The Power of Concentration →

Mindfulness and meditation are the most important skills for a good (fulfilling, rich, peaceful, and peaceable) adult life, in my opinion. I hope one day we make them a routine part of our school curriculum. Until then, they're a good New Years Resolution (hint, hint).

Though the concept originates in ancient Buddhist, Hindu and Chinese traditions, when it comes to experimental psychology, mindfulness is less about spirituality and more about concentration: the ability to quiet your mind, focus your attention on the present, and dismiss any distractions that come your way. The formulation dates from the work of the psychologist Ellen Langer, who demonstrated in the 1970s that mindful thought could lead to improvements on measures of cognitive function and even vital functions in older adults.
Now we’re learning that the benefits may reach further still, and be more attainable, than Professor Langer could have then imagined. Even in small doses, mindfulness can effect impressive changes in how we feel and think — and it does so at a basic neural level.
In 2011, researchers from the University of Wisconsin demonstrated that daily meditation-like thought could shift frontal brain activity toward a pattern that is associated with what cognitive scientists call positive, approach-oriented emotional states — states that make us more likely to engage the world rather than to withdraw from it.
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But mindfulness goes beyond improving emotion regulation. An exercise in mindfulness can also help with that plague of modern existence: multitasking. Of course, we would like to believe that our attention is infinite, but it isn’t. Multitasking is a persistent myth. What we really do is shift our attention rapidly from task to task. Two bad things happen as a result. We don’t devote as much attention to any one thing, and we sacrifice the quality of our attention. When we are mindful, some of that attentional flightiness disappears as if of its own accord.
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Mindfulness training has even been shown to affect the brain’s default network — the network of connections that remains active when we are in a so-called resting state — with regular meditators exhibiting increased resting-state functional connectivity and increased connectivity generally. After a dose of mindfulness, the default network has greater consistent access to information about our internal states and an enhanced ability to monitor the surrounding environment.
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Until recently, our 20s were considered the point when our brain’s wiring was basically complete. But new evidence suggests that not only can we learn into old age, but the structure of our brains can continue to change and develop. In 2006, a team of psychologists demonstrated that the neural activation patterns of older adults (specifically, activation in the prefrontal cortex), began to resemble those of much younger subjects after just five one-hour training sessions on a task of attentional control. Their brains became more efficient at coordinating multiple tasks — and the benefit transferred to untrained activities, suggesting that it was symptomatic of general improvement.
Similar changes have been observed in the default network (the brain’s resting-state activity). In 2012, researchers from Ohio State University demonstrated that older adults who scored higher on mindfulness scales had increased connectivity in their default networks, specifically in two of the brain’s major information processing hubs. And while we already know that this kind of increased connectivity is a very good thing, there’s more to these particular results. The precise areas that show increased connectivity with mindfulness are also known to be pathophysiological sites of Alzheimer’s disease.

Six Confirmation Hearings, Trump News Conference Scheduled on One Day →

In Washington, Republican lawmakers have scheduled confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees next week—with at least six candidates set to testify to senators on the same day. It’s a move that critics say is a clear effort to prevent public scrutiny of Trump’s controversial Cabinet picks... The crush of hearings comes on the same day that Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has scheduled a rapid-fire series of budget items dubbed a "vote-o-rama" that will include votes related to repealing the Affordable Care Act. And topping it off, President-elect Donald Trump has scheduled his first news conference for January 11...

Yes Folks, Trade Really Did Cost Manufacturing Jobs →

Actually, automation is not new. It's called "productivity growth" and has been going on for centuries, often much faster than it is today. As we can see, manufacturing employment remained roughly even, with cyclical ups and downs, from 1970 to 2000. It then plunged as the trade deficit exploded to almost 6.0 percent of GDP in 2005 and 2006 ($1.1 trillion in today's economy).
The basic story is that manufacturing employment was declining as a share of total employment through this whole period and undoubtedly would have continued to do so regardless of what happened with trade. However, the sharp plunge in employment that we saw in the years 2000 to 2007 (pre-crash) was due to the trade deficit.

The clock is ticking on a global shift to the far-right →

Racially-charged nationalist parties have grown across Europe and the Americas the past several years, to the point of gaining seats in legislatures and running for the highest offices. It's possible the current chaos is part of a short-term trend following the global financial meltdown from 2007/8:

One, political polarization and fractionalization rise. The middle hollows out, and parties on the far right benefit more than those on the far left. In fact, on average, the far right sees an increase in vote share of about 30 percent in the five years following a financial crisis.  
Two, governing becomes much harder, precisely because of this splintering. There are more political crises, and there’s more leadership turnover.
And three, social unrest — anti-government demonstrations, strikes, riots — increases. 
These patterns generally do not occur in the wake of normal recessions or major macroeconomic shocks that are not financial in nature. 
“People see financial crises as man-made disasters,” explains Moritz Schularick, an economics professor at the University of Bonn and study co-author. This means that afterward, there is a popular impulse to punish those thought to be responsible. 
The scapegoats are often minorities and elites...
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The one silver lining buried in this depressing study? Right-wing populism may already have peaked. The researchers find that the political effects they document diminish over time, generally reverting back to pre-crisis conditions about 10 years after a crisis.

World War Three, By Mistake →

Good commentary on the current problems with our nuclear weapons regime, from an expert, with some interesting (terrifying) history.

My book “Command and Control” explores how the systems devised to govern the use of nuclear weapons, like all complex technological systems, are inherently flawed. They are designed, built, installed, maintained, and operated by human beings. But the failure of a nuclear command-and-control system can have consequences far more serious than the crash of an online dating site from too much traffic or flight delays caused by a software glitch. Millions of people, perhaps hundreds of millions, could be annihilated inadvertently. “Command and Control” focusses on near-catastrophic errors and accidents in the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union that ended in 1991. The danger never went away. Today, the odds of a nuclear war being started by mistake are low—and yet the risk is growing, as the United States and Russia drift toward a new cold war. The other day, Senator John McCain called Vladimir Putin, the President of the Russian Federation, “a thug, a bully, and a murderer,” adding that anyone who “describes him as anything else is lying.” Other members of Congress have attacked Putin for trying to influence the Presidential election.  On Thursday, Putin warned that Russia would “strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces,” and President-elect Donald Trump has responded with a vow to expand America’s nuclear arsenal.  “Let it be an arms race,” Trump told one of the co-hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”
The harsh rhetoric on both sides increases the danger of miscalculations and mistakes, as do other factors. Close encounters between the military aircraft of the United States and Russia have become routine, creating the potential for an unintended conflict. Many of the nuclear-weapon systems on both sides are aging and obsolete. The personnel who operate those systems often suffer from poor morale and poor training. None of their senior officers has firsthand experience making decisions during an actual nuclear crisis. And today’s command-and-control systems must contend with threats that barely existed during the Cold War: malware, spyware, worms, bugs, viruses, corrupted firmware, logic bombs, Trojan horses, and all the other modern tools of cyber warfare. The greatest danger is posed not by any technological innovation but by a dilemma that has haunted nuclear strategy since the first detonation of an atomic bomb: How do you prevent a nuclear attack while preserving the ability to launch one?

Eight charts that show 2016 wasn't as bad as you think →

The world may be trending toward authoritarianism; hopefully that's temporary, as people push back against it. In the meantime, while the media played up the chaos, violent deaths (from war and crime) have fallen, global carbon emissions have flatlined, poverty's falling, etc.

2,000 selected for compulsory basic income trial - names to be revealed in late December →

The kind of well-thought-out, small-scale experiment we ought to be doing more of, to see how people actually behave.

Once the trial begins, recipients of the basic income will have to give up their basic unemployment allowance or labour market subsidy, but the basic income will not affect other benefits.
Officials are hoping that participants in the trial will be motivated to find temporary or part-time work. However they will also be observing other aspects of their behaviour in the job market.
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The sample was drawn from a pool about 175,000 persons who make up the target population: in other words, people between the ages of 25 and 58 who are currently being paid a labour market subsidy or basic unemployment allowance in November 2016. The sample does not include unemployed who are still receiving the earnings-related unemployment allowance.
From this group, 2,000 names were chosen to receive 560 euros per month for two years, starting on January 1, 2017.

The Making of an American Terrorist →

How we describe these events, and how we characterize those who commit them matters. There seems to be a double-standard.

After the shootings, much of the media’s early reporting on Dear emphasized that he had no formal connection to anti-abortion groups or other right-wing activists. The New York Times called him a “gentle loner who occasionally unleashed violent acts towards neighbors and women he knew.” Buzzfeed described him as a “loner” who “never smiled.” Because he was white and American and acted alone, Dear did not fit the accepted definition of a terrorist: He was depicted simply as a crazy person, someone whose actions could not be anticipated or prevented. His violence, in short, was spurred by mental illness, not political ideology.
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When Muslim Americans commit acts of terrorism, we hold ISIS and Hezbollah and “radical Islam” accountable for their actions, even if they are mentally unstable, and even if there is no direct connection between them and the groups that inspired them. We call these terrorists “self-radicalized.” It is how we see Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013; and Omar Mateen, who went on a murderous rampage at the Pulse Night Club in Orlando last June; and Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, who killed 86 people and injured 434 at a celebration in Nice on Bastille Day. They did not go to a terrorist training camp, or join an organized cell, or attend an anti-Western madrassa. They learned to hate from a network of web sites and magazines and videotapes. Their madrassa was the media.
“That’s the way many terrorists today are radicalized now,” says Paul Gill, a professor of security and crime science at University College London. “They are not formally recruited or trained. Today’s terrorists go online and find the ideology that fits their personal grievance and passively consume the propaganda.”
Dear became radicalized in precisely the same way. But because the media he listened to advocated war in the name of a Christian god, and argued for an ideology considered “conservative,” he is portrayed as no one’s responsibility. In fact, as I learned from hours of speaking with Dear, the narratives he learned from Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones and Bill O’Reilly and countless far-right web sites meshed perfectly with his paranoid delusions, misogynist beliefs, and violent fantasies. The right-wing media didn’t just tell him what he wanted to hear. They brought authority and detail to a world he was convinced was tormenting him. They were his shelter and his inspiration, his only real community.