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(CNN)Looking for a way to be happier? Are you seeking deeper connections with friends or looking for more friends? Want to relate better to your co-workers? Try a little compassion.Compassion, as one scholar describes it, is "experiencing feelings of loving kindness toward another person's affliction." It's related to, but a little different from empathy, which the same scholar defines as "feeling with someone, that is, sharing the other person's emotion."

What she, and many other scholars have found, is that compassion is key to coping. The compassionate tend to have deeper connections with others and more friends. They are more forgiving and have a stronger sense of life purpose. Many studies have shown these results.

In that quiet space, sit in a comfortable position. Focus on your breath and try to clear your mind. The key is to be present in that space in that time. Then mentally focus on your heart area and think about someone you feel tenderness toward. This could be your spouse or your mom or your child.

From watching and participating in debates over the years regarding Reaganomics, patterns of logical fallacies and factual errors repeatedly arise among critics on the Left.  As the troublesome facts demonstrating the failures of Obamanomics accumulate, we find that almost religiously minded supporters of President Barack Obama can't deal with those facts, and exhibit analogous logical fallacies.

Some critics falsely argue that Reagan increased payroll taxes which are paid much more by lower and moderate income workers.  The payroll tax rate increases of the 1980s were adopted under President Carter and the Democratic Congress in 1977.  The Greenspan Commission Social Security rescue plan adopted in 1983 only advanced a couple of these already scheduled payroll tax rate increases by a year or two.  But the ultimate plan for payroll taxes is to phase them out entirely in favor of lower cost personal accounts to finance the benefits currently financed by those taxes, as discussed in previous columns in this space.

In a study published in the journal Annals of Clinical Microbiology, researchers at Ondokuz Mayis University in Samsun, Turkey screened the mobile phones of 200 health care workers in hospitals for germs that are known to be dangerous to human health.

The solution to this problem may be decidedly low tech -- disinfectant spray and a paper towel.

Specifically, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University studied the brain waves of drivers using cell phones -- and they found that even just listening to a conversation reduced the amount of brain activity devoted to driving by 37 percent

Citigroup is making progress toward shrinking its gender pay gap. But it still has some work to do.

Globally, the bank's female employees earned 27% less than men did, according to a new report from the company. That's a slight improvement over the 29% gender pay gap Citigroup reported for 2018. This year's analysis also found that the median income for minority workers in the US was 6% less than the median income for non-minorities, down from 7% last year.

When adjusted to account for job titles, seniority and location, women at Citigroup (C) earned 1% less than their male counterparts, according to the report. Citigroup said that following a review of its global pay, it made pay adjustments as part of this year's compensation cycle according to the blog post.The company also said it has committed to increasing representation at the assistant vice president through managing director levels to at least 40% for women globally and 8% for black employees in the US by the end of 2021.

The Federal Reserve is signaling it will do whatever it takes to save the coronavirus-ravaged American economy from a depression.

Taken together, the Fed said the new programs will provide up to $300 billion in new financing to an economy getting crushed by the crippling health restrictions aimed at fighting the pandemic. The Fed is going all out to prevent the health crisis from turning into a full-blown financial crisis.

US stock futures spiked on the new emergency actions from the Fed, which has already slashed interest rates to zero. Recession fears and a liquidity crunch have crashed the stock market over the past month and caused parts of the bond market to malfunction.

As odds of a global recession rise, governments and central banks around the world are racing to fend off the economic damage from the spread of the coronavirus. The toll has already landed hard on jittery financial markets. Stocks continued to sell off on Thursday as the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 969 points, or about 3.6%, as investors fled stocks. Companies have shut factories, canceled conferences and drastically scaled back employee travel.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate on Thursday gave final passage to a roughly $8 billion spending package to provide medical supplies in hard-hit areas and pay for vaccine research. President Trump has said he will sign the bill. Despite such measures, many economists now say growth is likely to slow considerably this year — if not contract altogether.

Goldman Sachs projected on Sunday that because of the coronavirus, the U.S. economy would grow by an anemic 0.9% during the first three months of 2020 and would flatline during the second quarter.

Over the past week, stock markets around the world plunged as distressing news about the spread of the novel coronavirus continued to accumulate.

The global stock market is, theoretically, the distillation of how investors think everything that happens in the world will play out in the economy. Right now, judging by these drops, investors are much less optimistic than they were a week ago. But what they’re predicting is not only how bad the outbreak could be in terms of workers staying home sick, drops in consumer spending, or supply-chain disruptions; it’s also how bad people think it could be.

What investors think the public is thinking is therefore crucial.

Three months ago, as the novel coronavirus began to gain a foothold in countries across Europe, officials in the UK said they were still confident that the risk to the British public remained low.

but at the time there were just 13 confirmed cases and no deaths in the UK. While the government ordered hospitals to prepare for an influx of patients, its advice to some of the country's most vulnerable people -- elderly residents of care or nursing homes -- was that they were "very unlikely" to be infected.

By May 1, of the 33,365 total confirmed deaths in England and Wales, at least 12,526 -- or 38% -- were care home residents, according to the latest estimates from the Office of National Statistics (ONS).

Many small business owners who received loans from the federal Paycheck Protection Program say the program's rules are forcing them to make a difficult decision: Either take on more debt or spend money in ways that don't actually benefit their business.

At issue is a key rule that says in order for a PPP loan to be forgiven, a small business owner must spend at least 75% of it on payroll expenses in the first eight weeks of the loan. The remaining 25% may be spent on mortgage interest, rent, utilities and interest on other business-related debt obligations.

That means for businesses that had to shutter and let employees go, they must rehire their workers -- many of whom just started receiving unemployment benefits -- and pay them for eight weeks even though there is no work for them to do. Then one of two things will happen: the business won't be allowed to reopen yet and its employees will have to go back on unemployment; or the business may reopen, but have a hard time paying employees because it's unlikely to turn a profit quickly.

to really understand the problem with Facebook we need to understand the structural roots of that problem, how much of it is baked into the core architecture of the site and its very business model

much of it is inherent in the core strategies of the post-2000, second wave Internet tech companies that now dominate our information space and economy.

Facebook is an ingenious engine for information and ideational manipulation.

The coronavirus pandemic is forcing all courts to alter their procedures, but the US Supreme Court, imbued with an archaic, insular air and a majority of justices over age 65, will face a distinct challenge to keep operating and provide public access to proceedings.

The virus is bound to force Supreme Court justices into new territory. They may open their operations in more modern ways. Or, if they move in the opposite direction and shun any high-tech alternative, they might postpone all previously scheduled March and April oral argument sessions, a total 20 disputes, until next summer or fall.

This very practical dilemma comes as the justices already have one of the most substantively difficult slate of cases in years, testing abortion rights, anti-bias protections for LGBTQ workers, and the Trump administration's plan for deportation of certain undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children. (Those cases have already been argued, and the justices are drafting opinions to be released later this spring.)

Procrastination is the habit of putting off important, less pleasurable tasks by doing something that’s easier or more pleasurable. Email, Twitter, Facebook, food, and Netflix are a procrastinator’s best friends.

You procrastinate because: • You lack motivation, and/or • You underestimate the power of present emotions versus future emotions when you set your goals or make your task list.

But what if you could better anticipate your future emotions? What if you could feel the pain now of being up at three in the morning working on that report, instead of then? Or what if you could feel what it’s like to face yet another complaint against that toxic worker now, instead of next month?

According to studies done by Sheena Iyengar at Columbia University, Americans make an average of 70 decisions each day. We make mundane decisions about what to have for lunch and which route to take to work, as well as defining decisions such as where to live, whom to marry, and whether to keep this job or accept that other offer. As Albert Camus said "life is the sum of our choices."  

the longer you spend waffling over what to have for breakfast, the harder it will be to make a good decision with a customer or co-worker later that morning.  The more we hem and haw about what to buy at the mall on Saturday afternoon, the more likely we are to choose to throw back a pound of fries and double dose of fudge dessert on Saturday evening.

A simple Know-Think-Do framework can help solve this problem by enabling us to make all of our decisions--big and small; daily and defining--quicker without sacrificing quality.

The bank experience showed how you could be oppressed by hierarchy, working in an environment where you were neither free nor equal. But this implied that freedom and equality were bound together in some way beyond the basic state of being unenslaved, which was an unorthodox notion. Much social thought is rooted in the idea of a conflict between the two.

If individuals exercise freedoms, conservatives like to say, some inequalities will naturally result. Those on the left basically agree—and thus allow constraints on personal freedom in order to reduce inequality. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the opposition between equality and freedom an “intrinsic, irremovable element in human life.” It is our fate as a society, he believed, to haggle toward a balance between them.

What if they weren’t opposed, Anderson wondered, but, like the sugar-phosphate chains in DNA, interlaced in a structure that we might not yet understand?

The philosopher Ronald Dworkin considered this type of parental conundrum in an essay called “What Is Equality?,” from 1981. The parents in such a family, he wrote, confront a trade-off between two worthy egalitarian goals. One goal, “equality of resources,” might be achieved by dividing the inheritance evenly, but it has the downside of failing to recognize important differences among the parties involved.

Another goal, “equality of welfare,” tries to take account of those differences by means of twisty calculations.

Take the first path, and you willfully ignore meaningful facts about your children. Take the second, and you risk dividing the inheritance both unevenly and incorrectly.

For decades, scientists working to predict changes in the climate relied mostly on calculations involving simple laws of physics and chemistry but little data from the real world. But with temperatures world-wide continuing to rise—and with data-collection techniques and technologies continuing to advance—scientists now rely on meticulous measurements of temperatures, ocean currents, soil moisture, air quality, cloud cover and hundreds of other phenomena on Earth and in its atmosphere.

“Now we can truly do climate studies because now we have observations to precisely say how weather trends have changed and are changing,

“When you are trying to develop long-term environmental records, including climate records, consistent measurement is incredibly valuable,” says Kevin Murphy, who as NASA’s chief science data officer oversees an archive of Earth observation data used by 3.9 million people last year. “It’s irreplaceable data.”

This year's Super Bowl will be full of firsts: the first without a packed stadium; the first requiring players and coaches to follow Covid-19 protocol; and the first broadcast in a long time to go without ads from some of its big, perennial advertisers.

That is surprising considering the Super Bowl, which typically draws around 100 million viewers

has been frequently rated the most-watched broadcast of th