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Barrett is a professor of psychology at Northeastern

her research has led her to conclude that each of us constructs them in our own individual ways, from a diversity of sources: our internal sensations, our reactions to the environments we live in, our ever-evolving bodies of experience and learning, our cultures.

if Barrett is correct, we’ll need to rethink how we interpret mental illness, how we understand the mind and self, and even what psychology as a whole should become in the 21st century.

The problem was the options that Ekman had given his subjects when asking them to identify the emotions shown on the faces they were presented with. Those options, Barrett discovered, had limited the ways in which people allowed themselves to think. Barrett explained the problem to me this way: “I can break that experiment really easily, just by removing the words. I can just show you a face and ask how this person feels. Or I can show you two faces, two scowling faces, and I can say, ‘Do these people feel the same thing?’ And agreement drops into the toilet.”

Just as that first picture of the bee actually wasn’t a picture of a bee for me until I taught myself that it was, my emotions aren’t actually emotions until I’ve taught myself to think of them that way. Without that, I have only a meaningless mishmash of information about what I’m feeling.

emotion isn’t a simple reflex or a bodily state that’s hard-wired into our DNA, and it’s certainly not universally expressed. It’s a contingent act of perception that makes sense of the information coming in from the world around you, how your body is feeling in the moment, and everything you’ve ever been taught to understand as emotion. Culture to culture, person to person even, it’s never quite the same. What’s felt as sadness in one person might as easily be felt as weariness in another, or frustration in someone else.

The brain, it turns out, doesn’t consciously process every single piece of information that comes its way. Think of how impossibly distracting the regular act of blinking would be if it did. Instead, it pays attention to what you need to pay attention to, then raids your memory stores to fill in the blanks.

In many quarters, Barrett was angrily attacked for her ideas, and she’s been the subject of criticism ever since. “I think Lisa does a disservice to the actual empirical progress that we’re making,” says Dacher Keltner, a Berkeley psychologist

Keltner told me that he himself has coded thousands of facial expressions using Ekman’s system, and the results are strikingly consistent: Certain face-emotion combinations recur regularly, and others never occur. “That tells me, ‘Wow, this approach to distinct emotions has real power,’” he says.

Ekman reached the peak of his fame in the years following 2001. That’s the year the American Psychological Association named him one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century. The next year, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article about him in the New Yorker, and in 2003 he began working pro bono for the TSA. A year later, riding the updraft of success, he left his university post and started the Paul Ekman Group,

a small research team to visit the isolated Himba tribe in Namibia, in southern Africa. The plan was this: The team, led by Maria Gendron, would do a study similar to Ekman’s original cross-cultural one, but without providing any of the special words or context-heavy stories that Ekman had used to guide his subjects’ answers. Barrett’s researchers would simply hand a jumbled pile of different expressions (happy, sad, fearful, angry, disgusted, and neutral) to their subjects, and would ask them to sort them into six piles. If emotional expressions are indeed universal, they reasoned, then the Himba would put all low-browed, tight-lipped expressions into an anger pile, all wrinkled-nose faces into a disgust pile, and so on.

It didn’t happen that way. The Himba sorted some of the faces in ways that aligned with Ekman’s theory: smiling faces went into one pile, wide-eyed fearful faces went into another, and affectless faces went mostly into a third. But in the other three piles, the Himba mixed up angry scowls, disgusted grimaces, and sad frowns. Without any suggestive context, of the kind that Ekman had originally provided, they simply didn’t recognize the differences that leap out so naturally to Westerners.

“What we’re trying to do,” she told me, “is to just get people to pay attention to the fact that there’s a mountain of evidence that does not support the idea that facial expressions are universally recognized as emotional expressions.” That’s the crucial point, of course, because if we acknowledge that, then the entire edifice that Paul Ekman and others have been constructing for the past half-century comes tumbling down. And all sorts of things that we take for granted today—how we understand ourselves and our relationships with others, how we practice psychology

Barrett’s theory is still only in its infancy. But other researchers are beginning to take up her ideas, sometimes in part, sometimes in full, and where the science will take us as it expands is impossible to predict. It’s even possible that Barrett will turn out to be wrong, as she herself acknowledges. “Every scientist has to face that,” she says. Still, if she is right, then perhaps the most important change we’ll need to make is in our own heads. If our emotions are not universal physiological responses but concepts we’ve constructed from various biological signals and stashed memories, then perhaps we can exercise more control over our emotional lives than we’ve assumed.

“Every experience you have now is seeding your experience for the future,” Barrett told me. “Knowing that, would you choose to do what you’re doing now?” She paused a beat and looked me in the eye. “Well? Would you? You are the architect of your own experience.”

Dramatic budget cuts in the past few years, however, may make US academia less of a paradise.

European salaries also lag behind those in the U.S., with the average European life scientist making anywhere from 41 to 82 percent of what the average American researcher earns.

Europe make around 50 percent of what full professors there make, postdocs in the U.S. earn less than a third of a professor’s salary.

Equal Pay Act prohibited unequal pay for men and women doing the same jobs. But salary disparities remain, including in the life sciences. “It is a persistent problem,” says Curtis. “It’s important for people to realize that there are continuing inequalities.” In this year’s survey, for example, male respondents in the U.S. reported an average total income of around $111,000 per year, while their female counterparts averaged just $77,000 in annual pay.

fewer women make it to high-level positions than men do, says Curtis.

life-science specialty is often tomorrow’s overcrowded field. Case in point: genomics versus genetics. Genomics relies heavily on bioinformatics, mathematics, and computational modeling

survey highlights the well-established discrepancy between industry and academic salaries. According to the data, life scientists in industry make around $136,000 per year, compared to average academic earnings of $85,000.

A landmark Johns Hopkins study in 1990 found that lawyers were 3.6 times as likely as non-lawyers to suffer from depression, putting them at greater risk than people in any other occupation. In December, Yale Law School released a study that said 70 percent of its students were affected by mental health issues.

From 1999 to 2007, lawyers were 54 percent more likely to commit suicide than people in other profession

the job requires an unhealthy degree of cynicism. “Research shows that an optimistic outlook is good for your mental health,” said Patricia Spataro, director of the New York State Lawyer Assistance Program, a resource for attorneys with mental health concerns. “But lawyers are trained to always look for the worst-case scenario. They benefit more from being pessimistic, and that takes a toll.”

the pressure to be hired by a big-name firm is so strongly ingrained in law school culture, one George Washington University student said, that even those who enroll with the intention of performing public service often find themselves redirected.

“It’s a very real pressure in law school,” Helen Clemens, the law student, said. “It comes from all kinds of avenues, but mostly I would say it just comes from the people surrounding you. If everyone is talking about leaders from our school who have gotten jobs at a really prestigious firm, the assumption is that we all should be trying to work at a similar place.”

As an economist, I look at it this way: Every profession produces both private returns — the fruits of labor that a person enjoys — and social returns — those that society enjoys. If I set up a shop on Etsy selling photographs, my private returns may be defined as the revenue I generate. The social returns are the pleasure that my photographs provide to my customers.

People in some professions provide a surplus of social returns. Inventors are a good example. Take the modern semiconductor. It made possible countless other inventions — nearly every piece of computing we interact with today.

countries suffer when talented people become what we economists call “rent seekers.” Instead of creating wealth, rent seekers simply transfer it — from others to themselves.

Job titles don’t tell you whether someone is primarily a rent seeker. A lawyer who helps draft precise contracts may actually be helping the wheels of commerce turn, and so creating wealth. But trial lawyers in a country with poorly functioning tort systems may simply be extracting rents: They can make money by pursuing frivolous lawsuits.

In this respect, finance is a vexing industry.

I can’t help wondering: Is this the best use of talent?

Booth, have shown in a study how extreme this financial gold rush has become in at least one corner of the financial world. From 2005 to 2011, they found that the duration of arbitrage opportunities in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange declined from a median of 97 milliseconds to seven milliseconds

correcting mispricing at this speed is unlikely to have any real social benefit: What serious investment is being guided by prices at the millisecond level? Short-term arbitrage, while lucrative, seems to be mainly rent-seeking.

This kind of rent-seeking behavior is widespread in other parts of finance. Banks sometimes make money by using hidden fees rather than adding true value. Debt collection agencies may use unscrupulous practices. Lenders to poor people buying used cars can make profits with business models that encourage high rates of default — making money by taking advantage of people’s overconfidence about what cars they can afford and by repossessing vehicles. These kinds of practices may be both lucrative — and socially pernicious.

The poor face a tremendous problem every day juggling money and expenses. Their pay often fluctuates week by week, yet they must pay rent no matter what they earn. Right now, poor people often use expensive payday loans or must incur expensive late fees.

Surely we could do better. Finding ways to smooth out these shocks is the kind of important, socially valuable problem that finance could solve. Many other crucial social problems have finance at their root, from saving for college to insuring unemployment risk.

Instead of finding clever ways to hide fees, banking innovations could solve these real and important problems.

So how should I feel about my students going into finance? I hope they realize that they have the potential to do great good and not simply make money. It may not be how the industry is structured now, but idealism and inventiveness are two of the best traits of youth, and finance especially could use them.

Super Bowl's audience exists on a different planet from the rest of everything we call "pop culture."

So if you add the year's biggest movie and the year's biggest TV show and the year's biggest album (while pretending that there is no overlap), you sum to an audience of 69 million, total. This year's Super Bowl is projected to have 120 million viewers watching—all at once. There is pop culture, and then there is the Super Bowl.

The argument "$4 million for 30 seconds is absurd" is sort of like saying "$1,000 for dinner is absurd." Yes, $1,000 is an expensive dinner-for-one. But what about a fancy dinner for 10 friends? Or 20 friends? Or 100? The more people at the table, the more that $1,000 starts to look like a bargain.

To understand why the Super Bowl is such a good deal by TV advertising standards, you have to understand the first thing about TV advertising. It's not about the price you pay for the advertisement. It's about the price you pay for the eyeballs

The Super Bowl's rate this year is about $35 to reach 1,000 people. Is that expensive? Not at all.

People in living rooms across the country say, in unison, "Everybody shut up, I want to experience this corporate messaging so that I can engage with the brand."

For four hours a year, a Super Bowl viewer transforms from an ordinary human, constantly rejecting the bombardment of advertising, into a marketing professor's platonic ideal of consumer, diligently seeking out great brand messaging. Surely, that remarkable metamorphosis is worth something.

a newly emerging model of how the brain focuses attention on a particular task, using neurons in the thalamic reticular nucleus as a switchboard to control the amount of information the brain receives, limiting and filtering out sensory information that we don't want to pay attention to

People need to be able to focus on one thing and suppress other distractions to perform everyday functions such as driving, talking on the phone, and socializing

sets the stage for ever more detailed studies on the complex behavior involved in how the mammalian brain pays attention to what's important, and especially how those neural circuits are broken in cases of attention-deficit diseases, such as ADHD, autism, and schizophrenia

its individual neurons as possible regulators of the brain's ability to multitask

The test, they say, was designed to gauge how well the area of the brain known to control higher behavioral functions, the prefrontal cortex, could direct the focus on one sense over another

researchers distracted the mice with opposing stimuli: If the mouse was expecting a flash of light to guide it to the milk reward, the researchers distracted it with a sound, and vice versa. Distracting the mice decreased their ability to collect the food reward to 70 percent from nearly 90 percent, even if the distracting stimulus was removed later

found that inactivating the prefrontal cortex region of the brain, which is believed responsible for decision-making in complex behaviors, disrupted TRN neural signaling and reduced mice to only random success in obtaining a milk reward when presented with specifically cued light or sound signals

Inactivating the TRN, while leaving the cortical regions intact, also diminished success with obtaining the prompted food reward

prefrontal cortex is essential to performing such behavioral tasks

this part of the brain "stores the knowledge ultimately communicated to the TRN to control how much visual or auditory sensory information is suppressed or not, and how the brain ultimately multitasks

for example, a good instructor would teach Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech by encouraging a conversation that involved analyzing the text and identifying the evidence, both factual and rhetorical, that makes it persuasive. “The opposite of what we’d want is a classroom where a teacher might ask only: ‘What was the year the speech was given? Where was it given?’ ”

in the past, assembling the SAT focused on making sure the questions performed on technical grounds, meaning: Were they appropriately easy or difficult among a wide range of students, and were they free of bias when tested across ethnic, racial and religious subgroups? The goal was “maximizing differentiation” among kids, which meant finding items that were answered correctly by those students who were expected to get them right and incorrectly by the weaker students. A simple way of achieving this, Coleman said, was to test the kind of obscure vocabulary words for which the SAT was famous

In redesigning the test, the College Board shifted its emphasis. It prioritized content, measuring each question against a set of specifications that reflect the kind of reading and math that students would encounter in college and their work lives. Schmeiser and others then spent much of early last year watching students as they answered a set of 20 or so problems, discussing the questions with the students afterward. “The predictive validity is going to come out the same,” she said of the redesigned test. “But in the new test, we have much more control over the content and skills that are being measured.”

Evidence-based reading and writing, he said, will replace the current sections on reading and writing. It will use as its source materials pieces of writing — from science articles to historical documents to literature excerpts — which research suggests are important for educated Americans to know and understand deeply. “The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Federalist Papers,” Coleman said, “have managed to inspire an enduring great conversation about freedom, justice, human dignity in this country and the world” — therefore every SAT will contain a passage from either a founding document or from a text (like Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address) that is part of the “great global conversation” the founding documents inspired.

The Barbara Jordan vocabulary question would have a follow-up — “How do you know your answer is correct?” — to which students would respond by identifying lines in the passage that supported their answer.

The idea is that the test will emphasize words students should be encountering, like “synthesis,” which can have several meanings depending on their context. Instead of encouraging students to memorize flashcards, the test should promote the idea that they must read widely throughout their high-school years.

. No longer will it be good enough to focus on tricks and trying to eliminate answer choices. We are not interested in students just picking an answer, but justifying their answers.”

the essay portion of the test will also be reformulated so that it will always be the same, some version of: “As you read the passage in front of you, consider how the author uses evidence such as facts or examples; reasoning to develop ideas and to connect claims and evidence; and stylistic or persuasive elements to add power to the ideas expressed. Write an essay in which you explain how the author builds an argument to persuade an audience.”

The math section, too, will be predicated on research that shows that there are “a few areas of math that are a prerequisite for a wide range of college courses” and careers. Coleman conceded that some might treat the news that they were shifting away from more obscure math problems to these fewer fundamental skills as a dumbing-down the test, but he was adamant that this was not the case. He explained that there will be three areas of focus: problem solving and data analysis, which will include ratios and percentages and other mathematical reasoning used to solve problems in the real world; the “heart of algebra,” which will test how well students can work with linear equations (“a powerful set of tools that echo throughout many fields of study”); and what will be called the “passport to advanced math,” which will focus on the student’s familiarity with complex equations and their applications in science and social science.

“Sometimes in the past, there’s been a feeling that tests were measuring some sort of ineffable entity such as intelligence, whatever that might mean. Or ability, whatever that might mean. What this is is a clear message that good hard work is going to pay off and achievement is going to pay off. This is one of the most significant developments that I have seen in the 40-plus years that I’ve been working in admissions in higher education.”

The idea of creating a transparent test and then providing a free website that any student could use — not to learn gimmicks but to get a better grounding and additional practice in the core knowledge that would be tested — was appealing to Coleman.

(The College Board won’t pay Khan Academy.) They talked about a hypothetical test-prep experience in which students would log on to a personal dashboard, indicate that they wanted to prepare for the SAT and then work through a series of preliminary questions to demonstrate their initial skill level and identify the gaps in their knowledge. Khan said he could foresee a way to estimate the amount of time it would take to achieve certain benchmarks. “It might go something like, ‘O.K., we think you’ll be able to get to this level within the next month and this level within the next two months if you put in 30 minutes a day,’ ” he said. And he saw no reason the site couldn’t predict for anyone, anywhere the score he or she might hope to achieve with a commitment to a prescribed amount of work.

sentenced Monday to 25 years in prison and ordered to pay the churches $2.6 million.

he was deeply sorry and wanted them to know he had recovered his faith in God

race was not considered a motive,

The music has been linked, in some instances, to fires at Christian churches in Norway.

Summerhays ordered him to pay $1.1 million in restitution to Mt. Pleasant Missionary Baptist Church and $970,213.30 to Greater Union Baptist Church, both in Opelousas, and $590,246 to St. Mary Missionary Baptist Church in Port Barre.

no one was injured.

Church Arson Prevention Act

“The churches survived for nearly 150 years but did not survive this defendant’s warped act of hatred.”

The judge asked the Bureau of Prisons to put Matthews in a prison near his family and to ensure that he gets substance abuse counseling and mental health treatment, KATC-TV reported.

Lisa Ashton had the same problem. She received a PPP loan for her business, Northern Lights Holistic, a wellness center in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. But she quickly realized she wouldn't be able to spend it in eight weeks, especially since her business won't be allowed to open before June 1. She called her bank and asked to give the money back.

"We'd rather survive and live to fight another day, even if eventually we owe the government some money," Huffman said.

Kurt Huffman, who owns the restaurant group ChefStable in Oregon, sees the PPP loan as a welcome lifeline but says the eight-week window to qualify for forgiveness is much too tight for restaurants.

"I told them the situation and I told them that it's going to be too much money for me to spend," Ashton said. Her bank agreed to take half back -- and she can now pay her 16 freelancers and rent through July 1, without accruing loan debt. "I won't have to worry about the interest or everything accumulating ... and being stuck with that payment. So I feel really good about that."

It's unclear whether either will happen. But a new report from the inspector general overseeing the Small Business Administration recommends that the SBA review its 75/25 rule for divvying up how the money must be spent. The IG noted that the law that created the program does not create any such restriction.

"The Paycheck program is underperforming because Treasury unilaterally required that 75% of the funds be used for payroll within eight weeks of receiving the loan," Seiberg wrote in a note to clients. "The frustration in Washington is that Treasury could unilaterally fix the problems tomorrow because it created them. ... If Treasury won't fix Paycheck, expect Congress to change the terms in the next stimulus."

While the physical sciences produce many detailed and precise predictions, the social sciences do not.  The reason is that such predictions almost always require randomized controlled experiments, which are seldom possible when people are involved.  For one thing, we are too complex: our behavior depends on an enormous number of tightly interconnected variables that are extraordinarily difficult to  distinguish and study separately

Without a strong track record of experiments leading to successful predictions, there is seldom a basis for taking social scientific results as definitive

our policy discussions should simply ignore social scientific research.  We should, as Manzi himself proposes, find ways of injecting more experimental data into government decisions.  But above all, we need to develop a much better sense of the severely limited reliability of social scientific results.   Media reports of research should pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to emphasize what they don’t show as much as what they do.

Given the limited predictive success and the lack of consensus in social sciences, their conclusions can seldom be primary guides to setting policy.  At best, they can supplement the general knowledge, practical experience, good sense and critical intelligence that we can only hope our political leaders will have.

How much authority should we give to such work in our policy decisions?  The question is important because media reports often seem to assume that any result presented as “scientific” has a claim to our serious attention.

Without a strong track record of experiments leading to successful predictions, there is seldom a basis for taking social scientific results as definitive

our policy discussions should simply ignore social scientific research.  We should, as Manzi himself proposes, find ways of injecting more experimental data into government decisions.  But above all, we need to develop a much better sense of the severely limited reliability of social scientific results.   Media reports of research should pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to emphasize what they don’t show as much as what they do

our policy discussions should simply ignore social scientific research.  We should, as Manzi himself proposes, find ways of injecting more experimental data into government decisions.  But above all, we need to develop a much better sense of the severely limited reliability of social scientific results.   Media reports of research should pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to emphasize what they don’t show as much as what they do.

Social sciences may be surrounded by the “paraphernalia” of the natural sciences, such as technical terminology, mathematical equations, empirical data and even carefully designed experiments. 

Given the limited predictive success and the lack of consensus in social sciences, their conclusions can seldom be primary guides to setting policy.  At best, they can supplement the general knowledge, practical experience, good sense and critical intelligence that we can only hope our political leaders will have.

During our leisure time, not counting work, each of us processes 34 gigabytes, or 100,000 words, every day

The world’s 21,274 television stations produce 85,000 hours of original programming every day as we watch an average of five hours of television daily, the equivalent of 20 gigabytes of audio-video images

That’s not counting YouTube, which uploads 6,000 hours of video every hour.

We’ve created a world with 300 exabytes (300,000,000,000,000,000,000 pieces) of human-made information. If each of those pieces of information were written on a 3-by-5-inch index card and then spread out side by side, just one person’s share—your share of this information—would cover every square inch of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined.

Neurons are living cells with a metabolism; they need oxygen and glucose to survive, and when they’ve been working hard, we experience fatigue. Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds,

The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated (by the researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and, independently, by Bell Labs engineer Robert Lucky) at 120 bits per second. That bandwidth, or window, is the speed limit for the traffic of information we can pay conscious attention to at any one time.

While a great deal occurs below the threshold of our awareness, and this has an impact on how we feel and what our life is going to be like, in order for something to become encoded as part of your experience, you need to have paid conscious attention to it.

What does this bandwidth restriction—this information speed limit—mean in terms of our interactions with others? In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second. With a processing limit of 120 bits per second, this means you can barely understand two people talking to you at the same time

We’re surrounded on this planet by billions of other humans, but we can understand only two at a time at the most! It’s no wonder that the world is filled with so much misunderstanding.

With such attentional restrictions, it’s clear why many of us feel overwhelmed by managing some of the most basic aspects of life. Part of the reason is that our brains evolved to help us deal with life during the hunter-gatherer phase of human history

Attention is the most essential mental resource for any organism. It determines which aspects of the environment we deal with, and most of the time, various automatic, subconscious processes make the correct choice about what gets passed through to our conscious awareness. For this to happen, millions of neurons are constantly monitoring the environment to select the most important things for us to focus on.

These neurons are collectively the “attentional filter.” They work largely in the background, outside of our conscious awareness. This is why most of the perceptual detritus of our daily lives doesn’t registe

The attentional filter is one of evolution’s greatest achievements. In nonhumans, it ensures that they don’t get distracted by irrelevant things

When our protohuman ancestors left the cover of the trees to seek new sources of food, they simultaneously opened up a vast range of new possibilities for nourishment and exposed themselves to a wide range of new predators. Being alert and vigilant to threatening sounds and visual cues is what allowed them to survive; this meant allowing an increasing amount of information through the attentional filter.

Ten thousand years ago, humans plus their pets and livestock accounted for about 0.1% of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass inhabiting the earth; we now account for 98%

Humans are, by most biological measures, the most successful species our planet has seen. We have managed to survive in nearly every climate our planet has offered (so far), and the rate of our population expansion exceeds that of any other known organism

Our success owes in large part to our cognitive capacity, the ability of our brains to flexibly handle information. But our brains evolved in a much simpler world with far less information coming at us. Today, our attentional filters easily become overwhelmed.

Successful people—or those who can afford it—employ layers of other people whose job it is to narrow their own attentional filters.

Solutions to our leaky privacy system tend to focus on transparency and control — that our best hope is knowing what our data is being used for and choosing whether to participate. But a challenge to that conventional wisdom emerges in his research. Giving users control may be an essential step, but it may also be a bit of an illusion.

personal data is what fuels the barons of the Internet age. Mr. Acquisti investigates the trade-offs that users make when they give up that data, and who gains and loses in those transactions. Often there are immediate rewards (cheap sandals) and sometimes intangible risks downstream (identity theft). “

“The technologist in me loves the amazing things the Internet is allowing us to do,” he said. “The individual who cares about freedom is concerned about the technology being hijacked, from a technology of freedom into a technology of surveillance.”

EARLY in his sojourn in this country, Mr. Acquisti asked himself a question that would become the guiding force of his career: Do Americans value their privacy?

If we have something — in this case, ownership of our purchase data — we are more likely to value it. If we don’t have it at the outset, we aren’t likely to pay extra to acquire it. Context matters.

“What worries me,” he said, “is that transparency and control are empty words that are used to push responsibility to the user for problems that are being created by others.”

We are constantly asked to make decisions about personal data amid a host of distractions, like an e-mail, a Twitter notification or a text message. If Mr. Acquisti is correct, those distractions may hinder our sense of self-protection when it comes to privacy.

His latest weapon against distraction is an iPad application, which lets him create a to-do list every morning and set timers for each task: 30 minutes for e-mail, 60 minutes to grade student papers, and so on.

it is not surprising that he is cautious in revealing himself online. He says he doesn’t feel compelled to post a picture of his meals on Instagram. He uses different browsers for different activities. He sometimes uses tools that show which ad networks are tracking him. But he knows he cannot hide entirely, which is why some people, he says, follow a policy of “rational ignorance.”

The online advertising industry insists that the data is scrambled to make it impossible to identify individuals.

Mr. Acquisti offers a sobering counterpoint. In 2011, he took snapshots with a webcam of nearly 100 students on campus. Within minutes, he had identified about one-third of them using facial recognition software. In addition, for about a fourth of the subjects whom he could identify, he found out enough about them on Facebook to guess at least a portion of their Social Security numbers.

The point of the experiment was to show how easy it is to identify people from the rich trail of data they scatter around the Web, including seemingly harmless pictures. Facebook can be especially valuable for identity thieves, particularly when a user’s birth date is visible to the public.

Does that mean Facebook users should lie about their birthdays (and break Facebook’s terms of service)? Mr. Acquisti demurred. He would say only that there are “complex trade-offs” to be made. “I reveal my date of birth and hometown on my Facebook profile and an identity thief can reconstruct my Social Security number and steal my identity,” he said, “or someone can send me ‘happy birthday’ messages on the day of my birthday, which makes me feel very good.”

The weakness in movies has multiple roots. Films, while in theaters, live behind a pay wall; television is free, once the monthly subscription is paid.

a collapse in home video revenue, caused partly by piracy, drove film salaries down. Television, meanwhile, raised its pay

But the number of films released by specialty divisions of the major studios, which have backed Oscar winners like “Slumdog Millionaire,” from Fox Searchlight, fell to just 37 pictures last year, down 55 percent from 82 in 2002,

“So, what does that mean for us as a culture?” Ms. Sylte asked of a vacuum that might occur if the better films went away. The hole, Mr. Gazzale said, to whom the question was relayed, would be a large one. “Movies remind us of our common heartbeat,” he said.

ultimately, students who use essay-writing services are cheating no one more than themselves. They are depriving themselves of the opportunity to ask, "What new insights and perspectives might I gain in the process of writing this paper?" instead of "How can I check this box and get my credential?"

why stop with exams? Why not follow this path to its logical conclusion? If the entire course is online, why shouldn't students hire someone to enroll and complete all its requirements on their behalf? In fact, "Take-my-course.com" sites have already begun to appear. One site called My Math Genius promises to get customers a "guaranteed grade," with experts who will complete all assignments and "ace your final and midterm."

Students sometimes argue that their talents have improved so dramatically that they are deserving of higher grades. Past studies, however, have found little evidence of this.

While it’s true that top schools have become more selective, the overall universe of students attending college has gotten broader, reflecting a wider distribution of abilities and levels of preparation, especially at the bottom. College students today also study less and do not appear to be more literate than their predecessors were.

Plus, of course, even if students have gotten smarter, or at least more efficient at studying (hey, computers do help), grades are arguably also supposed to measure relative achievement among classmates.

Affirmative action also sometimes gets blamed for rising grades; supposedly, professors have been loath to hurt the feelings of underprepared minority students. Rojstaczer and Healy note, however, that much of the increase in minority enrollment occurred from the mid-1970s to mid-’80s, the only period in recent decades when average GPAs fell.

That first era, the researchers say, can be explained by changes in pedagogical philosophy (some professors began seeing grades as overly authoritarian and ineffective at motivating students) and mortal exigencies (male students needed higher grades to avoid the Vietnam draft).

The authors attribute today’s inflation to the consumerization of higher education. That is, students pay more in tuition, and expect more in return — better service, better facilities and better grades. Or at least a leg up in employment and graduate school admissions through stronger transcripts.

some universities have explicitly lifted their grading curves (sometimes retroactively) to make graduates more competitive in the job market, leading to a sort of grade inflation arms race

But rising tuition may not be the sole driver of students’ expectations for better grades, given that high school grades have also risen in recent decades. And rather than some top-down directive from administrators, grade inflation also seems related to a steady creep of pressure on professors to give higher grades in exchange for better teaching evaluations.

It’s unclear how the clustering of grades near the top is affecting student effort. But it certainly makes it harder to accurately measure how much students have learned. It also makes it more challenging for grad schools and employers to sort the superstars from the also-rans

Lax or at least inconsistent grading standards can also distort what students — especially women — choose to study, pushing them away from more stingily graded science, technology, engineering and math fields and into humanities, where high grades are easier to come by.

Without collective action — which means both standing up to students and publicly shaming other schools into adopting higher standards — the arms race will continue.

they do not qualify for basic protections like overtime pay and minimum wages.

independent contractors

many of which lose money and rely on investors to keep pouring in billions of dollars of capital, might find that it pays to treat workers better and even make some of them employees.

It doesn’t help that the Trump administration is rapidly stripping away as many regulations as it can, promising to repeal two for every new one implemented — an ultra-wealthy administration’s attempt to formalize the plutocratic free-for-all that has followed decades of growing corporate power, defined by massive income inequality, regulatory capture, a revolving door between agencies and the industries they oversee, and steadily eroding consumer rights. The empowered consumer is a figment of our imagination.

Experiences that used to be standardized are being divided into tiers denoting various rights, access and costs. The result is to both pit consumers against one another — as they compete for a limited pool of guaranteed seats on an airplane, for example — and to extract more money out of better-heeled customers.

If we violate any of the strictures of the contract we’ve implicitly signed by buying a ticket, then the airline — backed with the imprimatur of state authority, perhaps even with the help of local police — has every right to remove us from the plane without apology.

Survey the economic landscape and you’re likely to find similarly scrambled power relationships. During the foreclosure crisis, banks acted like arms of the state, with local sheriffs becoming the banking industry’s eviction force. Health insurers dictate access to health care for millions while a small coterie of chief executives reaps huge payouts. The telecommunications industry has consolidated into a handful of industry behemoths that maintain regional monopolies

The result is a lack of competition and slow, pricey service

Increasingly we’re not just paying more for less; we are sacrificing our privacy rights in the process, as personal data has become a huge driver of the digital economy

Those are the economic costs of this arrangement. The social and cultural costs are harder to define but no less important. As Sandel explains, common experiences become increasingly fragmented and subjected to the vicissitudes of the market: “At a time of rising inequality, the marketization of everything means that people of affluence and people of modest means lead increasingly separate lives. We live and work and shop and play in different places. Our children go to different schools.”

traditionally guaranteed rights become more contingent and benefits accrue to the wealthy.

We get what we pay for, which increasingly means whatever a company like United decides.

Serious empiricists frequently use regression analysis.

Regression analysis is inferior to RFT because of the difficulty of ruling out confounding factors (for example, that a gene jointly causes baldness and a preference for tight hats) and of establishing causation

RFT has its limitations as well. It is enormously expensive because you must (usually) pay a large number of people to participate in an experiment, though one can obtain a discount if one uses prisoners, especially those in a developing country. In addition, one cannot always generalize from RFTs.

academic research proceeds in fits and starts, using RFT when it can, but otherwise relying on regression analysis and similar tools, including qualitative case studies,

businesses also use RFT whenever they can. A business such as Wal-Mart, with thousands of stores, might try out some innovation like a new display in a random selection of stores, using the remaining stores as a control group

Manzi argues that the RFT—or more precisely, the overall approach to empirical investigation that the RFT exemplifies—provides a way of thinking about public policy. Thi

The book is less interested in the RFT than in the limits of empirical knowledge. Given these limits, what attitude should we take toward government?

the universe is shaky even where, as in the case of physics, “hard science” plays the dominant role. The scientific method cannot establish truths; it can only falsify hypotheses. The hypotheses come from our daily experience, so even when science prunes away intuitions that fail the experimental method, we can never be sure that the theories that remain standing reflect the truth or just haven’t been subject to the right experiment. And even within its domain, the experimental method is not foolproof. When an experiment contradicts received wisdom, it is an open question whether the wisdom is wrong or the experiment was improperly performed.

Much of scientific knowledge turns out to depend on norms of scientific behavior, good faith, convention, and other phenomena that in other contexts tend to provide an unreliable basis for knowledge.

Under this view of the world, one might be attracted to the cautious conservatism associated with Edmund Burke, the view that we should seek knowledge in traditional norms and customs, which have stood the test of time and presumably some sort of Darwinian competition—a human being is foolish, the species is wise. There are hints of this worldview in Manzi’s book, though he does not explicitly endorse it. He argues, for example, that we should approach social problems with a bias for the status quo; those who seek to change it carry the burden of persuasion. Once a problem is identified, we should try out our ideas on a small scale before implementing them across society

It is one thing to say, as he does, that federalism is useful because we can learn as states experiment with different policies. But Manzi takes away much of the force of this observation when he observes, as he must, that the scale of many of our most urgent problems—security, the economy—is at the national level, so policymaking in response to these problems cannot be left to the states. He also worries about social cohesion, which must be maintained at a national level even while states busily experiment. Presumably, this implies national policy of some sort

Pursuing the theme of federalism, Manzi argues that the federal government should institutionalize policy waivers, so states can opt out from national programs and pursue their own initiatives. A state should be allowed to opt out of federal penalties for drug crimes, for example.

Manzi’s commitment to federalism and his technocratic approach to policy, which relies so heavily on RFT, sit uneasily together. The RFT is a form of planning: the experimenter must design the RFT and then execute it by recruiting subjects, paying them, and measuring and controlling their behavior. By contrast, experimentation by states is not controlled: the critical element of the RFT—randomization—is absent.

The right way to go would be for the national government to conduct experiments by implementing policies in different states (or counties or other local units) by randomizing—that is, by ordering some states to be “treatment” states and other states to be “control” states,

Manzi’s reasoning reflects the top-down approach to social policy that he is otherwise skeptical of—although, to be sure, he is willing to subject his proposals to RFTs.