News Coverage After Debates Matters More Than You Might Think →

Can debates like the one tonight move poll results? Yes, but not in the way you might think.
In 2004, Kim Fridkin and a team of scholars at Arizona State University ran an experiment. They showed some people an entire presidential debate as it was happening, while others saw the debate plus 20 minutes of post-debate media coverage by different news organizations. Some news outlets covered John Kerry more favorably than George W. Bush, and some did the opposite.
People’s assessments of who won the debate — and their evaluations of the candidates more generally — were affected by which media outlet they were assigned to watch after the debate. The favorability of the coverage changed voters’ minds about the debate they had just seen only moments before.

The Neuroscience of Meditation, and the Virtues of Shutting Up →

Meditation and mindfulness practices have and continue to change my life for the better. Frankly, I consider this the most important skill we can teach people.  Yet, we don't. Yet.

In the last few years, the human quest for self-optimization has collided with improving mobile technology to birth more than 100,000 health apps for smartphones. The mobile market research firm Research2Guidance estimates that mHealth apps, as they’re called, will be a $26 billion industry by 2017.
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In theory, having more real-time data about our bodies means we can better mold them according to our will. But in practice, it may not be working out that way. Dr. Des Spence, a general practitioner in Glasgow, Scotland, argued in the British Medical Journal last year that constant self-tracking turns healthy people into “neurotics.”
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But all these interventions are temporary and rely on devices and paid services. They are also relatively unproven. What if the ultimate neuroenhancing biohack is 2,500 years old, requires no equipment and costs nothing?
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A few years ago, a computer scientist and a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona enrolled 45 human-resource managers in a trial: One-third of them took eight weeks of mindfulness-based meditation training, one-third took eight weeks of body relaxation training and one-third had no training at all. All three groups were given “stressful multitasking” tests before and after the eight-week period; those in the mindful-meditation group were able to sustain their focus longer than both other groups and reported feeling less stressed during the test.
The brain changes functionally and structurally all the time, taking in lessons from and responding to the stimulus of daily life. Neuroscientists call this neuroplasticity. But what if you could determine the way your brain changes?

Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the global economy →

On the Sunday talk shows, Trump made variations of the same argument he made in 2012 —  that as president he would be able to bring back lost manufacturing jobs from China and Mexico. If there’s been a policy “theme” to Trump’s campaign — and my colleague David Fahrenthold cogently explains why I put quotes around that word — it’s that past U.S. presidents have been bad trade negotiators and that because of these bad trade deals the rest of the world is somehow fleeing the U.S. manufacturing sector. This is a message he’s delivered again and again and again.
Trump’s message is very appealing to those who genuinely believe this narrative about the U.S. economic decline. It’s also a big lie.
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If you want more evidence, consider Monday’s excellent New York Times story by Hiroko Tabuchi about Chinese textile firms now relocating factories back to the United States. It turns out that rising labor costs in China compared with the United States has improved U.S. competitiveness. According to Tabuchi, “for every $1 required to manufacture in the United States, Boston Consulting estimates that it costs 96 cents to manufacture in China.”
So that means a massive exodus of Chinese jobs coming to the United States, right? Wrong:
The work is highly automated, with the factory’s 32 production lines churning out about 85 tons of yarn a day. Even when Keer opens a second factory next year, it will hire just 500 workers, a fraction of the thousands of workers who toiled at cotton mills across the South for much of the 19th and 20th centuries — a big reason Keer is able to keep costs down.

The smartphone is the new sun →

Today, there are well over 2bn smartphones in use, and there are between 3.5 and 4.5bn people with a mobile phone of some kind, out of only a little over 5bn adults on earth. Over the next few years almost all of the people who don't yet have a phone will get one, and almost all of the phones on earth will become smartphones. A decade ago some of that was subject to debate - today it isn't. What all those people pay for data, and how they charge their phones, may be a challenge, but the smartphone itself is close to a universal product for humanity - the first the tech industry has ever had.
...The smartphone wars mean there's now a firehose of cheap, low-power, ever-more-sophisticated smartphone components available for anyone else to use - it's as though someone dumped a shipping container worth of Lego on the floor and we're working out what to make. In parallel, the contract manufacturers that make all of those smartphones can also make other things with those components. These two factors - the components and the contract manufacturers, together the supply chain -  are behind the explosion of smart devices of every kinds - drones, wearables, internet of things, connected homes, cars, TVs and so on. 

The New Science of Sentencing →

More like "The Bad Science of Sentencing". You don't turn people back from bad behavior by telling them you believe they're likely to continue; that's a self-fulfilling prophecy-in-the-making. This is terribly stupid and evil. Instead, if you have reason to suspect people will fall back into crime, take the enormous amounts of money that would be spent on keeping them locked up longer, and invest that in, oh: jobs programs, training, therapy... Things that have a chance of benefiting society in the long term, instead of further degrading people and making the situation worse.

Criminal sentencing has long been based on the present crime and, sometimes, the defendant’s past criminal record. In Pennsylvania, judges could soon consider a new dimension: the future.
Pennsylvania is on the verge of becoming one of the first states in the country to base criminal sentences not only on what crimes people have been convicted of, but also on whether they are deemed likely to commit additional crimes. As early as next year, judges there could receive statistically derived tools known as risk assessments to help them decide how much prison time — if any — to assign.