than material success. The person leading a meaningful life has found some way of serving others that leads to a feeling of significance. Second, a meaningful life is more satisfying than a merely happy life. Happiness is about enjoying the present; meaning is about dedicating oneself to the future. Happiness is about receiving; meaningfulness is about giving. Happiness is about upbeat moods and nice experiences. People leading meaningful lives experience a deeper sense of satisfaction. In this way, meaning is an uplifting state of consciousness. It’s what you feel when you’re serving things beyond self. Yet it has to be said, as commonly used today, the word is flabby and vacuous, the product of a culture that has grown inarticulate about inner life. Let me put it this way: If we look at the people in history who achieved great things — like Nelson Mandela or Albert Schweitzer or Abraham Lincoln — it wasn’t because they wanted to bathe luxuriously in their own sense of meaningfulness. They had objective and eternally true standards of justice and injustice. They were indignant when those eternal standards were violated. ...Read more

Get to know yourself in social media

Numbers play an important role in todays world. Mainly to count the number of retweets, facebook likes or instagram followers. Our lives are centred around social media. However, the content posted by a lot of people on social networking site is vituperative, crass and critical. It only channels anger and gives way to insult. The article introduces an app call ThinkUp which tracks your social media account and gives vital information about it. ThinkUp shows the image that one is portraying on a social media site which comes across as harsh reality. Through personal experience, the author, Farhad Manjoo, says that the application helped him retweet and give importance to more insightful words. In modern times, where facebook helps employers with background checks, the need for this application is further amplified. 

Read an excerpt of the article written by Farhad Manjoo:   

Anil Dash, a longtime tech entrepreneur and blogger, was recently studying a list of the top words he had used on Twitter over the course of a month during the fall. Mr. Dash has half a million followers on Twitter, and like a lot of people in tech and media circles, he uses the social network to chat with colleagues, to pontificate about technology, politics and pop culture, and to participate in a lot of in jokes. Over the years Mr. Dash has also found himself in the middle of some of the most loaded controversies that have roiled that network. But when he looked at the list of his most-used words for that month, he decided that many of his tweets were too combative, and he wasn’t proud of that. ‘‘A lot of it was me dealing with ‘gamergate’ folks,’’ he said in an interview, referring to the past year’s antifeminist activist campaign by some video game enthusiasts. ‘‘I’m like: ‘God, I’m wasting my life. Why am I spending time on this? There are so many other things I could be doing.’’’ But, he added: ‘‘Seeing it was a revelation. I decided I’m just not doing it anymore. I immediately blocked five people, and it made my life better in 10 seconds.’’ Mr. Dash has been thinking about his behavior on social media for a while. Together with Gina Trapani, the former editor of the blog Lifehacker, he is a co-founder of ThinkUp, a year-old subscription service that analyzes how people comport themselves on Twitter and Facebook, with the goal of helping them become more thoughtful, less reflexive, more empathetic and more professional — over all, better behaved. In addition to a list of people’s most-used words and other straightforward stats like follower counts, ThinkUp shows subscribers more unusual information such as how often they thank and congratulate people, how frequently they swear, whose voices they tend to amplify and which posts get the biggest reaction and from whom. Some of this may sound trivial. But after using ThinkUp for about six months, I’ve found it to be an indispensable guide to how I navigate social networks. Every morning the service delivers an email packed with information, and in its weighty thoroughness, it reminds you that what you do on Twitter and Facebook can change your life, and other people’s lives, in important, sometimes unforeseen ways. ThinkUp is something like Elf on the Shelf for digitally addled adults — a constant reminder that someone is watching you, and that you’re being judged. That is the point. ‘‘The goal is to make you act like less of a jerk online,’’ Ms. Trapani said. ‘‘The big goal is to create mindfulness and awareness, and also behavioral change.’’ She pointed out that people often tweet and update without any perspective about themselves. That’s because Facebook and Twitter, as others have observed, have a way of infecting our brains. ...Read more

Challenging the ‘you-can- do-it’ vibe

Why should we always think positive? Is blind optimism the key to success? Dr. Oettingen disagrees. It just lowers blood pressure, he argues. He developed a technique called mental contrasting. The art to achieve our goals is to not only imagine achieving them, but also considering the barriers that could prevent them from achieving. He also developed an app called WOOP- wish, outcome, obstacle, plan. Dr. Friedman wonders to what extent would mental contrasting be affective for patients who suffer from depression, anxiety etc.  

Read an excerpt of the article written by Richard A. Friedman:

Ever hear the joke about the guy who dreams of winning the lottery? After years of desperate fantasizing, he cries out for God’s help. Down from heaven comes God’s advice: ‘‘Would you buy a ticket already?!’’ This starry-eyed dreamer is, like so many of us, a believer in old-fashioned positive thinking: Find your dream, wish for it, and success will be yours. Not quite, according to Gabriele Oettingen, a psychology professor at New York University and the University of Hamburg, who uses this joke to illustrate the limitations of the power of positive thinking. In her smart, lucid book, ‘‘Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation,’’ Dr. Oettingen critically re-examines positive thinking and gives readers a more nuanced — and useful — understanding of motivation based on solid empirical evidence. Conventional wisdom has it that dreams are supposed to excite us and inspire us to act. Putting this to the test, Dr. Oettingen recruits a group of undergraduate college students and randomly assigns them to two groups. She instructs the first group to fantasize that the coming week will be a knockout: good grades, great parties and the like; students in the second group are asked to record all their thoughts and daydreams about the coming week, good and bad. Strikingly, the students who were told to think positively felt far less energized and accomplished than those who were instructed to have a neutral fantasy. Blind optimism, it turns out, does not motivate people; instead, as Dr. Oettingen shows in a series of clever experiments, it creates a sense of relaxation complacency. ...Read more

Apps for ringing in 2015, and locking in resolutions

We live in a tech-savvy world, where even 4-year-old kids operate the latest apps. And there are never enough apps, that every year we welcome dozens of them. There are apps that even give us live feed of the New Year countdown at Times Square, that contain maps through which we can watch all the different time zones switch over as the clock strikes 12, that track your workout, bike rides and many more!

Read an excerpt of the article written by Kit Eaton:

It can’t be New Year’s Eve without a fair selection of apps to get you to 2015. But first: the party. The celebration in Times Square is one of the most famous in the world, and, of course, there’s an official app. The Times Square Official Ball App connects you to a social media feed about the party, plus a live stream for the ceremony in which the ball drops at midnight. The app has a countdown timer built in that allows you to know when the new year hits New York City. There’s not much more to this well-designed app, but it’s free for iOS and Android. For a more global take, there is the New Year Countdown app by TimeAndDate.com. Part countdown clock, part global timekeeper, it is great for explaining to children how time zones work. The app’s main page shows a countdown for key places in each time zone, starting with Christmas Island/Kiribati. There’s also a map view where you can watch all the different time zones switch over as 2015 arrives. It’s very simple, but charming, and it’s free on iOS. New Year’s resolutions are notoriously hard to keep, but there are apps to help you build and stick to a habit. My favorite of these is Lift, which promises to help you ‘‘Get fit. Get thin. Get rich. Get promoted. Get happy.’’ The motivation comes from the community of Lift users and some coaches. You can chat with any of these people, for advice or cheerleading. The app can also prompt you with reminders. It’s so easy to use that you won’t waste energy trying to figure it out. It’s free for iOS and Android. ...Read more

U.S. releases first look at rating plan for colleges. Education officials face complex task in gauging what constitutes success

Is there a formula based upon which colleges can be ranked? If not, can one be developed? President Obama and his administration are working towards creating one. RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA writes that the basis should be – accessibility, academic performance, affordability, graduates’ incomes etc. the ratings are – good, bad and somewhere between. However, they lack the data and resources to successfully be able to rank programs and this paucity often hampers their progress. 

Read an excerpt of the article written by  RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA :

In a report released on Friday, the Obama administration offered its first public glimpse of a planned system for rating how well colleges perform, saying it intended to group schools into just three broad categories — good, bad and somewhere between. In detailing what elements the system is likely to contain, the Department of Education also revealed how dauntingly complex the project has been, and how it continues to be hampered by the limitations of the data available. The department labeled what the Friday release calls a ‘‘draft framework,’’ much of it subject to change, with a lot of work still to be done before it produces a first version of an actual rating formula. Officials said that first system should become public before the start of the next school year, about eight months away, but even then, it will remain a work in progress, to be upgraded as problems arise and better data become available. Sixteen months ago, President Obama announced an ambitious system to assess each college on accessibility to lower-income students, affordability, students’ academic progress, and how well the students fare in finding good jobs and in paying off student loans. Those ratings could even be tied to the distribution of billions of dollars each year in federal aid, he said. Many critics of higher education have argued for a way of measuring and valuing what college students actually learn. ...Read more

Along with art and jewels, the rich now collect passports

Robert Frank says that it’s been called diversification of passport portfolios. Stock, real estate portfolios, and other forms of investment are not enough for the wealthy investors that they want to maintain passport portfolios now. The. Investors can gain citizenship of a country upon a few specific years of residency and investment in government bonds, property etc. In some cases like Malta, there is no residency requirement; hence it has benefitted the most. There are even some fast-track programs upon higher payment. Countries like Britain, Australia etc. have adopted such practices. They claim to be selling settlement, not citizenship. 

Read an excerpt of the article written by Robert Frank:

Along with stock and real estate portfolios, the global rich are now buying a new form of economic security: passport portfolios. Wealthy investors from around the world are increasingly shopping for visas or citizenship in other countries, hoping for a personal hedge against volatile governments or economies in their home countries. A vast majority are new millionaires and billionaires from emerging-market countries, especially China, Russia and countries in the Middle East. Often, they are shopping for passports or entree to Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia. Experts estimate that these ‘‘economic citizens’’ are spending $2 billion a year on second or third passports and visas. Demand is so strong that governments around the world have started an arms race of sorts for V.I.P. visas, offering ever-faster residencies and passports for ever-higher prices. Over the past year, Britain and several other European countries, along with Australia and Canada, have raised the prices or investment requirements of their so-called golden visas and created a new fast lane for citizenship. ‘‘Wealthy people in fragile countries want to have a second option in a more stable country,’’ said Christian H. Kalin, group chairman of Henley & Partners, a citizenship advisory firm based in London. ‘‘The wealthy already diversify their assets for protection. Now they want to make sure their residency is diversified as well. Why not have a portfolio of passports, too?’’ Opponents say the programs have a downside, including the potential to offer safe harbor to people who made their fortune through corruption or illegal activities. Others say that at a time when immigration and inequality are heated political topics, V.I.P. visas amount to selling citizenship to the rich without bringing many broader benefits to the host country. ‘‘These programs bring huge benefits to the Russian oligarchs or the various Chinese wanting to benefit from the rule of law, good educations and robust capital markets,’’ said David Metcalf, chairman of the British government’s Migration Advisory Committee and a professor emeritus at the London School of Economics. ‘‘But the fundamental question is, What does everyone else get out of it?’’ Last year, Viviane Reding, then the European Commission’s vice president for justice, fundamental rights and citizenship, put it more bluntly in a speech, saying, ‘‘Citizenship must not be up for sale.’’ Even as criticism mounts, governments are cashing in. One of the biggest winners is Malta. ...Read more

Why 2014 is a big deal

The drastic drop in crude oil prices does increase the purchasing power of the public. But it also reduces the demand for healthy alternatives like electric cars. The articles talks about the radical changes 2014 brought with it including major weather alterations and important decisions for a cleaner environment. The article written by Thomas L. Friedman talks about how fracking (a modern technique to extract oil) is reducing the oil prices and intern cause greater pollution. The notes that the same people who invent various methods to reduce environmental degradation are the ones who invent techniques like fracking. After much pondering, the author comes to a conclusion that the year 2014 can be a year of both technological advancement as well as environment sustainability. 

Read an excerpt of the article written by Thomas L. Friedman: 

I was just about to go with a column that started like this: When they write the history of the global response to climate change, 2014 could well be seen as the moment when the balance between action and denial tipped decisively toward action. That’s thanks to the convergence of four giant forces: São Paulo, Brazil, went dry; China and the United States together went green; solar panels went cheap; and Google and Apple went home. But before I could go further, the bottom fell out of the world oil price, and the energy economist Phil Verleger wrote me, saying: ‘‘Fracking is a technological breakthrough like the introduction of the PC. Low-cost producers such as the Saudis will respond to the threat of these increased supplies by holding prices down’’ — hoping the price falls below the cost of fracking and knocks some of those American frackers out. In the meantime, though, he added, sustained low prices for oil and gas would ‘‘retard’’ efforts to sell more climate-friendly, fuel-efficient vehicles that are helped by high oil prices and slow the shift to more climate-friendly electricity generation by wind and solar that is helped by high gas prices. So I guess the lead I have to go with now is: When they write the history of the global response to climate change, 2014 surely would have been seen as the moment when the climate debate ended. Alas, though, world crude oil prices collapsed, making it less likely that the world will do what the International Energy Agency recently told us we must: keep most of the world’s proven oil and gas reserves in the ground. As the I.E.A. warned, ‘‘no more than one-third of proven reserves of fossil fuels can be consumed prior to 2050’’ — otherwise we’ll bust through the limit of a 2-degree Celsius rise in average temperature that scientists believe will unleash truly disruptive ice melt, sea level rise and weather extremes. ...Read more