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For the most part politic debates never seem to accomplish anything, why is that? Is there a certain reason one side won't listen to the opposition.

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One of the tricks our mind plays is to highlight evidence which confirms what we already believe. If we hear gossip about a rival we tend to think "I knew he was a nasty piece of work"; if we hear the same about our best friend we're more likely to say "that's just a rumour". If you don't trust the government then a change of policy is evidence of their weakness; if you do trust them the same change of policy can be evidence of their inherent reasonableness.

Once you learn about this mental habit - called confirmation bias - you start seeing it everywhere.

This matters when we want to make better decisions. Confirmation bias is OK as long as we're right, but all too often we're wrong, and we only pay attention to the deciding evidence when it's too late.

How we should to protect our decisions from confirmation bias depends on why, psychologically, confirmation bias happens. There are, broadly, two possible accounts and a classic experiment from researchers at Princeton University pits the two against each other, revealing in the process a method for overcoming bias.

One possibility is that we simply have a blindspot in our imagination for the ways the world could be different

The first theory of confirmation bias is the most common. It's the one you can detect in expressions like "You just believe what you want to believe", or "He would say that, wouldn't he?" or when the someone is accused of seeing things a particular way because of who they are, what their job is or which friends they have. Let's call this the motivational theory of confirmation bias. It has a clear prescription for correcting the bias: change people's motivations and they'll stop being biased.

The alternative theory of confirmation bias is more subtle. The bias doesn't exist because we only believe what we want to believe, but instead because we fail to ask the correct questions about new information and our own beliefs. This is a less neat theory, because there could be one hundred reasons why we reason incorrectly - everything from limitations of memory to inherent faults of logic. One possibility is that we simply have a blindspot in our imagination for the ways the world could be different from how we first assume it is. Under this account the way to correct confirmation bias is to give people a strategy to adjust their thinking. We assume people are already motivated to find out the truth, they just need a better method. Let's call this the cognition theory of confirmation bias.

Confirmatory evidence strengthened people's views, as you'd expect, but so did disconfirmatory evidence

Thirty years ago, Charles Lord and colleagues published a classic experiment which pitted these two methods against each other. Their study used a persuasion experiment which previously had shown a kind of confirmation bias they called 'biased assimilation'. Here, participants were recruited who had strong pro- or anti-death penalty views and were presented with evidence that seemed to support the continuation or abolition of the death penalty. Obviously, depending on what you already believe, this evidence is either confirmatory or disconfirmatory. Their original finding showed that the nature of the evidence didn't matter as much as what people started out believing. Confirmatory evidence strengthened people's views, as you'd expect, but so did disconfirmatory evidence. That's right, anti-death penalty people became more anti-death penalty when shown pro-death penalty evidence (and vice versa). A clear example of biased reasoning.

For their follow-up study, Lord and colleagues re-ran the biased assimilation experiment, but testing two types of instructions for assimilating evidence about the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent for murder. The motivational instructions told participants to be "as objective and unbiased as possible", to consider themselves "as a judge or juror asked to weigh all of the evidence in a fair and impartial manner". The alternative, cognition-focused, instructions were silent on the desired outcome of the participants' consideration, instead focusing only on the strategy to employ: "Ask yourself at each step whether you would have made the same high or low evaluations had exactly the same study produced results on the other side of the issue." So, for example, if presented with a piece of research that suggested the death penalty lowered murder rates, the participants were asked to analyse the study's methodology and imagine the results pointed the opposite way.

They called this the "consider the opposite" strategy, and the results were striking. Instructed to be fair and impartial, participants showed the exact same biases when weighing the evidence as in the original experiment. Pro-death penalty participants thought the evidence supported the death penalty. Anti-death penalty participants thought it supported abolition. Wanting to make unbiased decisions wasn't enough. The "consider the opposite" participants, on the other hand, completely overcame the biased assimilation effect - they weren't driven to rate the studies which agreed with their preconceptions as better than the ones that disagreed, and didn't become more extreme in their views regardless of which evidence they read.

The finding is good news for our faith in human nature. It isn't that we don't want to discover the truth, at least in the microcosm of reasoning tested in the experiment. All people needed was a strategy which helped them overcome the natural human short-sightedness to alternatives.

The moral for making better decisions is clear: wanting to be fair and objective alone isn't enough. What's needed are practical methods for correcting our limited reasoning - and a major limitation is our imagination for how else things might be. If we're lucky, someone else will point out these alternatives, but if we're on our own we can still take advantage of crutches for the mind like the "consider the opposite" strategy.

--

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Tom Stafford is the author of the ebook For argument's sake: Evidence that reason can change minds is out now. If you have an everyday psychological phenomenon you'd like to see written about in these columns please get in touch with@tomstafford on Twitter, or ideas@idiolect.org.uk.

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How to get people to overcome their bias

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One of the tricks our mind plays is to highlight evidence which confirms what we already believe. If we hear gossip about a rival we tend to think "I knew he was a nasty piece of work"; if we hear the same about our best friend we're more likely to say "that's just a rumour".

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The percentage of obese children has tripled since the 1970s.

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Who has the right to threat the land of Native Americans and expand the oil pipeline going through their land?

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Native tribes unite against oil pipeline expansion

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Native American tribes in Washington state and British Columbia are joining forces against the proposed expansion of a Canadian oil pipeline. The tribes say the move would threaten their way of life, as well as those of their treasured orcas.

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Why is it that the world’s scientists don’t talk about animal agriculture, the biggest impact on the environment?

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As eye-opening as "Blackfish" and as inspiring as "An Inconvenient Truth". A new cut from executive producer Leonardo DiCaprio now exclusively streaming on Netflix.

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Do you believe baseball players are overpaid?

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I write about the intersection between sports and culture. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Perhaps no tidbit illustrates how awash Major League Baseball teams are with cash than this: David Price, who signed a seven-year, $217 million contract with the Red Sox last week, will make more money throughout the duration of his deal than every NFL player in history besides Peyton Manning.

But at least Price is a former Cy Young Award winner. Jeff Samardzija, who allowed more runs than any other pitcher in the American League last season, will get paid more money next year than Steph Curry, Kevin Durant and Adrian Peterson thanks to his recently inked five-year, $90 million contract.

What's going on here?

Over the last several years, a perfect confluence of events have contributed to this atmospheric rise in baseball salaries. Though MLB may be losing its grip nationally, business has never been better.
Revenue Is Booming
For the 13th consecutive year, MLB saw its revenue increase in 2015. As first reported by SportsMoney's Maury Brown, MLB generated roughly $9.5 billion in revenue this year, which is $500 million more than it produced in 2014. The average value of an MLB franchise is currently $1.2 billion.

The biggest reason for this influx of money is the proliferation of lucrative media rights agreements. On top of MLB's $12.4 billion TV deal with FOX and TBS, many teams have inked their own $1+ billion TV contracts in recent years.

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Why Are Baseball Players Getting Paid So Much Money?

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Share to email Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin Share to google I write about the intersection between sports and culture. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

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From my first steps onto campus, I was determined to make my Nigerian parents proud and to seize the opportunities they had left their native country for. I had graduated high school in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada's most eastern province, at the top of my class and as student body vice president. Being the single black student in a school of 600 had been immaterial to me. I had not developed a sense of black identity because, simply, I did not have to.

So here I was at the University of Western Ontario, the sole black on a dormitory floor made up mostly of white students from Toronto and a few ethnic minorities. It was, for most of us, the first time we were living away from home, and we spent time asking honest and sometimes naïve questions about one another, including ones about religion and race. It proved to be a safe, collegial space to check our biases. Or so I thought.

A few months in, we received an email notification that our exam grades were available. One by one, the pre-meds among us logged onto the reporting system to access our scores and, following the lead of one floor mate, shared them aloud. Each of us had already fallen prey to the paranoia that even a single mediocre grade would compromise our chances of medical school acceptance.

"76!" a friend proclaimed, appearing satisfied. "80" from my roommate. "74" from another. "72," lamented another. Then I nervously stepped up to enter my login. "94!" I declared in relief.

Most of the others donned looks of approval or surprise, while one, an Indo-Canadian business student, was notably shocked. "Are you trying to be white, Bolu?!" he jeered. The others laughed boisterously at the question.

I was confused. Surely, performing well didn't make me any less black, did it? This was the first time I saw myself as a racialized minority in the context of an educational institution. Some of my peers, it seems, were subscribing to the stereotype of black underachievement.

Throughout my undergraduate years I would hear comments of derision about "acting white." Coming from black and white colleagues alike, this quip was particularly common when I decided to pass up social activities to study. I would often succumb to peer pressure in the hope of fitting in, and I found myself second-guessing my dedication toward academics.

Similar experiences were described in the work of another man of Nigerian ancestry. In his 2003 book "Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb," John U. Ogbu, then a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, described how black youth are often seen as betraying their cultural identities by aspiring to academic success.

After months of fieldwork in the affluent Shaker Heights suburb of Cleveland, he had developed what he called the "cultural-ecological theory of academic disengagement": The education gap between black and white students could be partly explained by students underperforming to avoid derision by their peers. It was indeed a controversial finding.

Dr. Ogbu, who died a few months after his book was published, classified immigrants like my family - those who chose to migrate to settler societies like Canada and the United States - as voluntary minorities who accepted many aspects of the culture they had chosen.

In contrast, he described involuntary minorities - indigenous people and those who came here as part of the slave trade - as suffering from marginalization and discrimination for multiple generations. Some of these individuals, he found, were less trusting of educational institutions, which they saw as part of the system that contributed to their historical disenfranchisement. They clung to manners of speech and dress that were distinct from the (predominantly white) mainstream and that fostered a disregard, even a disdain, for assimilation.

Dr. Ogbu's theories rang true at times in my own life as I continued to struggle with the balancing act: Would I slack off or go to the library in the evenings to pre-read for the next physiology lecture and risk being caught "acting white"? (It was Dr. Ogbu who popularized the phrase in the mid-1980s, to explain why black students might spurn behaviors associated with achievement.) How much would I have to lower the grades I reported to my friends when they would pry, to fit their preconceptions?

Both my grades and my identity were slipping.

But toward the end of my undergraduate years, I found myself spending time with other first-generation Canadians from Africa. Like me, many of them understood that agency and dedication would propel them farther than foreign names and pigmentation would pull them back. The doors that advanced education promised to open were a primary reason our parents emigrated to North America. My new friends and I were not trying to conform to what peers, strangers or society believed a black male should be.

I attended medical school in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. Commonly, minority physicians-in-training report tremendous support from their communities. In his memoir, "Black Man in a White Coat," the African-American psychiatrist Dr. Damon Tweedy describes receiving positive and encouraging reactions when medical staff members saw the "young brother" sporting a white coat during his medical training at Duke in the late 1990s.

This would be the case for me as well.

Unfortunately, it is not always the case for others, who have the ability to succeed but succumb to social pressure. Minorities with aspirations of upward mobility have considerable barriers holding them back. Systemic factors like differential access to high-quality child care, lower socio-economic status overall and poorly funded schools account for much of the educational achievement gap between black students and the general population. Peer pressure should not be one of them.

Every step I took, from undergraduate training to medical school to competitive postgraduate training programs, yielded fewer and fewer colleagues of my complexion - a pattern documented in a recent article by Dr. Amit G. Pandya and other members of the American Academy of Dermatology diversity task force. It is for this reason that the academy runs a mentorship program that engages medical students of color in the hope of creating an ethnically diverse cohort of dermatologists.

The University of Toronto's Community of Support initiative recognizes the importance of a health care community that reflects the diversity of the Canadian population, with black and indigenous students a priority. Through its mentoring program I work with black students who aspire to become physicians. Many of them tell me that interacting with a physician who looks like them encourages them to continue their own journeys.

I tell them what my immigrant parents told me: to surpass expectations placed upon them by institutions, friends and themselves. Because achievement has no color.

Boluwaji Ogunyemi is chief dermatology resident at the University of British Columbia.

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When 'Black Like Me' Means 'White Like Them'

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From my first steps onto campus, I was determined to make my Nigerian parents proud and to seize the opportunities they had left their native country for. I had graduated high school in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada's most eastern province, at the top of my class and as student body vice president.

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“If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”

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The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code - known internally as the Guest ID number - that keeps tabs on everything they buy. "If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we've sent you or visit our Web site, we'll record it and link it to your Guest ID," Pole said. "We want to know everything we can."

Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you've moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit. Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you've ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own. (In a statement, Target declined to identify what demographic information it collects or purchases.) All that information is meaningless, however, without someone to analyze and make sense of it. That's where Andrew Pole and the dozens of other members of Target's Guest Marketing Analytics department come in.

Almost every major retailer, from grocery chains to investment banks to the U.S. Postal Service, has a "predictive analytics" department devoted to understanding not just consumers' shopping habits but also their personal habits, so as to more efficiently market to them. "But Target has always been one of the smartest at this," says Eric Siegel, a consultant and the chairman of a conference called Predictive Analytics World. "We're living through a golden age of behavioral research. It's amazing how much we can figure out about how people think now."

The reason Target can snoop on our shopping habits is that, over the past two decades, the science of habit formation has become a major field of research in neurology and psychology departments at hundreds of major medical centers and universities, as well as inside extremely well financed corporate labs. "It's like an arms race to hire statisticians nowadays," said Andreas Weigend, the former chief scientist at Amazon.com. "Mathematicians are suddenly sexy." As the ability to analyze data has grown more and more fine-grained, the push to understand how daily habits influence our decisions has become one of the most exciting topics in clinical research, even though most of us are hardly aware those patterns exist. One study from Duke University estimated that habits, rather than conscious decision-making, shape 45 percent of the choices we make every day, and recent discoveries have begun to change everything from the way we think about dieting to how doctors conceive treatments for anxiety, depression and addictions.

This research is also transforming our understanding of how habits function across organizations and societies. A football coach named Tony Dungy propelled one of the worst teams in the N.F.L. to the Super Bowl by focusing on how his players habitually reacted to on-field cues. Before he became Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill overhauled a stumbling conglomerate, Alcoa, and turned it into a top performer in the Dow Jones by relentlessly attacking one habit - a specific approach to worker safety - which in turn caused a companywide transformation. The Obama campaign has hired a habit specialist as its "chief scientist" to figure out how to trigger new voting patterns among different constituencies.

Researchers have figured out how to stop people from habitually overeating and biting their nails. They can explain why some of us automatically go for a jog every morning and are more productive at work, while others oversleep and procrastinate. There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell.

Inside the brain-and-cognitive-sciences department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are what, to the casual observer, look like dollhouse versions of surgical theaters. There are rooms with tiny scalpels, small drills and miniature saws. Even the operating tables are petite, as if prepared for 7-year-old surgeons. Inside those shrunken O.R.'s, neurologists cut into the skulls of anesthetized rats, implanting tiny sensors that record the smallest changes in the activity of their brains.

An M.I.T. neuroscientist named Ann Graybiel told me that she and her colleagues began exploring habits more than a decade ago by putting their wired rats into a T-shaped maze with chocolate at one end. The maze was structured so that each animal was positioned behind a barrier that opened after a loud click. The first time a rat was placed in the maze, it would usually wander slowly up and down the center aisle after the barrier slid away, sniffing in corners and scratching at walls. It appeared to smell the chocolate but couldn't figure out how to find it. There was no discernible pattern in the rat's meanderings and no indication it was working hard to find the treat.

The probes in the rats' heads, however, told a different story. While each animal wandered through the maze, its brain was working furiously. Every time a rat sniffed the air or scratched a wall, the neurosensors inside the animal's head exploded with activity. As the scientists repeated the experiment, again and again, the rats eventually stopped sniffing corners and making wrong turns and began to zip through the maze with more and more speed. And within their brains, something unexpected occurred: as each rat learned how to complete the maze more quickly, its mental activity decreased. As the path became more and more automatic - as it became a habit - the rats started thinking less and less.

This process, in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine, is called "chunking." There are dozens, if not hundreds, of behavioral chunks we rely on every day. Some are simple: you automatically put toothpaste on your toothbrush before sticking it in your mouth. Some, like making the kids' lunch, are a little more complex. Still others are so complicated that it's remarkable to realize that a habit could have emerged at all.

Take backing your car out of the driveway. When you first learned to drive, that act required a major dose of concentration, and for good reason: it involves peering into the rearview and side mirrors and checking for obstacles, putting your foot on the brake, moving the gearshift into reverse, removing your foot from the brake, estimating the distance between the garage and the street while keeping the wheels aligned, calculating how images in the mirrors translate into actual distances, all while applying differing amounts of pressure to the gas pedal and brake.

Now, you perform that series of actions every time you pull into the street without thinking very much. Your brain has chunked large parts of it. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any repeated behavior into a habit, because habits allow our minds to conserve effort. But conserving mental energy is tricky, because if our brains power down at the wrong moment, we might fail to notice something important, like a child riding her bike down the sidewalk or a speeding car coming down the street. So we've devised a clever system to determine when to let a habit take over. It's something that happens whenever a chunk of behavior starts or ends - and it helps to explain why habits are so difficult to change once they're formed, despite our best intentions.

To understand this a little more clearly, consider again the chocolate-seeking rats. What Graybiel and her colleagues found was that, as the ability to navigate the maze became habitual, there were two spikes in the rats' brain activity - once at the beginning of the maze, when the rat heard the click right before the barrier slid away, and once at the end, when the rat found the chocolate. Those spikes show when the rats' brains were fully engaged, and the dip in neural activity between the spikes showed when the habit took over. From behind the partition, the rat wasn't sure what waited on the other side, until it heard the click, which it had come to associate with the maze. Once it heard that sound, it knew to use the "maze habit," and its brain activity decreased. Then at the end of the routine, when the reward appeared, the brain shook itself awake again and the chocolate signaled to the rat that this particular habit was worth remembering, and the neurological pathway was carved that much deeper.

The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop - cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward - becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving emerges. What's unique about cues and rewards, however, is how subtle they can be. Neurological studies like the ones in Graybiel's lab have revealed that some cues span just milliseconds. And rewards can range from the obvious (like the sugar rush that a morning doughnut habit provides) to the infinitesimal (like the barely noticeable - but measurable - sense of relief the brain experiences after successfully navigating the driveway). Most cues and rewards, in fact, happen so quickly and are so slight that we are hardly aware of them at all. But our neural systems notice and use them to build automatic behaviors.

Habits aren't destiny - they can be ignored, changed or replaced. But it's also true that once the loop is established and a habit emerges, your brain stops fully participating in decision-making. So unless you deliberately fight a habit - unless you find new cues and rewards - the old pattern will unfold automatically.

"We've done experiments where we trained rats to run down a maze until it was a habit, and then we extinguished the habit by changing the placement of the reward," Graybiel told me. "Then one day, we'll put the reward in the old place and put in the rat and, by golly, the old habit will re-emerge right away. Habits never really disappear."

Luckily, simply understanding how habits work makes them easier to control. Take, for instance, a series of studies conducted a few years ago at Columbia University and the University of Alberta. Researchers wanted to understand how exercise habits emerge. In one project, 256 members of a health- insurance plan were invited to classes stressing the importance of exercise. Half the participants received an extra lesson on the theories of habit formation (the structure of the habit loop) and were asked to identify cues and rewards that might help them develop exercise routines.

The results were dramatic. Over the next four months, those participants who deliberately identified cues and rewards spent twice as much time exercising as their peers. Other studies have yielded similar results. According to another recent paper, if you want to start running in the morning, it's essential that you choose a simple cue (like always putting on your sneakers before breakfast or leaving your running clothes next to your bed) and a clear reward (like a midday treat or even the sense of accomplishment that comes from ritually recording your miles in a log book). After a while, your brain will start anticipating that reward - craving the treat or the feeling of accomplishment - and there will be a measurable neurological impulse to lace up your jogging shoes each morning.

Our relationship to e-mail operates on the same principle. When a computer chimes or a smartphone vibrates with a new message, the brain starts anticipating the neurological "pleasure" (even if we don't recognize it as such) that clicking on the e-mail and reading it provides. That expectation, if unsatisfied, can build until you find yourself moved to distraction by the thought of an e-mail sitting there unread - even if you know, rationally, it's most likely not important. On the other hand, once you remove the cue by disabling the buzzing of your phone or the chiming of your computer, the craving is never triggered, and you'll find, over time, that you're able to work productively for long stretches without checking your in-box.

Some of the most ambitious habit experiments have been conducted by corporate America. To understand why executives are so entranced by this science, consider how one of the world's largest companies, Procter & Gamble, used habit insights to turn a failing product into one of its biggest sellers. P.& G. is the corporate behemoth behind a whole range of products, from Downy fabric softener to Bounty paper towels to Duracell batteries and dozens of other household brands. In the mid-1990s, P.& G.'s executives began a secret project to create a new product that could eradicate bad smells. P.& G. spent millions developing a colorless, cheap-to-manufacture liquid that could be sprayed on a smoky blouse, stinky couch, old jacket or stained car interior and make it odorless. In order to market the product - Febreze - the company formed a team that included a former Wall Street mathematician named Drake Stimson and habit specialists, whose job was to make sure the television commercials, which they tested in Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Boise, Idaho, accentuated the product's cues and rewards just right.

The first ad showed a woman complaining about the smoking section of a restaurant. Whenever she eats there, she says, her jacket smells like smoke. A friend tells her that if she uses Febreze, it will eliminate the odor. The cue in the ad is clear: the harsh smell of cigarette smoke. The reward: odor eliminated from clothes. The second ad featured a woman worrying about her dog, Sophie, who always sits on the couch. "Sophie will always smell like Sophie," she says, but with Febreze, "now my furniture doesn't have to." The ads were put in heavy rotation. Then the marketers sat back, anticipating how they would spend their bonuses. A week passed. Then two. A month. Two months. Sales started small and got smaller. Febreze was a dud.

The panicked marketing team canvassed consumers and conducted in-depth interviews to figure out what was going wrong, Stimson recalled. Their first inkling came when they visited a woman's home outside Phoenix. The house was clean and organized. She was something of a neat freak, the woman explained. But when P.& G.'s scientists walked into her living room, where her nine cats spent most of their time, the scent was so overpowering that one of them gagged.

According to Stimson, who led the Febreze team, a researcher asked the woman, "What do you do about the cat smell?"

"It's usually not a problem," she said.

"Do you smell it now?"

"No," she said. "Isn't it wonderful? They hardly smell at all!"

A similar scene played out in dozens of other smelly homes. The reason Febreze wasn't selling, the marketers realized, was that people couldn't detect most of the bad smells in their lives. If you live with nine cats, you become desensitized to their scents. If you smoke cigarettes, eventually you don't smell smoke anymore. Even the strongest odors fade with constant exposure. That's why Febreze was a failure. The product's cue - the bad smells that were supposed to trigger daily use - was hidden from the people who needed it the most. And Febreze's reward (an odorless home) was meaningless to someone who couldn't smell offensive scents in the first place.

P.& G. employed a Harvard Business School professor to analyze Febreze's ad campaigns. They collected hours of footage of people cleaning their homes and watched tape after tape, looking for clues that might help them connect Febreze to people's daily habits. When that didn't reveal anything, they went into the field and conducted more interviews. A breakthrough came when they visited a woman in a suburb near Scottsdale, Ariz., who was in her 40s with four children. Her house was clean, though not compulsively tidy, and didn't appear to have any odor problems; there were no pets or smokers. To the surprise of everyone, she loved Febreze.

"I use it every day," she said.

"What smells are you trying to get rid of?" a researcher asked.

"I don't really use it for specific smells," the woman said. "I use it for normal cleaning - a couple of sprays when I'm done in a room."

The researchers followed her around as she tidied the house. In the bedroom, she made her bed, tightened the sheet's corners, then sprayed the comforter with Febreze. In the living room, she vacuumed, picked up the children's shoes, straightened the coffee table, then sprayed Febreze on the freshly cleaned carpet.

"It's nice, you know?" she said. "Spraying feels like a little minicelebration when I'm done with a room." At the rate she was going, the team estimated, she would empty a bottle of Febreze every two weeks.

When they got back to P.& G.'s headquarters, the researchers watched their videotapes again. Now they knew what to look for and saw their mistake in scene after scene. Cleaning has its own habit loops that already exist. In one video, when a woman walked into a dirty room (cue), she started sweeping and picking up toys (routine), then she examined the room and smiled when she was done (reward). In another, a woman scowled at her unmade bed (cue), proceeded to straighten the blankets and comforter (routine) and then sighed as she ran her hands over the freshly plumped pillows (reward). P.& G. had been trying to create a whole new habit with Febreze, but what they really needed to do was piggyback on habit loops that were already in place. The marketers needed to position Febreze as something that came at the end of the cleaning ritual, the reward, rather than as a whole new cleaning routine.

The company printed new ads showing open windows and gusts of fresh air. More perfume was added to the Febreze formula, so that instead of merely neutralizing odors, the spray had its own distinct scent. Television commercials were filmed of women, having finished their cleaning routine, using Febreze to spritz freshly made beds and just-laundered clothing. Each ad was designed to appeal to the habit loop: when you see a freshly cleaned room (cue), pull out Febreze (routine) and enjoy a smell that says you've done a great job (reward). When you finish making a bed (cue), spritz Febreze (routine) and breathe a sweet, contented sigh (reward). Febreze, the ads implied, was a pleasant treat, not a reminder that your home stinks.

And so Febreze, a product originally conceived as a revolutionary way to destroy odors, became an air freshener used once things are already clean. The Febreze revamp occurred in the summer of 1998. Within two months, sales doubled. A year later, the product brought in $230 million. Since then Febreze has spawned dozens of spinoffs - air fresheners, candles and laundry detergents - that now account for sales of more than $1 billion a year. Eventually, P.& G. began mentioning to customers that, in addition to smelling sweet, Febreze can actually kill bad odors. Today it's one of the top-selling products in the world.

Andrew Pole was hired by Target to use the same kinds of insights into consumers' habits to expand Target's sales. His assignment was to analyze all the cue-routine-reward loops among shoppers and help the company figure out how to exploit them. Much of his department's work was straightforward: find the customers who have children and send them catalogs that feature toys before Christmas. Look for shoppers who habitually purchase swimsuits in April and send them coupons for sunscreen in July and diet books in December. But Pole's most important assignment was to identify those unique moments in consumers' lives when their shopping habits become particularly flexible and the right advertisement or coupon would cause them to begin spending in new ways.

In the 1980s, a team of researchers led by a U.C.L.A. professor named Alan Andreasen undertook a study of peoples' most mundane purchases, like soap, toothpaste, trash bags and toilet paper. They learned that most shoppers paid almost no attention to how they bought these products, that the purchases occurred habitually, without any complex decision-making. Which meant it was hard for marketers, despite their displays and coupons and product promotions, to persuade shoppers to change.

But when some customers were going through a major life event, like graduating from college or getting a new job or moving to a new town, their shopping habits became flexible in ways that were both predictable and potential gold mines for retailers. The study found that when someone marries, he or she is more likely to start buying a new type of coffee. When a couple move into a new house, they're more apt to purchase a different kind of cereal. When they divorce, there's an increased chance they'll start buying different brands of beer.

Consumers going through major life events often don't notice, or care, that their shopping habits have shifted, but retailers notice, and they care quite a bit. At those unique moments, Andreasen wrote, customers are "vulnerable to intervention by marketers." In other words, a precisely timed advertisement, sent to a recent divorcee or new homebuyer, can change someone's shopping patterns for years.

And among life events, none are more important than the arrival of a baby. At that moment, new parents' habits are more flexible than at almost any other time in their adult lives. If companies can identify pregnant shoppers, they can earn millions.

The only problem is that identifying pregnant customers is harder than it sounds. Target has a baby-shower registry, and Pole started there, observing how shopping habits changed as a woman approached her due date, which women on the registry had willingly disclosed. He ran test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Lotions, for example. Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole's colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date.

As Pole's computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a "pregnancy prediction" score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There's, say, an 87 percent chance that she's pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August. What's more, because of the data attached to her Guest ID number, Target knows how to trigger Jenny's habits. They know that if she receives a coupon via e-mail, it will most likely cue her to buy online. They know that if she receives an ad in the mail on Friday, she frequently uses it on a weekend trip to the store. And they know that if they reward her with a printed receipt that entitles her to a free cup of Starbucks coffee, she'll use it when she comes back again.

In the past, that knowledge had limited value. After all, Jenny purchased only cleaning supplies at Target, and there were only so many psychological buttons the company could push. But now that she is pregnant, everything is up for grabs. In addition to triggering Jenny's habits to buy more cleaning products, they can also start including offers for an array of products, some more obvious than others, that a woman at her stage of pregnancy might need.

Pole applied his program to every regular female shopper in Target's national database and soon had a list of tens of thousands of women who were most likely pregnant. If they could entice those women or their husbands to visit Target and buy baby-related products, the company's cue-routine-reward calculators could kick in and start pushing them to buy groceries, bathing suits, toys and clothing, as well. When Pole shared his list with the marketers, he said, they were ecstatic. Soon, Pole was getting invited to meetings above his paygrade. Eventually his paygrade went up.

At which point someone asked an important question: How are women going to react when they figure out how much Target knows?

"If we send someone a catalog and say, 'Congratulations on your first child!' and they've never told us they're pregnant, that's going to make some people uncomfortable," Pole told me. "We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you're following the law, you can do things where people get queasy."

About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

"My daughter got this in the mail!" he said. "She's still in high school, and you're sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?"

The manager didn't have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man's daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. "I had a talk with my daughter," he said. "It turns out there's been some activities in my house I haven't been completely aware of. She's due in August. I owe you an apology."

When I approached Target to discuss Pole's work, its representatives declined to speak with me. "Our mission is to make Target the preferred shopping destination for our guests by delivering outstanding value, continuous innovation and exceptional guest experience," the company wrote in a statement. "We've developed a number of research tools that allow us to gain insights into trends and preferences within different demographic segments of our guest population." When I sent Target a complete summary of my reporting, the reply was more terse: "Almost all of your statements contain inaccurate information and publishing them would be misleading to the public. We do not intend to address each statement point by point." The company declined to identify what was inaccurate. They did add, however, that Target "is in compliance with all federal and state laws, including those related to protected health information."

When I offered to fly to Target's headquarters to discuss its concerns, a spokeswoman e-mailed that no one would meet me. When I flew out anyway, I was told I was on a list of prohibited visitors. "I've been instructed not to give you access and to ask you to leave," said a very nice security guard named Alex.

Using data to predict a woman's pregnancy, Target realized soon after Pole perfected his model, could be a public-relations disaster. So the question became: how could they get their advertisements into expectant mothers' hands without making it appear they were spying on them? How do you take advantage of someone's habits without letting them know you're studying their lives?

Before I met Andrew Pole, before I even decided to write a book about the science of habit formation, I had another goal: I wanted to lose weight.

I had got into a bad habit of going to the cafeteria every afternoon and eating a chocolate-chip cookie, which contributed to my gaining a few pounds. Eight, to be precise. I put a Post-it note on my computer reading "NO MORE COOKIES." But every afternoon, I managed to ignore that note, wander to the cafeteria, buy a cookie and eat it while chatting with colleagues. Tomorrow, I always promised myself, I'll muster the willpower to resist.

Tomorrow, I ate another cookie.

When I started interviewing experts in habit formation, I concluded each interview by asking what I should do. The first step, they said, was to figure out my habit loop. The routine was simple: every afternoon, I walked to the cafeteria, bought a cookie and ate it while chatting with friends.

Next came some less obvious questions: What was the cue? Hunger? Boredom? Low blood sugar? And what was the reward? The taste of the cookie itself? The temporary distraction from my work? The chance to socialize with colleagues?

Rewards are powerful because they satisfy cravings, but we're often not conscious of the urges driving our habits in the first place. So one day, when I felt a cookie impulse, I went outside and took a walk instead. The next day, I went to the cafeteria and bought a coffee. The next, I bought an apple and ate it while chatting with friends. You get the idea. I wanted to test different theories regarding what reward I was really craving. Was it hunger? (In which case the apple should have worked.) Was it the desire for a quick burst of energy? (If so, the coffee should suffice.) Or, as turned out to be the answer, was it that after several hours spent focused on work, I wanted to socialize, to make sure I was up to speed on office gossip, and the cookie was just a convenient excuse? When I walked to a colleague's desk and chatted for a few minutes, it turned out, my cookie urge was gone.

All that was left was identifying the cue.

Deciphering cues is hard, however. Our lives often contain too much information to figure out what is triggering a particular behavior. Do you eat breakfast at a certain time because you're hungry? Or because the morning news is on? Or because your kids have started eating? Experiments have shown that most cues fit into one of five categories: location, time, emotional state, other people or the immediately preceding action. So to figure out the cue for my cookie habit, I wrote down five things the moment the urge hit:

Where are you? (Sitting at my desk.)

What time is it? (3:36 p.m.)

What's your emotional state? (Bored.)

Who else is around? (No one.)

What action preceded the urge? (Answered an e-mail.)

The next day I did the same thing. And the next. Pretty soon, the cue was clear: I always felt an urge to snack around 3:30.

Once I figured out all the parts of the loop, it seemed fairly easy to change my habit. But the psychologists and neuroscientists warned me that, for my new behavior to stick, I needed to abide by the same principle that guided Procter & Gamble in selling Febreze: To shift the routine - to socialize, rather than eat a cookie - I needed to piggyback on an existing habit. So now, every day around 3:30, I stand up, look around the newsroom for someone to talk to, spend 10 minutes gossiping, then go back to my desk. The cue and reward have stayed the same. Only the routine has shifted. It doesn't feel like a decision, any more than the M.I.T. rats made a decision to run through the maze. It's now a habit. I've lost 21 pounds since then (12 of them from changing my cookie ritual).

After Andrew Pole built his pregnancy-prediction model, after he identified thousands of female shoppers who were most likely pregnant, after someone pointed out that some of those women might be a little upset if they received an advertisement making it obvious Target was studying their reproductive status, everyone decided to slow things down.

The marketing department conducted a few tests by choosing a small, random sample of women from Pole's list and mailing them combinations of advertisements to see how they reacted.

"We have the capacity to send every customer an ad booklet, specifically designed for them, that says, 'Here's everything you bought last week and a coupon for it,' " one Target executive told me. "We do that for grocery products all the time." But for pregnant women, Target's goal was selling them baby items they didn't even know they needed yet.

"With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly," the executive said. "Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We'd put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We'd put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

"And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn't been spied on, she'll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don't spook her, it works."

In other words, if Target piggybacked on existing habits - the same cues and rewards they already knew got customers to buy cleaning supplies or socks - then they could insert a new routine: buying baby products, as well. There's a cue ("Oh, a coupon for something I need!") a routine ("Buy! Buy! Buy!") and a reward ("I can take that off my list"). And once the shopper is inside the store, Target will hit her with cues and rewards to entice her to purchase everything she normally buys somewhere else. As long as Target camouflaged how much it knew, as long as the habit felt familiar, the new behavior took hold.

Soon after the new ad campaign began, Target's Mom and Baby sales exploded. The company doesn't break out figures for specific divisions, but between 2002 - when Pole was hired - and 2010, Target's revenues grew from $44 billion to $67 billion. In 2005, the company's president, Gregg Steinhafel, boasted to a room of investors about the company's "heightened focus on items and categories that appeal to specific guest segments such as mom and baby."

Pole was promoted. He has been invited to speak at conferences. "I never expected this would become such a big deal," he told me the last time we spoke.

A few weeks before this article went to press, I flew to Minneapolis to try and speak to Andrew Pole one last time. I hadn't talked to him in more than a year. Back when we were still friendly, I mentioned that my wife was seven months pregnant. We shop at Target, I told him, and had given the company our address so we could start receiving coupons in the mail. As my wife's pregnancy progressed, I noticed a subtle upswing in the number of advertisements for diapers and baby clothes arriving at our house.

Pole didn't answer my e-mails or phone calls when I visited Minneapolis. I drove to his large home in a nice suburb, but no one answered the door. On my way back to the hotel, I stopped at a Target to pick up some deodorant, then also bought some T-shirts and a fancy hair gel. On a whim, I threw in some pacifiers, to see how the computers would react. Besides, our baby is now 9 months old. You can't have too many pacifiers.

When I paid, I didn't receive any sudden deals on diapers or formula, to my slight disappointment. It made sense, though: I was shopping in a city I never previously visited, at 9:45 p.m. on a weeknight, buying a random assortment of items. I was using a corporate credit card, and besides the pacifiers, hadn't purchased any of the things that a parent needs. It was clear to Target's computers that I was on a business trip. Pole's prediction calculator took one look at me, ran the numbers and decided to bide its time. Back home, the offers would eventually come. As Pole told me the last time we spoke: "Just wait. We'll be sending you coupons for things you want before you even know you want them."

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The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores.

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Alice Goffman: How we're priming some kids for college - and others for prison

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In the United States, two institutions guide teenagers on the journey to adulthood: college and prison. Sociologist Alice Goffman spent six years in a troubled Philadelphia neighborhood and saw first-hand how teenagers of African-American and Latino backgrounds are funneled down the path to prison - sometimes starting with relatively minor infractions.

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How much does it really cost to go Greek?

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Jake Shepp, 18, worked part-time jobs at Sonic, a Hyatt hotel and a Mexican restaurant in Scottsdale, Ariz. to build a $3,500 savings account - and is now planning to use his hard-earned money for Kappa Sigma Fraternity fees at the University of Arizona.

As a prospective member paying out of his own pocket, Shepp says he thought hard before deciding to pay $900 to pledge.

"I told myself I could be in a fraternity, or I could go travel, or I could go buy a bunch of shoes; I could go do whatever I wanted, basically," he says. "But so far I've decided to stick with it because I think it's improved my time here at U of A significantly."

Like Shepp, many U.S. college freshmen choose to rush a fraternity or sorority in search of friendship, social status and belonging. But with new member fees, chapter dues, social expenses and fines, Greek life can cost hundreds and even thousands of dollars a year on top of tuition, housing and food.

Exact costs are hard to compare between campuses and chapters, as they vary widely and are broken down in different ways. Most universities, governing councils and national organizations don't keep track of averages, but some costs can be examined on a case-by-case basis.

The University of Central Florida, the second largest university with a Greek system in the country, does publish cost comparisons of all its fraternities and sororities. According the most recent data, the average new sorority member will pay $1,280 per semester and the average fraternity member will pay $605 per semester, not including room and board at the chapter house.

Many chapters also charge fines as punishment for unexcused absences and even tardiness at events. For example, Sigma Alpha Epsilon brothers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pony up $5 for every missed chapter meeting, $50 for a missed formal pledging ceremony and $75 for missing an initiation ceremony.

Additionally, there are extra costs that sorority women in particular incur, including formal wear, rush outfits, Greek letter gear and gifts for younger sisters.

"For recruitment they have very specific outfits," says Jaclyn Schwartz, a junior at the University of Illinois and a member of Alpha Epsilon Phi. "We had to buy two different pairs of shoes, jewelry, a nice dress shirt for one of the days and then two dresses."

Additionally, Schwartz says she spent around $150 on presents for her pledge "daughter," which included picture frames, candy, a sweatshirt and customized T-shirts. She pays for everything with money she earns from her summer job at a country club.

Despite the costs, joining a fraternity or sorority could be a worthwhile investment. According to a 2014 national survey in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, students who participate in Greek organizations are more likely to graduate on time. When compared with students who take a "victory lap" and stay on campus an extra year, this could amount to thousands of dollars in tuition savings.

There's also something to be said for the non-financial returns that Greek students enjoy after graduation, including networking connections and the benefit of having developed leadership skills.

"The dollar costs of joining a Greek organization are balanced against the lifelong benefits of contacts, networking, and, yes, fraternity," says Dave Isaacs, a spokesman for the Office of Student Life at Ohio State University. "It's in effect a comparison of the actual cost of Greek fees with the social benefit of, years after college, calling up a fraternity brother for a job or a favor."

Schwartz, an advertising major, met a sorority sister at a career fair and experienced this firsthand.

"She works at a really great agency and she was like, 'Hey, if you ever need an internship, let me know,'" Schwartz recalls. "I feel like she wouldn't have offered that if we hadn't had that connection of being in the same sorority."

Teddy Nykiel writes for NerdWallet, a website that helps consumers make smarter financial decisions. NerdWallet is a USA TODAY content partner providing general news, commentary and coverage from around the Web. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.

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Ramsey Touchberry, University of Florida

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How much does it really cost to go Greek?

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Jake Shepp, 18, worked part-time jobs at Sonic, a Hyatt hotel and a Mexican restaurant in Scottsdale, Ariz. to build a $3,500 savings account - and is now planning to use his hard-earned money for Kappa Sigma Fraternity fees at the University of Arizona.

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Are police body cameras really a usefully tool.

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Activist Post
Police abuse is a major problem not because of a few bad apples but because of the training, equipment, and tactics.

The establishment wants the public arguing about who the victims are of police brutality instead of focusing on the actions police routinely get away with. And they get away with it because it's protocol, or standard operating procedure.

Police are somehow anointed with special privileges that regular citizens do not have. They are allowed to break into people's homes, spy on them, harass them in the street, confiscate suspicious cash, and murder citizens if they do not comply with their demands.

These actions are obviously wrong and illegal if anyone except "authorities" carries them out. If 2014 proved anything, it's that police can get away with murder while average citizens can't exchange cigarettes without a license.

This has caused protests and riots throughout the country and the solution being offered is not to change the laws to remove these absurd privileges from cops, but to put a camera on every single officer.

On the surface, cameras seem like they'll add a layer of accountability to the system. However, civil liberties groups who advocate this approach seem to be shortsighted.

Here are 5 reasons to oppose body cameras for cops:

Video didn't matter in publicized cases: In the case of Eric Garner, the NY man who was choked to death for selling loose cigarettes, clear video footage did not matter. In the court's eyes disobeying officers is grounds for using lethal force. Case closed, at least until laws are changed.

Privacy, facial recognition: Technology already exists for cameras to be equipped with facial recognition software that could immediately identify anyone the cop comes in contact with. And with new threat level analysis of social media and other "watch list" mechanisms, cops will be motivated to stop someone without actual probable cause. This is extremely dangerous for liberty. This alone should halt your support for mandatory police cameras.

Boondoggle - Just like Michael Chertoff cashed in on naked body scanners following the sketchy underwear bomber, several cronies will make big bucks outfitting all police with these cameras and for providing supposed oversight.

Ends being let off with a warning: Remember the good cops who let you off on warnings for minor infractions? Say goodbye to that. Police cameras will be used to hold police accountable to their bosses more than to the public.

Cops can turn them off: Cops can easily turn the cameras off, and precincts can delete or edit footage in their favor. Cameras are as good as useless if people don't trust the system to preserve and use the footage wisely.

Cameras may prevent some good cops from acting like complete thugs; however, when thuggish behavior is not just tolerated but legal in the eyes of the system, does it really matter if we have that behavior on video or not?

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5 Reasons Police Body Cameras Are a Terrible Idea

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Activist Post Police abuse is a major problem not because of a few bad apples but because of the training, equipment, and tactics. The establishment wants the public arguing about who the victims are of police brutality instead of focusing on the actions police routinely get away with.

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In a time where a good bit of Muslims feel scared, where has the "all lives matter" hashtag gone?

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Remember those All Lives Matter advocates? You know, those who spoke out in response to Black Lives Matter. Those who felt that it was unfair to single out Black Lives when there were other, non-black lives at risk as well. Those who felt "Black Lives Matter" meant black lives mattered more than others. Those who deliberately declined to see "Black Lives Matter" as a movement highlighting the demonstrable evidence that black lives do matter less than white lives to the criminal justice system, and instead, formed a competing hashtag as a means of undermining BLM without actually doing anything to support all the other lives they claimed to care about. Yeah those guys. Do you know if they want to carpool to the next travel ban protest to show support for the Muslim lives that are being targeted or will they just meet us there?

Around the country people of all backgrounds gathered to protest Trump's executive order to ban travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries entering the U.S. A discriminatory attack on a group of people based on their religious beliefs, something you would think would upset anyone who's expressed concern for the fair and just treatment of "All Lives" right? So it had me pondering all weekend, where are those righteous souls who thought that every life was so precious that we simply couldn't afford to focus on just one group of people when so many others were suffering? Do Muslim lives not fall under the All Lives Matter umbrella? Or are they exempt in the small print along with Black lives, Mexican, Gay, Trans, Refugee, or basically everyone who is not White?

Amidst this weekends atrocities we were able to once again reunite the flawed right wing ideology with their best friend hypocrisy when it comes to this despicable saying. All Lives Matter supporters could not give two flying f***s about any other life than theirs or those who look like them. All Lives Matter is not a movement formed to represent all groups regardless of race and ethnicity, it is a not so thinly veiled effort to deflect attention from systemic racism. If they really were for all lives then I must have missed their banners at Standing Rock, or at the rally for immigrants rights, or at the Fight for $15 march, or the women's march, or in the airports this weekend.

The point of "All Lives Matter" has always been to diminish the message that Black Lives Matter or that they should matter more than they do. A message that becomes ever clearer when all we hear are crickets over Trump's travel ban, or anything that questions a white right wing narrative. So i'm sorry to break it to you but if there is anyone at the airports waiting for an All Lives Matter advocate to come and save the day, you've got a better chance of seeing David Duke teaching Hebrew school.

So, in the interest of being honest, maybe now All Lives Matters protesters can drop the pretense and rebrand the movement to represent what they should have been called from the get go. White Lives Matter. Sorry, pardon me, I meant "Only White Lives Matter."

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Where Are The 'All Lives Matter' Supporters Now?

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Remember those All Lives Matter advocates? You know, those who spoke out in response to Black Lives Matter. Those who felt that it was unfair to single out Black Lives when there were other, non-black lives at risk as well. Those who felt "Black Lives Matter" meant black lives mattered more than others.

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Has there been secret white supremacists in our law enforcement?

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W hite supremacists and other domestic extremists maintain an active presence in U.S. police departments and other law enforcement agencies. A striking reference to that conclusion, notable for its confidence and the policy prescriptions that accompany it, appears in a classified FBI Counterterrorism Policy Guide from April 2015, obtained by The Intercept. The guide, which details the process by which the FBI enters individuals on a terrorism watchlist, the Known or Suspected Terrorist File, notes that "domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers," and explains in some detail how bureau policies have been crafted to take this infiltration into account.

Although these right-wing extremists have posed a growing threat for years, federal investigators have been reluctant to publicly address that threat or to point out the movement's longstanding strategy of infiltrating the law enforcement community.

No centralized recruitment process or set of national standards exists for the 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States, many of which have deep historical connections to racist ideologies. As a result, state and local police as well as sheriff's departments present ample opportunities for white supremacists and other right-wing extremists looking to expand their power base.

In a heavily redacted version of an October 2006 FBI internal intelligence assessment, the agency raised the alarm over white supremacist groups' "historical" interest in "infiltrating law enforcement communities or recruiting law enforcement personnel." The effort, the memo noted, "can lead to investigative breaches and can jeopardize the safety of law enforcement sources or personnel." The memo also states that law enforcement had recently become aware of the term "ghost skins," used among white supremacists to describe "those who avoid overt displays of their beliefs to blend into society and covertly advance white supremacist causes." In at least one case, the FBI learned of a skinhead group encouraging ghost skins to seek employment with law enforcement agencies in order to warn crews of any investigations.

That report appeared after a series of scandals involving local police and sheriff's departments. In Los Angeles, for example, a U.S. District Court judge found in 1991 that members of a local sheriff's department had formed a neo-Nazi gang and habitually terrorized black and Latino residents. In Chicago, Jon Burge, a police detective and rumored KKK member, was fired, and eventually prosecuted in 2008, over charges relating to the torture of at least 120 black men during his decadeslong career. Burge notoriously referred to an electric shock device he used during interrogations as the "nigger box." In Cleveland, officials found that a number of police officers had scrawled " racist or Nazi graffiti" throughout their department's locker rooms. In Texas, two police officers were fired when it was discovered they were Klansmen. One of them said he had tried to boost the organization's membership by giving an application to a fellow officer he thought shared his " white, Christian, heterosexual values. "

Although the FBI has not publicly addressed the issue of white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement since that 2006 report, in a 2015 speech, FBI Director James Comey made an unprecedented acknowledgment of the role historically played by law enforcement in communities of color: "All of us in law enforcement must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our history is not pretty." Comey and the agency have been less forthcoming about that history's continuation into the present.

I n 2009, shortly after the election of Barack Obama, a Department of Homeland Security intelligence study, written in coordination with the FBI, warned of the "resurgence" of right-wing extremism. "Right-wing extremists have capitalized on the election of the first African-American president, and are focusing their efforts to recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda," the report noted, singling out "disgruntled military veterans" as likely targets of recruitment. "Right-wing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat."

The report concluded that "lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent right-wing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States." Released just ahead of nationwide Tea Party protests, the report caused an uproar among conservatives, who were particularly angered by the suggestion that veterans might be implicated, and by the broad brush with which the report seemed to paint a range of right-wing groups.

Faced with mounting criticism, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano disavowed the document and apologized to veterans. The agency's unit investigating right-wing extremism was largely dismantled and the report's lead investigator was pushed out. "They stopped doing intel on that, and that was that," Heidi Beirich, who leads the Southern Poverty Law Center's tracking of extremist groups, told The Intercept. "The FBI in theory investigates right-wing terrorism and right-wing extremism, but they have limited resources. The loss of that unit was a loss for a lot of people who did this kind of work."

"Federal law enforcement agencies in general - the FBI, the Marshals, the ATF - are aware that extremists have infiltrated state and local law enforcement agencies and that there are people in law enforcement agencies that may be sympathetic to these groups," said Daryl Johnson, who was the lead researcher on the DHS report. Johnson, who now runs DT Analytics, a consulting firm that analyzes domestic extremism, says the problem has since gotten "a lot more troublesome."

Johnson singled out the Oath Keepers and the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association for their anti-government attitudes and efforts to recruit active as well as retired law enforcement officers. "That's the biggest issue and it's greater now than it's ever been, in my opinion." Johnson added that Homeland Security has given up tracking right-wing domestic extremists. "It's only the FBI now," he said, adding that local police departments don't seem to be doing anything to address the problem. "There's not even any training now to make state and local police aware of these groups and how they could infiltrate their ranks."

A spokesperson for DHS declined to comment on the 2009 report or on the agency's specific concerns about white supremacist and right-wing groups.

I n 2014, the Department of Justice re-established its Domestic Terrorism Task Force, a unit that was created following the Oklahoma City bombing. But for the most part, the government's efforts to confront domestic terrorism threats over the last decade have focused on homegrown extremists radicalized by foreign groups. Last year, a group of progressive members of Congress called on President Obama and DHS to update the controversial 2009 report. "The United States allocates significant resources towards combating Islamic violent extremism while failing to devote adequate resources to right-wing extremism," they wrote. "This lack of political will comes at a heavy price."

Critics fear that the backlash following the 2009 DHS report hindered further action against the growing white supremacist threat, and that it was largely ignored because the issue was so politically controversial. "I believe that because that report was so denounced by conservatives, it sort of closed the door on whatever the FBI may have been considering doing with respect to combating infiltration of law enforcement by white supremacists," said Samuel Jones, a professor of law at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago who has written about white power ideology in law enforcement. "Because after the 2006 FBI report, we simply cannot find anything by local law enforcement or the federal government that addresses this issue."

Pete Simi, a sociologist at Chapman University who spent decades studying the proliferation of white supremacists in the U.S. military, agreed. "The report underscores the problem of even discussing this issue. It underscores how difficult this issue is to get any traction on, because a lot of people don't want to discuss this, let alone actually do something about it." Simi said that the extremist strategy to infiltrate the military and law enforcement has existed "for decades." In a study he conducted of individuals indicted for far-right terrorism-related activities, he found that at least 31 percent had military experience.

After a series of investigations uncovered substantial numbers of extremists in the military, the Department of Defense moved to impose stricter screenings, including monitoring recruits' tattoos for white supremacist symbols and discharging those found to espouse racist views.

"The military has completely reformed its process on this front," said the SPLC's Beirich, who lobbied the DOD to adopt those reforms. "I don't know why it wouldn't be the same for police officers; we can't have people with guns having crazy ideas or ideas that threaten certain populations."

R eforming police, as it turns out, is a lot harder than reforming the military, because of the decentralized way in which the thousands of police departments across the country operate, the historical affinity of certain police departments with the same racial ideologies espoused by extremists, and an even broader reluctance to do much about it.

"If you look at the history of law enforcement in the United States, it is a history of white supremacy, to put it bluntly," said Simi, citing the origin of U.S. policing in the slave patrols of the 18th and 19th centuries. "More recently, just going back 50 years, law enforcement, particularly in the South, was filled with Klan members."

Norm Stamper, a former chief of the Seattle Police Department and vocal advocate for police reform, told The Intercept that white supremacy was not simply a matter of history. "There are police agencies throughout the South and beyond that come from that tradition," he said. "To think that that kind of thinking has dissolved somehow is myopic at best."

Stamper said he had fired officers who expressed racist views, but added, "It's not likely to happen in most police departments, because many of those departments come from a tradition of saying the officer is entitled to his or her opinions." Whether the First Amendment protects an officer's right to express racist, white supremacist views - or even to associate with organizations that endorse those views - is something that remains a subject of debate, Stamper said. "You can fire someone. Whether the termination will stand up under review is the real question."

"Local, state, federal agencies, all to some extent have their hands tied, because it's not necessarily against the law to be a member of a domestic hate group" said Simi, noting the military as the one exception because of its unique legal status. For instance, the U.S. government considers the KKK a hate group - but membership in the group is not illegal. That's the case for all domestic hate or extremist groups, though authorities can choose to target their members under conspiracy statutes, Simi said.

Most police departments don't screen prospective officers for hate group affiliation. The SPLC has reported that the number of these groups peaked at more than 1,000 in 2011, from less than half that in the late 1990s, though experts like Simi note that many of these groups "come and go" and membership between them is often fluid.

Although officers have been fired for expressing hateful views - sometimes to be re-hired by other departments, as happens regularly with officers accused of misconduct - some officers have also challenged those dismissals in court. Robert Henderson, an 18-year veteran of the Nebraska State Patrol, was fired when his membership in the Klan was discovered. He sued on First Amendment grounds and appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear his case. Last year, 14 officers in the San Francisco Police Department were caught exchanging racist and homophobic texts that included several references to "white power" and messages such as "all niggers must fucking hang." Most of those officers remain on the force after an attempt to fire several of them was blocked by a judge, who said the statute of limitation had expired.

"All agencies, if they want to, can curtail this problem - the problem is that many do not," said Jones, who has been tracking similar incidents following the 2006 FBI report and believes many more get buried behind the code of silence that often dominates police departments. "When somebody holds a belief that indicates that they do not see all Americans are worthy of equal protection under the law, it compromises their ability to be a police officer."

A ccording to the Counterterrorism Policy Guide, the FBI has the option to mark a watchlisted police officer as a "silent hit," thus preventing queries to the National Crime Information Center, a clearinghouse for crime data accessible to law enforcement agencies nationwide, from returning a record that identifies the officer as having been flagged as a known or suspected terrorist. The document states that a "specific, narrowly defined, and legitimate operational justification" must be given in order to mark a Known or Suspected Terrorist (KST) entry as a silent hit. The suspect's membership or affiliation with a law enforcement or military agency with access to the NCIC database is one of the specific justifications listed, implying that extremist infiltration is enough of a concern that the FBI has built-in protocols to prevent domestic terrorism investigations from being obstructed by members of law enforcement.

The FBI document also notes that in order to protect the safety of local law enforcement, suspects who are "violent or are known to be armed and dangerous" may not be marked as silent hits. It's unclear how that standard applies to armed law enforcement personnel, especially since the FBI document singles out not only white supremacist groups for their ties to law enforcement, but also militia extremists and sovereign citizen extremists. While there is plenty of overlap between them, the last group, in particular, is characterized by deep anti-government ideology and the belief that "even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or 'sovereign' from the United States," the FBI notes on its website. "As a result, they believe they don't have to answer to any government authority, including courts, taxing entities, motor vehicle departments, or law enforcement."

In a 2011 article, the FBI's counterterrorism analysis section called sovereign citizens "a growing domestic threat to law enforcement." In one 2010 incident, two Arkansas police officers were killed when 16-year-old sovereign citizen Joseph Kane fired on them with an AK-47 assault rifle after he and his father were pulled over for a routine stop.

A 2014 survey found that sovereign citizen extremists were perceived by law enforcement agencies as a top threat, ahead of foreign-inspired extremists. And a 2015 DHS intelligence assessment, written in coordination with the FBI, warned about the continuing threat sovereign citizen extremists pose to police officers.

The counterterrorism guide does not specify the conditions under which the FBI will notify local law enforcement agencies whose members may be under surveillance as silent hits. Michael German, a former FBI agent who specialized in domestic terrorism investigations, told The Intercept that such alerts are likely handled on a "case-by-case basis." "Typically, if someone in the police department is suspect, unless it's an extreme case of leadership, professional courtesy requires some sort of notification," he said.

The FBI did not respond to a detailed series of questions sent by The Intercept about its knowledge of extremists' presence in law enforcement agencies, but a spokesperson for the agency did comment on the practice of placing silent hits on law enforcement officers. "While a silent hit would keep a subject who is a law enforcement employee from knowing they are under scrutiny, it would be standard practice to let someone at the agency know that one of their officers was under investigation," the spokesperson said.

A lthough the FBI's counterterrorism guide prohibits watchlisting individuals in the Known or Suspected Terrorist File "based solely on activities protected by the First Amendment," the document does not elaborate on what would constitute such activity. Nor does it state what specific actions on the part of officers would be serious enough to warrant inclusion in the watchlist. The document refers to the Terrorist Screening Center's March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance, previously published by The Intercept, for additional details regarding the watchlisting standard. The FBI did not answer questions about what activities would warrant entry into the list.

Civil rights groups have denounced the Known or Suspected Terrorist database's lack of transparency and the vague formulation of its standards. In a detailed analysis of the KST watchlist based on documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the ACLU observed that the goal of the list "is not law enforcement, but the surveillance and tracking of individuals for indefinite periods." The April 2016 report characterized the watchlist as "essentially a black box - an opaque and expanding accumulation of names."

A disproportionate number of Muslims have been included on the watchlist, and because the database is accessible to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies nationwide, the ACLU said, they are exposed to "unwarranted scrutiny or investigation by police." That level of scrutiny has hardly been applied to white supremacists, however, even though the country's first anti-terrorism laws, in the 1870s, were aimed at protecting black citizens from groups like the KKK, and despite the ongoing threat posed by these extremists.

"This is a fundamental problem in this country: We simply do not take this flexible, and forgiving, and exceptionally understanding approach for combating any other form of terrorism," said Jones. "Anybody who's on social media advocating support for ISIS can be criminally charged with very little effort."

"For some reason, we have stepped away from the threat of domestic terrorism and right-wing extremism," Jones continued. "The only way we can reconcile this kind of behavior is if we accept the possibility that the ideology that permeates white nationalists and white supremacists is something that many in our federal and law enforcement communities understand and may be in sympathy with."

That sympathy might just be reflected by the election of a president who was endorsed and celebrated by the KKK, and who has been reluctant to disassociate himself from individuals espousing white supremacist views.

"This election, for white supremacists, was a signal that 'We're on the right track,'" said Simi. "I have never seen anything like it among white supremacists, where they express this feeling of triumph and jubilee. They are just elated about the idea that they feel like they have somebody in the White House who gets it."

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The FBI Has Quietly Investigated White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement

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W hite supremacists and other domestic extremists maintain an active presence in U.S. police departments and other law enforcement agencies. A striking reference to that conclusion, notable for its confidence and the policy prescriptions that accompany it, appears in a classified FBI Counterterrorism Policy Guide from April 2015, obtained by The Intercept.

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Does the implication of police body cameras actually lower police brutality?

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The notion has been around for a while. But since August's fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri -- for which witness accounts varied widely -- it's gained traction to become part of the national conversation about police conduct.

The idea is that a video camera mounted on an officer's vest or uniform would provide an accurate, objective account of every encounter with a civilian. Ideally, the camera would discourage police misconduct while protecting officers against unfounded civil complaints of brutality or corruption.

Some police associations support the idea, and even the Obama administration is backing it.

Since August, more than 150,000 people have signed a petition on the White House's website urging that all state, county and local police be required to wear a camera. In response, Deputy Assistant to the President Roy L. Austin Jr. expressed support for the proposal while saying the Department of Justice is researching the best way to implement video technology into daily policing.

As Austin noted, a 2013 report by the Department of Justice found that "both officers and civilians acted in a more positive manner when they were aware that a camera was present."

Of course, body cameras create some thorny privacy issues, such as whether police need consent to videotape activities on private property. Some officers also view the cameras as unwanted scrutiny and a sign that their supervisors don't trust them.

And the fact that a witness used a phone camera to record New York police arresting Eric Garner in July didn't prevent the injuries that led to Garner's death a short time later, nor did the footage lead to indictments for the officers involved.

Still, among the police departments that have experimented with officer-worn cameras, early results have been encouraging. A 2013 study found that public complaints against police officers in Rialto, California, plunged after the city's 54 frontline officers began wearing video cameras. Use of force by Rialto officers also declined in the months after the cameras were introduced.

Other police departments across the U.S. are also now testing body cameras. Amid protests following the lack of indictments in the Garner case, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced in December that his police department was accelerating efforts to equip all its officers with body cameras as well.

"When something happens, to have a video record of it from the police officer's perspective, it's going to help in many, many ways," de Blasio said.

"It's going to improve the work of law enforcement. And God forbid, when something goes wrong, we're going to have a clear understanding of what happened and whatever approaches we need to take as a result."

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The notion has been around for a while. But since August's fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri -- for which witness accounts varied widely -- it's gained traction to become part of the national conversation about police conduct.

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There is always two sides to the story. Are pro athletes REALLY overpaid?

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Jimmy Connors plays two tennis matches and winds up with $850,000, and Muhammad Ali fights one bout and winds up with five million bucks. Me, I play one-hundred and ninety games, and I'm overpaid! - Johnny Bench

In my lifetime, I have seen strikes and lockouts from just about every major sport, and they all argue over the same basic thing: money. The NBA, NFL and MLB are the most notable when it comes to disputes over salary.

With players and coaches asking for more perks and pay, it makes you wonder if they are already making more money than they are worth. It also begs the question of how you measure a player's value in dollars and cents.

In this article, I will explore both sides of the argument. Whether or not athletes are overpaid is not for me to decide; this is simply to see what all of you think.

Once you have come up with your opinion on the matter, please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Heads
Each sport is different in how they pay their athletes, and the difference in salaries from one player to another can be in the tens of millions of dollars.

In a time when many Americans are struggling to make mortgage payments, student loan payments and find good employment, it sometimes becomes frustrating to hear about someone who makes millions playing a game demand more money and then get it.

If you look at it subjectively, it is hard to deny something that I think a lot of people will think: Most athletes are overpaid.

Let me run down some statistics for you to back up the argument before going any further. I will use Chicago-based teams as an example, since I am from Illinois. These numbers do not include endorsement deals or any bonuses.

The highest paid Bears player made over 13 million dollars in 2011

The highest paid Cubs player will make 19 million dollars in 2012

The highest paid Bulls player will make 13.5 million dollars in 2012

The highest paid Blackhawks player will make 6.3 million dollars in 2012

The lowest paid Bears player made $330,000 in 2011

The lowest paid Cubs player will make $417,000 in 2012

The lowest paid Bulls player will make about $850,000 in 2012

The lowest paid Blackhawks player will make $512,000 in 2012

The average Bears player made about 2 million dollars in 2011

The average Cubs player will make over 6 million dollars in 2012

The average Bulls player will make just under 5 million dollars in 2012

The average Blackhawks player will make just over 2.7 million dollars in 2012

These numbers certainly make me realize a few things. Different sports pay very differently, athletes are separated in salary by very large margins and many athletes are overpaid.

Now, allow me to give you some examples of how much some people in non-sports industries make each year. These numbers may vary depending on the specific area of expertise.

No matter how you look at it, the guy getting paid 19 million dollars to swing a bat at a ball is making more per game than the average American household makes in an entire decade.

Do you think it's fair? Think about how much you took home last month. Now, think about how much your bills cost you. Now, think about how much money you had left over to buy a ticket to a game or something else that you didn't really need, but wanted.

It doesn't really seem right that the thing my three-year-old nephew does for fun makes someone millions of dollars every year. Then again, life is not always fair.

Athletes were not always paid more than CEOs. In the early stages of the American Football system, most players had to have a normal day job on top of playing, because there was no money to be made in pro football.

The same thing goes for almost all early African-American athletes who were paid significantly less than their white counterparts, even if they performed far better.

My father has worked his ass off for the 40 years since he began working, suffering injuries to his shoulder and back on the job, and yet he will retire having made less in his lifetime than Payton Manning made just last year. Does that make sense?
Tails
Here is the other side of the argument: Aren't we, the fans, the ones who dictate how much money these guys make in the first place?

I have gladly shelled out up to $75 for a ticket to a game, and I have bought officially licensed team hoodies and travel mugs for more than I am willing to admit.

We are the ones who are willing to keep giving more of our hard-earned money to attend games in person, buy over-priced beer and food and wear the jerseys of our favorite athletes.

If we stopped going to games and buying officially-licensed merchandise, then these numbers would obviously have to go down to balance out the budget.

When we make the decision that it is worth it to pay a day's wages to attend a three-hour game and cheer till we loose our voices, then we are telling these athletes that they are worth every penny they make, and maybe in the minds of some people, they are worth it.

Many people get inspired by athletes and end up doing great things on their own, and inspiration is not something which can be priced and stocked at Wal-Mart next to the soda.

If you find any kind of inspiration from someone else, then there is no way to put a value on how that person has positively affected your life, especially if that inspiration drives you to do something fantastic.

There are also other reasons these guys and gals get paid the big bucks, and one thing in particular that affects many athletes, both during and after their pro career, is injuries.

Health insurance companies will either deny these men and women outright, or give them coverage which will not actually help the cost of knee or hip-replacement surgery, for example.

According to costhelper.com, the average knee-replacement surgery for someone without insurance is between $35,000 and $40,000.

This is not including physical therapy, follow-up exams and surgeries to replace any parts needed on the synthetic joint. This is just one scenario where a huge expense might pop up for an athlete.

With most athletes putting their bodies through the ringer each and every time they play, it is likely that at some point they will incur some kind of high-cost medical bill.

Another high-cost medical issue can be brain damage, which can affect anyone who suffers trauma to the head. According to braininjury.com, the average force needed to give someone brain damage is around 50 Gs, or, in easier to understand terms, being hit with a 13-pound bowling ball traveling at 20mph.

Football players can be subjected to hits up to 200 Gs when hit, but wearing a helmet can prevent the damage from happening, or at the very least lessen the impact it has on one's life.

Another reason for high pay is the short career of an athlete. The average American will retire between the ages of 65-75, but a professional athlete will last a lot less in their career than someone who sits at a desk all day.

Being put through the kind of physical stress a pro athlete goes through will almost certainly affect you later in life, especially those in full-contact sports.

Knee, back and head injuries can be the hardest to deal with later in one's life, due to the fact that they are parts of the body we use every day for many different activities.

Speaking from experience, I can tell you that dealing with knee problems can affect how you live your entire life.

After being born with a congenital leg problem (my femurs are technically backwards in my legs), the doctors told my parents I would never be able to walk without several expensive surgeries being performed to reverse the bones.

My parents could not afford the surgeries, but I ended up being just fine. I could run and do everything all my normal-legged friends could do. In fact, I was more flexible than most.

When I began studying martial arts at the age of six, it helped me to stop walking with pigeon toes. I went through studying for 13 years, but after about ten years of not only studying, but teaching martial arts, I began to notice some discomfort in my knees.

I went to a specialist who took some X-rays and performed tests, and the issue was that I had worn away all the cartilage in my knees, to the point where my knee caps were moving more than they should have.

Now, ten years later, I am still a healthy adult, but every day I wake up and feel some pain in my knees, which can make it hard to get going in the morning. Winter weather makes it even worse.

This is something I have to assume pro athletes deal with on a much larger scale, since they deal with much more physical contact than I was dealing with.

These kinds of physical problems can cost a retired athlete a lot of money to make their daily lives livable. This, combined with the fact that most insurance companies won't cover a pro athlete, makes it so their medical bills end up much higher than the average person.

So, now that you have seen both sides of the coin, please feel free to share your thoughts on the subject below.

A special thanks to my partner in crime, Mike LeMonier, who gave me some great information to contribute to the article.
Information on teams and player's Salaries gathered from the following sources. Chicago Bears salary from Sportscity.com
Chicago Cubs salary from Chicago Blackhawks salary from Sportscity.com

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Two Sides to Every Coin: Are Professional Athletes Overpaid?

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Jimmy Connors plays two tennis matches and winds up with $850,000, and Muhammad Ali fights one bout and winds up with five million bucks. Me, I play one-hundred and ninety games, and I'm overpaid! - Johnny Bench In my lifetime, I have seen strikes and lockouts from just about every major sport, and they all argue over the same basic thing: money.

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Are pro athletes paid too much?

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Wouldn't it be great to make nearly $111 million a year simply to play a game? Tiger Woods, along with many other professional athletes, certainly think so. But do these athletes really deserve all that money?

In my mind, absolutely not. Professional athletes are making too much money in a society where salaries and wages are traditionally based on the value of one's work. In today's society, one should be paid according to the job's economic importance and their value to society.

Teaching is one of the most economically important occupations because our future economy relies on the education of its youth, yet teachers are paid astronomically less than the average professional athlete is. In fact, each basket Kobe Bryant scores earns him equivalent to the average classroom teacher's yearly salary.

However, some may argue that while teacher's only provide service to a single classroom, superstar athletes are entertaining fans all around the world, enticing people with a feeling of relaxation and excitement.

Obviously, what these individuals must not be aware of is the most important man in our nation, the president, who makes critical decisions that affect the entire world every day, only makes $400,000 a year. While President Obama is hard at work reviving the economy, the unproven rookie in the MLB is earning way over that figure.

Furthermore, police officers, firefighters, and doctors save lives while risking their own for a fraction of what sports stars make. People in the military leave their families at home to defend and protect the country knowing they may never return. It's truly a pity that none of these true heroes are given the same recognition by society as athletes such as Brett Favre or Michael Jordan are given.

While I do understand that making it into the pros is not an easy thing to do, and that it takes a tremendous number of hours of hard work and dedication every day to earn a job in professional sports, these people do nothing more than entertain the general public.

Moreover, in my mind, if these athletes want to continue to be rewarded with the fame and fortune that is unfairly bestowed upon them, they must prove to the world that they are going to be positive role models for future athletes, and those who admire them.

These infamous players must grow up, and prove to America that they can be positive role models for kids on and off the field. They may get leeway when it comes to their salaries, but the law should be overpowered by any amount of talent.

If Alex Rodriguez earns the same amount of money as it would take to feed the nation's poor for a year, he can't cheat and take steroids. What kids learn from successful ballplayers like him is that "It's okay for me to use illegal substances, because in the long run, it will pay off by earning me an enormous contract."

In order for these players to gain respect, they need to have a more significant impact on the community.

Finally, what really puzzles me, is how athletes get upset when athletes say that millions of dollars won't be able to support him and his family, and that they need more. What puzzles me even more, is how after holding out for weeks, and sometimes months, the owners give in and pay them what they don't deserve.

Think about Jamarcus Russel, the former No. 1 overall pick in the '07 draft. He is on a six-year $68 million contract, with $31 million guaranteed. In simpler terms, that means that despite currently being recognized as one of the biggest busts of all time, and even if he were to get injured tomorrow and never play again, he will still have $31 million in the bank. In any other job, if you don't perform to your expectations, you're fired. There is no guaranteed money.

The whole system that allows professional athletes to just swim around in money is simply ridiculous, and it needs to stop. When asking people whether they think athletes are paid way too much money, most agree with me.

Do you?

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Do Professional Athletes Get Paid Too Much Money?

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Wouldn't it be great to make nearly $111 million a year simply to play a game? Tiger Woods, along with many other professional athletes, certainly think so. But do these athletes really deserve all that money? In my mind, absolutely not...

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Strange answers to the psychopath test.

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Jon Ronson: Strange answers to the psychopath test

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Is there a definitive line that divides crazy from sane? With a hair-raising delivery, Jon Ronson, author of The Psychopath Test, illuminates the gray areas between the two. (With live-mixed sound by Julian Treasure and animation by Evan Grant.)

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Why should we create an education system that nurtures creativity?

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Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

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Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

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Are school shootings and the unemployment rate really related, or just a coincidence?

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WASHINGTON -- School shootings rise when the economy tanks, according to a new study of U.S. schools, even as violent crime in general appears to be unaffected.

Researchers analyzed data from 379 shootings in schools between 1990 and 2013 and found a link between changes in national and local unemployment rates and the frequency of shootings.

Most were targeted attacks -- often not fatal -- and suicides, according to the study in Monday's journal Nature Human Behaviour. Only six percent of the shootings studied were random mass shootings.

Using a complex statistical analyses, researchers found "with very, very high confidence" there are specific time periods when school shootings are higher than others, said study co-author and data scientist Luis Amaral, a physicist and co-director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems.

"Above 5.7 percent (unemployment) you start to really detect an in increase," in the frequency of school shootings, Amaral said.

Some experts not involved in the research did not find the study convincing, in part because different types of gun violence at school -- random and targeted, and fatal and non-fatal -- often have completely different motivations and root causes.

Criminologist James Fox of Northeastern University said the hypothesis of economic stress and gun violence doesn't apply to younger shooters who wouldn't be thinking of entering the workforce.

Amaral argues that when joblessness is high, "there's sort of a loss of hope and increasing anger," Amaral said. "We think there is a kind of anger that gets pent up as these things happen and it comes out as violence."

And while economic crime goes up with the unemployment rate, the statistics show that the rate of violent crimes like murder and also rape don't go up and down with the unemployment rate, Amaral said, citing existing crime statistics. He said that's the result of a broader and more complex set of factors that affect violent crime rates outside of schools.

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School shootings rise when economy struggles, study suggests

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WASHINGTON -- School shootings rise when the economy tanks, according to a new study of U.S. schools, even as violent crime in general appears to be unaffected. Researchers analyzed data from 379 shootings in schools between 1990 and 2013 and found a link between changes in national and local unemployment rates and the frequency of shootings.

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Does "activism" in the modern world actually work?

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In our information-rich world, activist and advocacy groups trying to get attention for particular causes increasingly rely on social media as a means of building support for their causes. Users are urged to "like" posts and pages on Facebook, share Twitter and blog posts with everyone they know, and to create videos or take a picture for Instagram relating to their cause. Advocates often ask supporters to wear a particular color of clothing on a certain day or purchase bracelets or show other signs of support for a cause.

Such forms of advocacy, particularly those related to social media, are often derisively referred to as "slacktivism" or "armchair activism." These activities pose a minimal cost to participants; one click on Facebook or retweet on Twitter and the slacktivist can feel that he or she has helped to support the cause. While a percentage of the purchase price of a T-shirt or piece of jewelry may go to support program activities, for the most part, these activities of support for a cause require minimal cost - and the activist gets something tangible in return rather than donating the full amount to the cause. Slacktivists don't have to spend a Saturday doing hard labor to build a home or sacrifice a portion of their monthly entertainment budget to a cause. They don't even have to move from behind the screens of their electronic devices.

Campaigns targeting slacktivists are usually based on the logic that increased awareness of a cause is in and of itself a worthy reason to pursue them. There is some limited evidence that asking supporters to "Please retweet" a Twitter post increases the number of retweets a post will get, but many large U.S. advocacy organizations are convinced that asking new participants for token forms of support is a strong path to deeper engagement. Their logic assumes that the more attention a cause receives, the more likely public officials are to pay attention to a cause, and thus the more tangible benefits (like legislation, a policy change, or money allocated to help victims of a crisis) there will be. Campaigns for attention also often implicitly assume that more attention will lead to a greater likelihood of increased participant engagement, including providing forms of financial support.

A new paper (gated) by University of British Columbia graduate student Kirk Kristofferson and co-authors Katherine White and John Peloza tests the notion that slacktivist-style "token displays of support" lead participants to engage in more costly and meaningful contributions to the cause. Using a series of field and laboratory experiments, they found that those who engage in slacktivism can and do sometimes engage more deeply. What's the determining factor? The extent to which a slacktivist's activism is public or private. Note Kristofferson et al:

Importantly, the socially observable nature (public vs. private) of initial token support is identified as a key moderator that influences when and why token support does or does not lead to meaningful support for the cause. Consumers exhibit greater helping on a subsequent, more meaningful task after providing an initial private (vs. public) display of token support for a cause.

In other words, those whose initial act of support is done more privately (for example, writing to a member of Congress) are more likely to engage in deeper, more costly forms of engagement later on. Those whose initial support is public (i.e. through posting to Facebook or Twitter) are less likely to engage more deeply. Moreover, the researchers find that most appeals for token engagement "promote slacktivism among all but those highly connected to the cause."

As Kristofferson and his co-authors point out, these findings have several practical applications for advocacy organizations seeking to promote their cause. One of the team's experiments found that value alignment - the idea that a person's public actions reflect his or her private beliefs - was more likely to produce deeper engagement as well, and they suggest that charities should promote the values underlying their causes if they want to turn more slacktivists into committed, policy-changing activists.
Thanks to Scott Gilmore for first pointing this out.

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In our information-rich world, activist and advocacy groups trying to get attention for particular causes increasingly rely on social media as a means of building support for their causes. Users are urged to "like" posts and pages on Facebook, share Twitter and blog posts with everyone they know, and to create videos or take a picture for Instagram relating to their cause.

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How can cryptocurrency change the global economy? Why have governments banned such currencies?

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Unlike traditional currency, determining the value of cryptocurrency and electronic cash is a bit tricky. As the CTO of a company that's working to make online payments easier, I can understand why so many within the global business, legal and political environments are struggling with the concept.

The U.S. dollar, for example, has its value determined by the exchange rate, treasury notes and measurement against foreign exchange reserves. As Joe Weisenthal explains in Business Insider, the dollar has "intrinsic value" because it's the only currency that the government accepts, and it's what the public uses for commerce. Similarly, gold has intrinsic value because it can be used for jewelry.

Cryptocurrency such as bitcoin doesn't have the same luxury. While it's true that cryptocurrency has numerous benefits, none of that explains the actual price of coins. And it only gets more complicated when attempting to define what exactly bitcoin tokens are.

Venzen Khaosan explains on CryptoCoinsNews: "Bitcoin's value is a perceived regard for its benefits and usefulness. The term value, as used here, is not to be confused with price, which is the monetary cost of a bitcoin. The use and consequent value of Bitcoin is a result of many aspects of its innovation, its network, and its features."
How to Value Bitcoins
The value of bitcoins can be determined in different ways. For example, regarding their scientific value, coins have solved the Two Generals Problem. (This was a thought experiment devised to illustrate how challenging it is to coordinate an action by communicating over an unreliable link, and the first computer communication problem thought to be unsolvable.)

Beyond their scientific value, coins have technological value in that they are censorship resistant and can't be shut down. They also have social value because they use public ledgers and decentralized systems, which removes the need for a trusted third party for transactions.

There is also significant design value in using them as currency, secure storage and a decentralized public ledger, and the cryptocurrency model encourages community contribution and collaboration. Other areas of value with coins relate to their network value, contract and application value, and their transmission and storage value, as they work for all of these things.

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The Value of Cryptocurrency Today And What The Future Might Hold

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Unlike traditional currency, determining the value of cryptocurrency and electronic cash is a bit tricky. As the CTO of a company that's working to make online payments easier, I can understand why so many within the global business, legal and political environments are struggling with the concept. The U.S.

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Is it possible to create AI without losing control of it?

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Can we build AI without losing control over it?

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Scared of superintelligent AI? You should be, says neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris -- and not just in some theoretical way. We’re going to build superhuman machines, says Harris, but we haven’t yet grappled with the problems associated with creating something that may treat us the way we treat ants.

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How can we effectively stop cyber crime? is simply stopping it enough?

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Cybercrime netted a whopping $450 billion in profits last year, with 2 billion records lost or stolen worldwide. Security expert Caleb Barlow calls out the insufficiency of our current strategies to protect our data. His solution? We need to respond to cybercrime with the same collective effort as we apply to a health care crisis, sharing timely information on who is infected and how the disease is spreading. If we’re not sharing, he says, then we’re part of the problem.

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Criminal justice system reform begins with our prosecutors

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Adam Foss: A prosecutor's vision for a better justice system

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(NOTE: Adam Foss has been under investigation by the Suffolk County District Attorney's office. For more details and TED's response, read "An update on allegations about a TED speaker" below.)

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The lies we tell pregnant women

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Sofia Jawed-Wessel: The lies we tell pregnant women

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"When we tell women that sex isn't worth the risk during pregnancy, what we're telling her is that her sexual pleasure doesn't matter ... that she in fact doesn't matter," says sex researcher Sofia Jawed-Wessel. In this eye-opening talk, Jawed-Wessel mines our views about pregnancy and pleasure to lay bare the relationship between women, sex and systems of power.

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For as much work as they do, doesn't it make sense for teachers to make a decent salary?

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Is Donald Trumps ban actually helping American's or harming us?

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LONDON -- President Trump's suspension of all immigration for citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries for 90 days, and his 120 day suspension on the U.S. refugee program, are drawing increasing fire from around the globe.

Iraq's lawmakers are hitting back with a ban of their own and more than one million Britons have demanded their government cancel Mr. Trump's planned state visit to the U.K. later this year.

Those developments come as American embassies in Europe warn people from the seven affected countries not to bother showing up for U.S. visa appointments, and as the United Nations human rights chief derides Mr. Trump's moves as illegal under international law.

Mr. Trump's executive order includes a 90-day ban on travel to the U.S. by citizens of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen, and a 120-day suspension of the U.S. refugee program.

While the leaders of some of Europe's far-right, fringe political groups -- which have gained traction in recent years as the European Union grapples with a refugee crisis and in the wake of several deadly terror attacks in France and elsewhere -- have lauded the moves, the majority reaction from abroad to Mr. Trump's moves has been negative.

Iraq

Two lawmakers said Monday that the Iraqi parliament had approved a "reciprocity measure" after President Trump's executive order temporarily banning citizens from Iraq from entering the United States.

The measure, adopted by lawmakers at a Monday session of parliament, is to apply to Americans entering Iraq.

Lawmakers Kamil al-Ghrairi and Mohammed Saadoun told The Associated Press that the decision is binding for the government. Both said the decision was passed by a majority of votes in favor, but couldn't offer specific numbers. No further details were available on the wording of the parliamentary decision.

It was also not immediately clear who the ban will apply to -- American military personnel, non-government and aid workers, oil companies and other Americans doing business in Iraq.

It was also not known if and how the Iraqi measure would affect cooperation in the U.S.-backed fight against ISIS militants in Mosul.

Britain

The British government's plans to honor President Trump with a state visit later this year are sparking increasing opposition following his order on immigration.

A state visit involves lavish pomp and ceremony, often with a stay at Buckingham Palace hosted by Queen Elizabeth II.

The three major opposition parties have all called for the state visit to be canceled and an online petition opposing the trip passed the 1 million signatures mark on Monday.

That far exceeds the 100,000 required to mandate a debate in Parliament. The public petitions, hosted on a government website, do not mandate any action beyond the deliberation in parliament, however, regardless of how many people sign.

Last year Parliament debated whether to ban Mr. Trump, then a candidate, from visiting the United Kingdom after a similar online petition was filed.

United Nations

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid bin Ra'ad Zeid al-Hussein, who rarely uses Twitter, took to President Trump's preferred means of communication on Monday to deride the U.S. leader's immigration and travel crackdown as "forbidden" and "mean-spirited."

"Discrimination on nationality alone is forbidden under #humanrights law" - @UNHumanRights Chief #Zeid pic.twitter.com/EpYpEpyYrf
- UN Human Rights (@UNHumanRights) January 30, 2017

Al-Hussein, a former Jordanian ambassador to the U.N., said, "discrimination on nationality alone is forbidden under human rights law," and added that, "the U.S. ban is also mean-spirited and wastes resources needed for proper counter-terrorism."

African Union

Three of the nations whose citizens are now banned from entering the United States are in Africa -- Libya, Sudan and Ethiopia -- prompting the leader of the African Union to warn of "turbulent times" ahead for her continent.

"The very country to which many of our people were taken as slaves during the transatlantic slave trade has now decided to ban refugees from some of our countries," AU commission chief Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma told people gathered from the 54 member states for a summit in Ethiopia's capital. "What do we do about this? Indeed, this is one of the greatest challenges to our unity and solidarity."

Border confusion

The U.S. Embassies in London and Berlin have advised people from the seven countries affected by President Donald Trump's travel ban not to seek a visa, or schedule an appointment - even if they are a dual nationals.

The statement posted on the London embassy's website on Monday issued the guidance to "aliens from the countries of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen."

It says, "if you are a national, or dual national, of one of these countries, please do not schedule a visa appointment or pay any visa fees at this time."

There has been widespread confusion about whether the ban applied to dual nationals, but administration officials attempted to clarify later on Sunday that dual nationals and U.S. green card holders, at least, or " lawful permanent residents " as the head of Homeland Security said, would be allowed in after questioning.

Turned away

Air France has blocked 15 passengers from Muslim countries from traveling to the U.S. because they would have been refused entry under President Trump's new immigration ban.

Air France said in a statement it was informed Saturday by the U.S. government of the new restrictions, and had no choice but to stop the passengers from boarding U.S.-bound flights.

An airline spokeswoman said Monday that the passengers were taken back to their point of departure or otherwise taken care of. She would not provide the passengers' names, nationalities or other details.

The company earlier had reported that 21 passengers had been turned away, but then corrected its count.

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Trump's crackdown draws protests, retaliation abroad

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LONDON -- President Trump's suspension of all immigration for citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries for 90 days, and his 120 day suspension on the U.S. refugee program, are drawing increasing fire from around the globe. Iraq's lawmakers are hitting back with a ban of their own and more than one million Britons have demanded their government cancel Mr. Trump's planned state visit to the U.K.

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"I share, therefore I am"

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Renny Gleeson: Our antisocial phone tricks

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In this funny (and actually poignant) 3-minute talk, social strategist Renny Gleeson breaks down our always-on social world -- where the experience we're having right now is less interesting than what we'll tweet about it later.

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9 hours and 22 minutes: Is it consuming our lives?

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How can we get our kids to put down their phones when they see us on ours so often?

A 2016 survey by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit children's advocacy and media ratings organization, asked almost 1,800 parents of children aged 8 to 18 about screen time and electronic media use by the parents. The average amount of time that parents spent with screen media of all kinds (computers, TVs, smartphones, e-readers) every day: 9 hours and 22 minutes. And on average, only an hour and 39 minutes of that was work-related; 7 hours and 43 minutes were personal.

Maybe that's one reason you hear more and more often the recommendation that families delineate specific screen-free times and places in their lives. James P. Steyer, the chief executive of Common Sense Media, cited the idea of "sacred spaces" advocated by Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the 2015 book "Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age."

It's just as important to regulate our own use of devices and put them aside for screen-free periods as it is to ask our children to disconnect. And it certainly adds spice to family life if children understand that the same rules apply for all ages: that Dad will get grief for surreptitiously checking his phone under the dinner table and Mom has to park hers in the designated recharging zone for the night just as the children do.

Here are my own top five sacred spaces, but I'll tell you frankly that they're very much "aspirational" for me; I have a long way to go before I'm a good example.

1. In the Bed

Keeping TVs out of children's bedrooms and bedtimes is an old pediatric recommendation from back in the day when TV was the screen we worried about most. Now we also stress keeping smartphones out of their beds, but many of us as adults also struggle with this imperative, which pretty much everyone agrees is critical for improved sleep and therefore improved health. Those of us with children out of the home, of course, tell ourselves that the phone has to come into the bedroom in case a child needs to call - but the phone can sleep on the other side of the room, not on the night stand.

2. At the Table

If the family gathers around the dinner table, basic table manners dictate no digital participants. And yes, that means parents get in trouble if they lapse, and you don't get to use the old let-me-just-Google-this-important-and-educational-fact strategy to settle family debates and questions of history, literature, or old movie trivia, because everyone knows what else you'll do once you take out the phone.

3. Reading a Book

I don't read books well if I'm toggling back and forth to email. That's O.K. for other kinds of reading, maybe, but not for books. If you made a New Year's resolution to read more books or you're going to try for family reading time, you can allow e-readers, but you might keep other screens at a distance.

4. In the Outdoors

It's definitely worth picking some outdoor experiences that are going to be screen-free. One of the dangers of carrying our screens with us wherever we go is that wherever we go, the landscape is the same - it's a conscious decision to go outside and see what there is to see, even if that means losing the chance to take a photo now and then. It may also work to put phones on airplane mode for travel and family activities, so they can be used only as cameras - or for maps or emergency calls if needed.

5. In the Car

This is a tougher one for many families, since screens in the car can be so helpful on long rides, especially with siblings in proximity. But time in the car can also be remarkably intimate family time (yes, I know, not always in a good way). Some of the most unguarded conversations of the middle school and adolescent years take place when a parent is chauffeuring, so it's probably worth trying for some designated screenless miles. I assume that I don't have to say that the driver should not be looking at a screen - but the parent riding shotgun in the front also has to play by the rules.

Mr. Steyer said his organization's survey showed that parents are paying attention to the ways that their children use screen media, and that they see it as their responsibility to monitor and regulate their children's use of technology. In fact, two-thirds of the parents felt that such monitoring was more important than respecting their children's privacy.

Parents' role has to include awareness and also a willingness to "use media and technology together whenever you can," Mr. Steyer said; "it's good for parents to watch and play and listen with their kids and experience media and technology with them and ask them questions about what they see and hear."

In a new policy on screen media use by school-age children and adolescents released last October, the American Academy of Pediatrics suggested that families develop and regularly update a family media use plan, using an online tool that takes into account the individual family's patterns and goals and lets you designate screen-free times and places. That can be helpful for screen-loving children and for their screen-loving parents as well.

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5 No-Phone Zones for Parents and Kids Alike

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How can we get our kids to put down their phones when they see us on ours so often? A 2016 survey by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit children's advocacy and media ratings organization, asked almost 1,800 parents of children aged 8 to 18 about screen time and electronic media use by the parents.

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Are you reading fake news?

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Google, democracy and the truth about internet search

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Tech-savvy rightwingers have been able to 'game' the algorithms of internet giants and create a new reality where Hitler is a good guy, Jews are evil and... Donald Trump becomes president

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Are your views affected by how you search for news?

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Pew Research Center's Journalism Project

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When it comes to getting news about politics and government, liberals and conservatives inhabit different worlds. There is little overlap in the news sources they turn to and trust. And whether discussing politics online or with friends, they are more likely than others to interact with like-minded individuals, according to a new Pew Research Center study.

The project - part of a year-long effort to shed light on political polarization in America - looks at the ways people get information about government and politics in three different settings: the news media, social media and the way people talk about politics with friends and family. In all three areas, the study finds that those with the most consistent ideological views on the left and right have information streams that are distinct from those of individuals with more mixed political views - and very distinct from each other.

These cleavages can be overstated. The study also suggests that in America today, it is virtually impossible to live in an ideological bubble. Most Americans rely on an array of outlets - with varying audience profiles - for political news. And many consistent conservatives and liberals hear dissenting political views in their everyday lives.

Yet as our major report on political polarization found, those at both the left and right ends of the spectrum, who together comprise about 20% of the public overall, have a greater impact on the political process than do those with more mixed ideological views. They are the most likely to vote, donate to campaigns and participate directly in politics. The five ideological groups in this analysis (consistent liberals, mostly liberals, mixed, mostly conservatives and consistent conservatives) are based on responses to 10 questions about a range of political values. That those who express consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions have different ways of informing themselves about politics and government is not surprising. But the depth of these divisions - and the differences between those who have strong ideological views and those who do not - are striking.

Overall, the study finds that consistent conservatives:

Are tightly clustered around a single news source, far more than any other group in the survey, with 47% citing Fox News as their main source for news about government and politics.

Express greater distrust than trust of 24 of the 36 news sources measured in the survey. At the same time, fully 88% of consistent conservatives trust Fox News.

Are, when on Facebook, more likely than those in other ideological groups to hear political opinions that are in line with their own views.

Are more likely to have friends who share their own political views. Two-thirds (66%) say most of their close friends share their views on government and politics.

By contrast, those with consistently liberal views:

Are less unified in their media loyalty; they rely on a greater range of news outlets, including some - like NPR and the New York Times- that others use far less.

Express more trust than distrust of 28 of the 36 news outlets in the survey. NPR, PBS and the BBC are the most trusted news sources for consistent liberals.

Are more likely than those in other ideological groups to block or "defriend" someone on a social network - as well as to end a personal friendship - because of politics.

Are more likely to follow issue-based groups, rather than political parties or candidates, in their Facebook feeds.

Those with down-the-line conservative and liberal views do share some common ground; they are much more likely than others to closely follow government and political news. This carries over to their discussions of politics and government. Nearly four-in-ten consistent conservatives (39%) and 30% of consistent liberals tend to drive political discussions - that is, they talk about politics often, say others tend to turn to them for information rather than the reverse, and describe themselves as leaders rather than listeners in these kinds of conversations. Among those with mixed ideological views, just 12% play a similar role.

The Pew Research Center's American Trends Panel

Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center released a major analysis of changes in the American electorate titled Political Polarization in the American Public. The study, based on interviews with more than 10,000 adults nationwide, tracked the growing ideological consistency and partisan antipathy expressed by Americans, and how these views correlate with people's willingness to compromise, relationships with friends and family, and even preferences about where to live.

This report is based on a follow-up survey, about where people get political news and information, conducted among the 88% of panel members with online access. While the picture drawn might be slightly different if those without internet access had been included, this report provides a thorough look at political information consumption by the large online population.

It is important to note, though, that those at either end of the ideological spectrum are not isolated from dissenting views about politics. Nearly half (47%) of across-the-board conservatives - and 59% of across-the-board liberals - say they at least sometimes disagree with one of their closest political discussion partners.

For those closer to the middle of the ideological spectrum, learning about politics, or discussing it with friends and family, is a less of a focus. When they do follow politics, their main news sources include CNN, local TV and Fox News, along with Yahoo News and Google News, which aggregate stories from a wide assortment of outlets; these U.S. adults see more of a mix of views in social media and are less likely to be aware of their friends'political leanings.

This study, the latest in a series of reports on political polarization, is based on an online survey conducted March 19-April 29, 2014 with 2,901 members of the Pew Research Center's new American Trends Panel - a panel recruited from a telephone survey of 10,013 adults conducted earlier this year.

Among the key findings:

Media Sources: Nearly Half of Consistent Conservatives Cite Fox News

When it comes to choosing a media source for political news, conservatives orient strongly around Fox News. Nearly half of consistent conservatives (47%) name it as their main source for government and political news, as do almost a third (31%) of those with mostly conservative views. No other sources come close.

Consistent liberals, on the other hand, volunteer a wider range of main sources for political news - no source is named by more than 15% of consistent liberals and 20% of those who are mostly liberal. Still, consistent liberals are more than twice as likely as web-using adults overall to name NPR (13% vs. 5%), MSNBC (12% vs. 4%) and the New York Times (10% vs. 3%) as their top source for political news.

Among the large group of respondents with mixed ideological views, CNN (20%) and local TV (16%) are top sources; Fox News (8%), Yahoo News (7%) and Google News (6%) round out their top five sources.

Trust and Distrust: Liberals Trust Many, Conservatives Trust Few

At least as important as where people turn for news is whose news they trust. And here, the ideological differences are especially stark.

Respondents were asked whether they had heard of each of the 36 outlets listed in the accompanying graphic. For those they had heard of, they were asked about their trust - or distrust - in each source.

Liberals, overall, trust a much larger mix of news outlets than others do. Of the 36 different outlets considered, 28 are more trusted than distrusted by consistent liberals. Just eight earn higher shares of distrust than trust. Still, among those eight, the levels of distrust can be high: fully 81% of consistent liberals distrust Fox News, and 75% distrust the Rush Limbaugh Show.

Among consistent conservatives, by contrast, there are 24 sources that draw more distrust than trust. The same is true for 15 sources among those with mostly conservative views. And, of the eight outlets more trusted than distrusted by consistent conservatives, all but one, on balance, are distrusted by consistent liberals.

Also at play here is the degree to which people are more familiar with certain news sources than others. Some outlets such as CNN, ABC News and Fox News, are recognized by at least nine-in-ten respondents, meaning that more respondents offer a view of these outlets one way or the other. Outlets currently occupying more niche markets, such as Politico, the Economist or BuzzFeed, are known by only about a third of respondents. Thus, while they may elicit strong views in one direction, the share of respondents weighing in is relatively small.

This section of the report looks in detail at news audiences and trust and distrust of outlets across ideological groups. For more on how the news sources were selected, see Appendix B.

Social Media: Conservatives More Likely to Have Like-Minded Friends

In the growing social media space, most users encounter a mix of political views. But consistent conservatives are twice as likely as the typical Facebook user to see political opinions on Facebook that are mostly in line with their own views (47% vs. 23%). Consistent liberals, on average, hear a somewhat wider range of views than consistent conservatives - about a third (32%) mainly see posts in line with their own opinions.

But that doesn't mean consistent liberals necessarily embrace contrasting views. Roughly four-in-ten consistent liberals on Facebook (44%) say they have blocked or defriended someone on social media because they disagreed with something that person posted about politics. This compares with 31% of consistent conservatives and just 26% of all Facebook users who have done the same.

Consistent liberals who pay attention to politics on Facebook are also more likely than others to "like" or follow issue-based groups: 60% do this, compared with 46% of consistent conservatives and just a third (33%) of those with mixed views. And both the left and the right are more likely than others to follow political parties or elected officials: 49% of consistent conservatives and 42% of consistent liberals do so, compared with 29% of Facebook users overall.

Talking Politics: Dissenting Views Penetrate, but Less Frequently for the Ideologically Consistent

In personal conversations about politics, those on the right and left are more likely to largely hear views in line with their own thinking.

While only a quarter (25%) of respondents with mixed ideological views say most of their close friends share their own political views, that is true of roughly half (52%) of consistent liberals and two-thirds (66%) of consistent conservatives. And, when those who talk about politics are asked to name up to three people they most often talk to about politics, half (50%) of consistent conservatives name only individuals they describe as also being conservative - outpacing the 31% of consistent liberals who name only liberals.

At the same time, consistent liberals are more likely to stop talking to someone because of politics. Roughly a quarter (24%) have done so, compared with 16% of consistent conservatives and around 10% of those with more mixed political views.

Still, a solid portion of even the most ideologically-aligned respondents encounter some political disagreement with their close discussion partners. Nearly half (47%) of consistent conservatives who talk about politics name one or more discussion partners with whom they disagree at least some of the time. This figure rises to more than half (59%) of consistent liberals and even larger shares of those with mostly liberal and ideologically-mixed political views (79% each).

Media Outlets by the Ideological Composition of Their Audience

Ideological differences in media source preferences result in distinct audience profiles for many media outlets. Many sources, such as the Wall Street Journal, USA TODAY, ABC News, CBS News and NBC News have audiences that are, on average, ideologically similar to the average web respondent.

Reflecting liberals' use of a greater number of media sources, there are more outlets whose readers, watchers and listeners fall to the left of the average web respondent than to the right. At the same time, a handful of outlets have audiences that are more conservative than the average respondent.

Fox News sits to the right of the midpoint, but is not nearly as far right as several other sources, such as the radio shows of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. A closer look at the audience breakdowns reveals why: While consistent conservatives get news from Fox News at very high rates, many of those with less conservative views also use Fox News. By contrast, the audiences for Limbaugh and Beck are overwhelmingly conservative.

By comparison, the average consumer of the Wall Street Journal sits very close to the typical survey respondent, but the range of Journal readers is far broader because it appeals to people on both the left and the right. As a result, while respondents overall cluster toward the center of the ideological spectrum, the Journal's audience is relatively evenly distributed across the continuum: 20% are consistent liberals, 21% mostly liberal, 24% mixed, 22% mostly conservative and 13% consistent conservative.

For a more detailed look at the ideological composition of each source's audience, see the Pew Research Center's interactive database.

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When it comes to getting news about politics and government, liberals and conservatives inhabit different worlds. There is little overlap in the news sources they turn to and trust. And whether discussing politics online or with friends, they are more likely than others to interact with like-minded individuals, according to a new Pew Research Center study.

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Is domestic violence really a women's issue?

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Jackson Katz: Violence against women -- it's a men's issue

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Domestic violence and sexual abuse are often called "women's issues." But in this bold, blunt talk, Jackson Katz points out that these are intrinsically men's issues -- and shows how these violent behaviors are tied to definitions of manhood. A clarion call for us all -- women and men -- to call out unacceptable behavior and be leaders of change.

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What's wrong with education... in a nutshell.

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Get a daily email featuring the latest talk, plus a quick mix of trending content.

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Sir Ken Robinson: Changing education paradigms

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In this talk from RSA Animate, Sir Ken Robinson lays out the link between 3 troubling trends: rising drop-out rates, schools' dwindling stake in the arts, and ADHD. An important, timely talk for parents and teachers.

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"White people and Black people are not having a discussion about race. Black people, thinking as a group, are talking about living in a racist system. White people, thinking as individuals, refuse to talk about “I, racist” and instead protect their own individual and personal goodness. In doing so, they reject the existence of racism. But arguing about personal non-racism is missing the point."

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What follows is the text of a "sermon" that I gave as a "congregational reflection" to an all White audience at the Bethel Congregational United Church of Christ on Sunday, June 28th. The sermon was begun with a reading of The Good Samaritan story, and this wonderful quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah. Credit for this speech goes to Chaédria LaBouvier, who's "Why We Left" inspired me to speak out about racism; to Robin DiAngelo, who's "White Fragility" gave me an understanding of the topic; and to Reni Eddo-Lodge who said "Why I'm no longer talking to white people about race" long before I had the courage to start doing it again.
A couple weeks ago, I was debating what I was going to talk about in this sermon. I told Pastor Kelly Ryan I had great reservations talking about the one topic that I think about every single day.

Then, a terrorist massacred nine innocent people in a church that I went to, in a city that I still think of as home. At that point, I knew that despite any misgivings, I needed to talk about race.

You see, I don't talk about race with White people. To illustrate why, I'll tell a story:

It was probably about 15 years ago when a conversation took place between my aunt, who is White and lives in New York State, and my sister, who is Black and lives in North Carolina. This conversation can be distilled to a single sentence, said by my Black sister:

"The only difference between people in The North and people in The South is that down here, at least people are honest about being racist."

There was a lot more to that conversation, obviously, but I suggest that it can be distilled into that one sentence because it has been, by my White aunt. Over a decade later, this sentence is still what she talks about. It has become the single most important aspect of my aunt's relationship with my Black family. She is still hurt by the suggestion that people in New York, that she, a northerner, a liberal, a good person who has Black family members, is a racist.

This perfectly illustrates why I don't talk about race with White people. Even- or rather, especially- my own family.

I love my aunt. She's actually my favorite aunt, and believe me, I have a lot of awesome aunts to choose from. But the facts are actually quite in my sister's favor on this one.

New York State is one of the most segregated states in the country. Buffalo, New York where my aunt lives is one of the 10 most segregated school systems in the country. The racial inequality of the area she inhabits is so bad that it has been the subject of reports by the Civil Rights Action Network and the NAACP.

Those, however, are facts that my aunt does not need to know. She does not need to live with the racial segregation and oppression of her home. As a white person with upward mobility, she has continued to improve her situation. She moved out of the area I grew up in- she moved to an area with better schools. She doesn't have to experience racism, and so it is not real to her.

Nor does it dawn on her that the very fact that she moved away from an increasingly Black neighborhood to live in a White suburb might itself be a aspect of racism. She doesn't need to realize that "better schools" exclusively means "whiter schools."

I don't talk about race with White people because I have so often seen it go nowhere. When I was younger, I thought it was because all white people are racist. Recently, I've begun to understand that it's more nuanced than that.

To understand, you have to know that Black people think in terms of Black people. We don't see a shooting of an innocent Black child in another state as something separate from us because we know viscerally that it could be our child, our parent, or us, that is shot.

The shooting of Walter Scott in North Charleston resonated with me because Walter Scott was portrayed in the media as a deadbeat and a criminal- but when you look at the facts about the actual man, he was nearly indistinguishable from my own father.

Racism affects us directly because the fact that it happened at a geographically remote location or to another Black person is only a coincidence, an accident. It could just as easily happen to us- right here, right now.

Black people think in terms of we because we live in a society where the social and political structures interact with us as Black people.

White people do not think in terms of we. White people have the privilege to interact with the social and political structures of our society as individuals. You are "you," I am "one of them." Whites are often not directly affected by racial oppression even in their own community, so what does not affect them locally has little chance of affecting them regionally or nationally. They have no need, nor often any real desire, to think in terms of a group. They are supported by the system, and so are mostly unaffected by it.

What they are affected by are attacks on their own character. To my aunt, the suggestion that "people in The North are racist" is an attack on her as a racist. She is unable to differentiate her participation within a racist system (upwardly mobile, not racially profiled, able to move to White suburbs, etc.) from an accusation that she, individually, is a racist. Without being able to make that differentiation, White people in general decide to vigorously defend their own personal non-racism, or point out that it doesn't exist because they don't see it.

The result of this is an incessantly repeating argument where a Black person says "Racism still exists. It is real," and a white person argues "You're wrong, I'm not racist at all. I don't even see any racism." My aunt's immediate response is not "that is wrong, we should do better." No, her response is self-protection: "That's not my fault, I didn't do anything. You are wrong."

Racism is not slavery. As President Obama said, it's not avoiding the use of the word Nigger. Racism is not white water fountains and the back of the bus. Martin Luther King did not end racism. Racism is a cop severing the spine of an innocent man. It is a 12 year old child being shot for playing with a toy gun in a state where it is legal to openly carry firearms.

But racism is even more subtle than that. It's more nuanced. Racism is the fact that "White" means "normal" and that anything else is different. Racism is our acceptance of an all white Lord of the Rings cast because of historical accuracy, ignoring the fact that this is a world with an entirely fictionalized history.

Even when we make shit up, we want it to be white.

And racism is the fact that we all accept that it is white. Benedict Cumberbatch playing Khan in Star Trek. Khan, who is from India. Is there anyone Whiter than Benedict fucking Cumberbatch? What? They needed a "less racial" cast because they already had the Black Uhura character?
That is racism. Once you let yourself see it, it's there all the time.

Black children learn this when their parents give them "The Talk." When they are sat down at the age of five or so and told that their best friend's father is not sick, and not in a bad mood- he just doesn't want his son playing with you. Black children grow up early to life in The Matrix. We're not given a choice of the red or blue pill. Most white people, like my aunt, never have to choose. The system was made for White people, so White people don't have to think about living in it.

But we can't point this out.

Living every single day with institutionalized racism and then having to argue its very existence, is tiring, and saddening, and angering. Yet if we express any emotion while talking about it, we're tone policed, told we're being angry. In fact, a key element in any racial argument in America is the Angry Black person, and racial discussions shut down when that person speaks. The Angry Black person invalidates any arguments about racism because they are "just being overly sensitive," or "too emotional," or- playing the race card. Or even worse, we're told that we are being racist (Does any intelligent person actually believe a systematically oppressed demographic has the ability to oppress those in power?)

But here is the irony, here's the thing that all the angry Black people know, and no calmly debating White people want to admit: The entire discussion of race in America centers around the protection of White feelings.

Ask any Black person and they'll tell you the same thing. The reality of thousands of innocent people raped, shot, imprisoned, and systematically disenfranchised are less important than the suggestion that a single White person might be complicit in a racist system.

This is the country we live in. Millions of Black lives are valued less than a single White person's hurt feelings.

White people and Black people are not having a discussion about race. Black people, thinking as a group, are talking about living in a racist system. White people, thinking as individuals, refuse to talk about "I, racist" and instead protect their own individual and personal goodness. In doing so, they reject the existence of racism.

But arguing about personal non-racism is missing the point.

Despite what the Charleston Massacre makes things look like, people are dying not because individuals are racist, but because individuals are helping support a racist system by wanting to protect their own non-racist self beliefs.

People are dying because we are supporting a racist system that justifies White people killing Black people.

We see this in the way that one Muslim killer is a sign of Islamic terror; in the way one Mexican thief is a pointer to the importance of border security; in one innocent, unarmed Black man is shot in the back by a cop, then sullied in the media as a thug and criminal.

And in the way a white racist in a state that still flies the confederate flag is seen as "troubling" and "unnerving." In the way people "can't understand why he would do such a thing."

A white person smoking pot is a "Hippie" and a Black person doing it is a "criminal." It's evident in the school to prison pipeline and the fact that there are close to 20 people of color in prison for every white person.

There's a headline from The Independent that sums this up quite nicely: "Charleston shooting: Black and Muslim killers are 'terrorists' and 'thugs'. Why are white shooters called 'mentally ill'?"

I'm gonna read that again: "Black and Muslim killers are 'terrorists' and 'thugs'. Why are white shooters called 'mentally ill'?"

Did you catch that? It's beautifully subtle. This is an article talking specifically about the different way we treat people of color in this nation and even in this article's headline, the white people are "shooters" and the Black and Muslim people are "killers."

Even when we're talking about racism, we're using racist language to make people of color look dangerous and make White people come out as not so bad.

Just let that sink in for a minute, then ask yourself why Black people are angry when they talk about race.

The reality of America is that White people are fundamentally good, and so when a white person commits a crime, it is a sign that they, as an individual, are bad. Their actions as a person are not indicative of any broader social construct. Even the fact that America has a growing number of violent hate groups, populated mostly by white men, and that nearly *all* serial killers are white men can not shadow the fundamental truth of white male goodness. In fact, we like White serial killers so much, we make mini-series about them.

White people are good as a whole, and only act badly as individuals.

People of color, especially Black people (but boy we can talk about "The Mexicans" in this community), are seen as fundamentally bad. There might be a good one- and we are always quick to point them out to our friends, show them off as our Academy Award for "Best Non-Racist in a White Role"- but when we see a bad one, it's just proof that the rest are, as a rule, bad.

This, all of this, expectation, treatment, thought, the underlying social system that puts White in the position of Normal and good, and Black in the position of "other" and "bad," all of this, is racism.

And White people, every single one of you, are complicit in this racism because you benefit directly from it.

This is why I don't like the story of the good samaritan. Everyone likes to think of themselves as the person who sees someone beaten and bloodied and helps him out.

If I could re-write that story, I'd rewrite it from the perspective of Black America. What if the person wasn't beaten and bloody? What if it wasn't so obvious? What if they were just systematically challenged in a thousand small ways that actually made it easier for you to succeed in life?

Would you be so quick to help then, or would you, like most White people, stay silent and let it happen.

Here's what I want to say to you: Racism is so deeply embedded in this country not because of the racist right-wing radicals who practice it openly, it exists because of the silence and hurt feelings of liberal America.

That's what I want to say, but really, I can't. I can't say that because I've spent my life not talking about race to White people. In a big way, it's my fault. Racism exists because I, as a Black person, don't challenge you to look at it.

Racism exists because I, not you, am silent.

But I'm caught in the perfect Catch 22, because when I start pointing out racism, I become the Angry Black Person, and the discussion shuts down again. So I'm stuck.

All the Black voices in the world speaking about racism all the time do not move White people to think about it- but one White John Stewart talking about Charleston has a whole lot of White people talking about it. That's the world we live in. Black people can't change it while White people are silent and deaf to our words.

White people are in a position of power in this country because of racism. The question is: Are they brave enough to use that power to speak against the system that gave it to them?

So I'm asking you to help me. Notice this. Speak up. Don't let it slide. Don't stand watching in silence. Help build a world where it never gets to the point where the Samaritan has to see someone bloodied and broken.

As for me, I will no longer be silent. I'm going to try to speak kindly, and softly, but that's gonna be hard. Because it's getting harder and harder for me to think about the protection of White people's feelings when White people don't seem to care at all about the loss of so many Black lives.
This blog was originally published on Medium.com.

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What follows is the text of a "sermon" that I gave as a "congregational reflection" to an all White audience at the Bethel Congregational United Church of Christ on Sunday, June 28th. The sermon was begun with a reading of The Good Samaritan story, and this wonderful quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah.