Dale Carson is a defense attorney in Jacksonville, Florida, as well as an alumnus of the Miami-Dade Police Department and the FBI. So he knows a thing or two about how cops determine who to hassle, and what all of us can do to not be one of those people. Carson has distilled his tips into a book titled Arrest-Proof Yourself, now in its second edition. It is a legitimately scary book—369 pages of insight on the many ways police officers profile and harass the people on their beat in an effort to rack up as many arrests as possible. 

"Law enforcement officers now are part of the revenue gathering system," Carson tells me in a phone interview. "The ranks of cops are young and competitive, they’re in competition with one another and intra-departmentally. It becomes a game. Policing isn’t about keeping streets safe, it’s about statistical success. The question for them is, Who can put the most people in jail?"

Which would make the question for you and me, how can we stay out of jail? Carson's book does a pretty good job of explaining—in frank language—how to beat a system that's increasingly predatory.

Be Invisible to Police

Carson has four golden rules, the first of which is, "If police can't see you, they can't arrest you." The simplest application of this concept is that if you plan on doing something illegal, you should do it in the privacy of your home. Yes, you can be arrested while at home, but you can't be profiled sitting in your living room, and profiling is what you're trying to avoid. 

Planning on consuming illegal drugs? Stay at home, like these two! (Joshua Resnick /Shutterstock.com)

The rule extends to activities that are perfectly legal. "In 21st century America," he writes, "as long as you're not committing a crime, you should be able to wear the wildest clothes you want, roam the streets when you feel like it, and lean on a light post or hang out at some wild club if it amuses you." "Should" is the key word. In reality, cops love hassling people who stand out, even though it's not illegal to, say, have a Buckeyes bumper sticker that looks like a pot leaf. If you drive a sports car or a lowrider, you're more likely to attract a cop's attention than if you drive, say, a gray Honda Civic. Same goes for clothes, hairstyles, tone and volume of voice. Be boring.  

So try to blend in. Beat cops who patrol the same routes day after day are "incredibly attuned to incongruity." But don't be too reactive when you see cops. "Police are visual predators," Carson writes. "Any sudden change in motion, speed, direction or behavior immediately attracts their attention." That means even if you're doing something you think might attract a cop's attention, quickly doing something else will attract even more attention. "Don't alter the pattern," Carson advises. "Keep on keeping on." 

Also, if you can help it, don't go out after dark. 

What if I can't be invisible to police?

If police want to hassle you, they're going to, even if you're following the above tips as closely as possible. What then? Every interaction with a police officer entails to contests: One for "psychological dominance" and one for "custody of your body." Carson advises giving in on the first contest in order to win the second. Is that belittling? Of course. "Being questioned by police is insulting," Carson writes. "It is, however, less insulting than being arrested. What I'm advising you to do when questioned by police is pocket the insult. This is difficult and emotionally painful." 

It can be difficult for a society to shrug off a bad idea it's been running with for millennia. Unequal treatment of the genders is on its way out, but many of our contemporary innovations still carry the smear of institutionalized discrimination or de facto bias.

Take Wikipedia, for example. Despite the fact that our communal encyclopedia provides a wealth of accessible information, women make up fewer than 15% of the project's editors. (For further information, see the Wikipedia article "Wikipedia: Systemic bias.") Oftentimes, the lack of gender parity results in a dearth of articles about, or including, important female figures in society. That's what science journalist and BrainPOP news director Maia Weinstock found when she started editing Wikipedia articles back in 2007: Women who should be included in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) achievement canon were simply missing from the archives. Or, when they were included, their stories were often stubs that left out the magnitude of their contributions.

In attempt to rectify some of these wrongs, Weinstock organized a Wikipedia Edit–a–thon held on last year's Ada Lovelace day, a holiday dedicated to celebrating achievements of women in STEM fields, named for the pioneering 19th–century scientist (who, thankfully, has an extensive Wikipedia entry). Today, Weinstock is organizing another round of editing at Brown University, in which some 40 contributors will help write articles from scratch or expand stubs on women pioneers.

"We hope that this will be replicated in the future, and we'd like these things to be done every day, not just Ada Lovelace day," Weinstock said.

Edit–a–thon has posted a list of the articles its editors seek to create and to expand during the event, and below are some highlights. They include female innovators who currently don't exist on Wikipedia, or do exist on Wikipedia but in a very limited capacity.

Liane Brauch Russell, Geneticist

Liane Brauch Russell was born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria in 1923, and fled to London during World War II. She moved to the United States to pursue her studies, and after graduating from Hunter College and initiating her PhD at the University of Chicago, Russell went to work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which had been used to develop nuclear weapons as part of the Manhattan Project. There, Russell launched a major investigation into the effects of radiation on mice, and shed significant light on the relationship between prenatal exposure to radiation and birth defects.

Russell was the first scientist to figure out the periods of embryonic development that were critical to healthy growth of different parts of the body, according to the Department of Energy, and later won the DOE's Enrico Fermi award for her work convincing doctors that prenatal exposure to radiation needed to be prevented. In the early '90s, Russell also helped secure a 125,000–acre piece of land in Tennessee now dedicated to preserving the Big South Fork National River and its tributaries. She does not have a Wikipedia page.

Dorothy Celeste Boulding Ferebee, Activist Doctor

Dorothy Celeste Boulding Ferebee was born in the late 19th century Jim Crow South, the granddaughter of former slaves. At a time when few women, let alone African American women, were studying medicine, Ferebee graduated among the top five in her class at Tufts University Medical School, but racism barred her from obtaining internships at white hospitals. She moved from Boston to Washington, D.C., instead, where she worked at Freedmen's Hospital (later Howard University Hospital), which was established directly after the Civil War. Eventually, Ferebee launched her own clinic by convincing trustees of a segregated medical center to open up another site, the Southeast Neighborhood House, to cater specifically to the underserved African American community on Capitol Hill.

Not only did Ferebee launch a clinic, but she also established day care at Southeast for working mothers. During the Great Depression, Ferebee directed the Mississippi Health Project, which brought smallpox and diphtheria immunizations to sharecroppers living under plantation owners' thumbs. She held many other notable positions until her death in 1980, including an appointment from President John F. Kennedy to the council for the Food for Peace foreign aid program. Ferebee does have a Wikipedia page, but it's brief, and leaves out much of her story and accomplishments.

Ingeborg Hochmair, Cochlear Implant Engineer

Electrical engineer Ingeborg Hochmair played a central role in developing the cochlear implant. But while she and her husband jointly founded MED–EL, a cochlear implant manufacturing company, and Ingeborg won the prestigious Lasker Award for her work, she still has no Wikipedia page. "I went to Wikipedia to learn about her, and not only does she not have a page at all, but her husband has a full page," Weinstock said. Her husband's page, moreover, downplays her accomplishments: "Together with his wife Ingeborg Hochmair, who holds several degrees in electrical engineering, he designed a device that was able to stimulate the fibers of the auditory nerve at several locations within the cochlea."

Vera Kistiakowsky, Nuclear Physicist

Vera Kistiakowsky "is regarded as one of the country's outstanding scientists in the twentieth century," according to Mount Holyoke's Women of Influence gallery, but she does not have a Wikipedia page. Kistiakowsky's father, who served on President Eisenhower's Science Advisory Committee, does have one, but the younger Kistiakowky went on to pursue a groundbreaking career in nuclear physics, too. In 1963, Kistiakowsky joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Nuclear Science, and went on to publish more than 100 articles on experimental particle physics and observational astrophysics. Kistiakowsky also helped found Boston's WISE (Women in Science and Engineering), and launched a committee in the American Physical Society (APS) to "study the status of women physicists," according to the Cambridge Women's Heritage Project.

Barbara Crawford Johnson, Lunar Landing Engineer

The Apollo Lunar Landing Program had one woman on its engineering team, and that woman was Barbara Crawford Johnson, manager of Mission Requirements and Evaluation. Before she took the highest position ever to be had by a woman in the program, Johnson helped design one of the United States' first missiles, the SM–64 Navaho. The Apollo 11 Wikipedia page doesn't discuss Johnson's contributions, and her own page mostly consists of a description of an episode of Mad Men on which she was mentioned.

1) After doing some home renovation work late into the evening, my husband had inadvertently left both our garage door and our back door open when he came to bed.

2) There have been a string of burglaries in our neighborhood, often involving somebody kicking in the back door of a house.

3) If the cops are patrolling your neighborhood alleys looking for burglars and they see your garage door and back door open, they might interpret that as a sign that there could be a robbery in progress at your residence. Legal precedent calls this “totality of circumstances”. Just leaving your back door open might not be suspicious, especially if you lock the screen door and, thus, imply that you meant to do that. But combine an open back door with the open garage, an unlocked screen door, the time of night, and the string of burglaries, and cops start to decide that they can’t just shrug their shoulders and walk away. This will end up being important.

4) Turns out, when there is a window unit and a fan on in our bedroom, we can’t hear people yelling something like, for instance, “Police!”, through our back screen door. Or, at any rate, I might hear it, but will not register properly what is being said.

4a) My neighbor and his roommate were not out yelling for their dog at 4:00 in the morning. Also, there are two Minneapolis police officers whose voices sound strikingly like those of my neighbor and his roommate. Small world.

5) If you don’t answer the door at 4:00 in the morning and the cops have a totality of circumstances that lead them to believe a robbery may be in progress, they then have probable cause to enter your house.

6) Upon waking up to strangers and flashlights in the hallway six feet from our bed, my husband’s response is to charge at said intruders while screaming. (It is also worth noting that he is not a pajama kind of guy.) He will later explain his train of thought as, “Strangers! Pregnant wife! Attack!”

7) Confirming previous suspicions, we can now be fairly confident that we benefit from the sort of class and race biases that prevent a man from being shot or tased when he runs screaming, naked, at a cop in the dark at 4:00 in the morning. It probably also doesn’t hurt that there seems to be a correlation between the time it takes to trip and fall into the wall and the time it takes to register that the intruder in your hallway is dressed like a cop and you maybe shouldn’t hit him. Later, I will lie awake for at least an hour, thinking about the many, many ways this situation could have gone poorly and about the strange brew of privilege and circumstance, training and luck, that, instead, made this something I will laugh about.

In conclusion: I think we are pretty good to go on the whole “remember to shut the door at night” thing.

Special thanks to Minneapolis Police Department Sgt. William Powell for answering my questions about probable cause and the likelihood of being prosecuted for assaulting an officer. Photo: Chris Barrie.

The idea of "borrowed nostalgia" takes on a very literal meaning as you watch "Facehawk," a music video for Big Data's track "Dangerous" that exploits your own memories. Head to thefacehawk.com and log in with your Facebook credentials to find your profile page -- nothing special. But the video above from director and interactive artist Rajeev Basu demonstrates what happens next using his own profile: the page blows apart into hundreds of fragments -- photos, status updates, etc -- that coalesce into a three-dimensional hawk. You have to try it yourself to appreciate uneasiness that comes with watching so many personal moments explode across your browser window. It's like watching a tornado tear up your house in slow motion and then put it back together in the shape of an elegant sculpture. 

What if you haven't posted much Facebook content to play with? Alan Wilkis, one half of Big Data along with Daniel Armbruster, assures a viewer on Vimeo that it'll still work, "but the hawk is considerably more filled out and detailed, the more content that you have in your Facebook profile." There you have it: the tug of war between the desire to share and the fear of putting too much out there. And that's their point -- Big Data say they make "music about voyeurism in the digital age." In this case, though, they promise not to share your data. Their music is available from Soundcloud, Spotify, and the iTunes store. Don't miss Wilkis's videos previously featured on Atlantic Video: "Come and Go," "Shadow," and "Old-Fashioned Girl." 

For more work by Rajeev Basu, visit http://www.rajeevbasu.com/.

The planned M Street protected bike lane, often called a cycletrack, will now be an almost-cycletrack: under the latest plans, bicycle riders will be able to ride protected from adjacent traffic from Thomas Circle to Georgetown except on one block, between 15th and 16th Streets.

Looking down M from 15th. Photo from Google Maps.

Martin Di Caro reported that instead of a fully protected lane, there will just be one of the more common painted bike lanes on this block. This is the block that includes the Metropolitan AME church, whose members loudly protested a bike lane at meetings earlier this year, since it would reduce the amount of on-street parking for the church.

DDOT Associate Director Sam Zimbabwe said that the detailed plans would be available soon, but I was able to independently get a copy of the latest proposal:

Bicycle planners were already willing to work creatively to accommodate the church's needs, such as with one possible proposal to allow parking in the cycletrack on Sundays. However, as David Cranor reported back in May,

When asked if this was a done deal, Zimbabwe said it was and it wasn't. That there was going to be a cycle track on M, but what it would look like was still negotiable. ... When asked if the 1500 block could be left out of the plans, he said that it would have too negative an impact on people trying to bike the road.

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Think back to the last time you experienced a high amount of psychological stress. For example, after you were in a fender bender or before you had to give a big speech in front of hundreds of people.

How was your thinking? A bit scattered?

Did performing simple tasks like writing or tying your shoe become difficult because of how much your hands were shaking?

If you’re like many people, you likely experienced small cognitive and physical breakdowns due to fear and stress. Whenever we encounter stressful situations, our body is flooded with hormones that elevate our heart rate to prime us to fight or flee. Our bodies become aroused and ready for action – a good thing. But if we get too amped up, our physical and cognitive skills fall apart – a very bad, potentially dangerous thing.

Now imagine what your response would be if you were in the middle of a gunfight with a bad guy.

How do you imagine your thinking would be then? Would you even be able to think?

Would you be able to respond with like force or would you just freeze like a deer in headlights?

In life-or-death situations, be it a firefight or an emergency evacuation, it’s often the psychological stress that gets a man killed. Or more specifically, his inability to manage that stress.

In today’s post we’re going to highlight some of the research from recent years that shows what stress does to a man’s ability to perform in high-risk scenarios. Moreover, we’ll introduce a color code system developed by one of history’s best shooting experts that many warriors (soldiers, fighters, police officers, first responders, and even average joes interested in beyond average training) use to gauge their mental and physical preparedness in life-or-death situations. We’ll end the post by discussing a few of the research-backed techniques that warriors around the world are beginning to use to mitigate stress, allowing them to perform at optimal levels even in the heat of a crisis.

While much of the research and content in this post is geared towards helping you become a better sheepdog, the principles and techniques can also be used to manage stress in everyday situations, whether that be a tough challenge at home, at work, or on the playing field. Even if you don’t plan on getting in a close-quarters firefight anytime soon, you can definitely benefit from this information.

The Inverted-U Theory of Stress and Performance

The Inverted-U Hypothesis proposes that increases in stress typically are accompanied by increases in quality of performance…only up to a point, though. After you reach a certain threshold, you experience diminishing returns where rising stress actually results in deteriorating performance quality in certain tasks.

Several sports performance researchers during the 1970s and 1980s found that athletes experienced increases and decreases in different motor skills at different stress-induced heart rates. For example, when heart rates reach above 115 beats per minute (BPM), fine motor skills, like writing, begin to deteriorate. However, when heart rates are between 115 and 145 BPM, complex motor skills, like throwing a football or aiming a gun, are at their peak. Cognitive functioning is also at its peak in this range. After 145 BPM, performance for complex motor skills begins to diminish, but gross motor skills like running and lifting remain at optimal levels. When heart rates go above 175 BPM, capacity for all skilled tasks disintegrates and individuals begin to experience catastrophic cognitive and physical breakdown.

While most of the research on stress and performance has been used in the realm of sports, researchers who study combat and tactical scenarios are beginning to use the Inverted-U hypothesis to help warriors of all kinds become better fighters and responders. By knowing how stress impacts their performance in life-or-death situations, warriors are able to take steps to help mitigate its effects either through training or stress-management techniques.

Physiological vs. Psychological Stress

As we discuss arousal (in reference to stress and heart rate) and its effect on performance, it’s important to note that there’s a big difference between heart rate increase caused by physiological versus psychological stress. You likely won’t see major deterioration in cognitive and physical performance when heart rates increase due to physical exercise. For example, you’re probably not going to experience tunnel vision after you get your heart rate up from a bunch of wind sprints.

It’s typically only when your heart rate increases rapidly due to psychological stress (e.g., fear in a deadly force encounter) that you’ll experience the significant negative effects of stress arousal.

The Stress Arousal Color Code

In his seminal book, Principles of Personal Defense, gun fighting expert Jeff Cooper laid out a color code system to help warriors gauge their mindset for combat scenarios. Each color represents a person’s potential state of awareness and focus. Originally, Cooper’s color code system only used white, yellow, orange, and red.

In recent years, combat researchers, like Lt. Col. Dave Grossman and Bruce K. Siddle, added two more levels, gray and black, for reasons we’ll dig into more later on in the post. Moreover, they combined Cooper’s system with the Inverted-U chart of arousal and performance to create a framework that associates a color level with a heart rate arousal level. Below we summarize this synthesis with text and illustrations.

Condition White

When you’re in Condition White, you’re completely unaware and un-alert to your surroundings. If a threat were to appear, you’d be caught off-guard and wouldn’t be able to respond adequately. Visual and cognitive reaction times are much slower in Condition White and we’re much more susceptible to Normalcy Bias. Because most people are sheep and not sheepdogs, Condition White is the norm in society. Ideally, the only time you should be in Condition White is when you’re secure in your home or asleep. When you leave the house, you should leave Condition White.

Condition Yellow

Condition Yellow is best described as relaxed alert. There’s no specific threat situation, but you have your head up and eyes open, and you’re taking in your surroundings in a relaxed, but alert manner. When you’re in Condition Yellow, you’re less likely to be caught off-guard from a sudden threat and you are better able to respond should a threat arise. Heart rate is normal, so there isn’t any degradation of fine motor skills or cognitive ability.

Tactical experts recommend that warriors stay in Condition Yellow at all times. In fact, many Air Force pilots stick a yellow dot on their watch or in the cockpit to remind them to stay in Condition Yellow.

Condition Orange

You enter Condition Orange when you identify a possible, specific threat. Something isn’t quite right and has your attention. Your goal isn’t to take action while in Condition Orange. Rather, it is to become extra vigilant so you can determine if a possible danger is in fact a threat that needs a response. Maybe you smell smoke, or perhaps you identify a person in the water who may be drowning, or maybe the guy walking towards you in a dark side-street is acting funny. In all of those situations, you’d want to be in Condition Orange.

While in Condition Orange, you should be formulating an attack plan on what you’ll do if you verify the threat, e.g., “If there’s a fire, I’ll call 911,” or  ”If he’s drowning, I’ll jump in and rescue him,” or “If he pulls out a gun, I’ll pull mine and shoot.”

When you’re in Condition Orange, stress levels will increase, as will your heart rate. However, you shouldn’t experience any cognitive or motor deterioration.

Staying in Condition Orange’s increased vigilance level on a regular basis isn’t recommended as it can be mentally and physically taxing. If you verify that a possible threat isn’t a threat, you should immediately drop back down into Condition Yellow’s relaxed alert. However, if you confirm that something or someone is indeed a threat, you should immediately move to…

Condition Red

You’ve verified the threat — now it’s time to implement the action plan you developed while in Condition Orange. When you’re in Condition Red, your mind and body are primed for action. Adrenaline is pumping through your veins and your heart rate is up to between 115 and 145 beats per minute. Studies have shown this to be the optimal level for tactical and survival scenarios. Complex motor skills, visual reaction times, and cognitive reaction times are at their peak.

While complex motor skills and visual and cognitive reaction times are at their best in Condition Red, fine motor skills, like writing or threading flex cuffs, deteriorate.

Condition Gray

Condition Gray wasn’t part of Cooper’s original color system, but after analyzing years of research, Grossman and his colleagues added it. When you reach Condition Gray, your heart rate rises above the optimal range of 115-145 BPM and goes up to 145-175 BPM. Consequently, mental and physical performance begins to suffer dramatically and puts the fighter at risk of being injured or killed.

Tunnel vision and loss of depth perception is common, which means a fighter may miss additional threats in the vicinity. Tunnel vision also often causes fighters to “not see” innocent third-party bystanders in a fight. This phenomenon is a big reason why most firearms trainers these days instruct students to get in the habit of scanning their environment after they neutralize a threat. The simple act of looking side-to-side can help disrupt tunnel vision.

Auditory exclusion is another common symptom of Condition Gray. Fighters who’ve experienced auditory exclusion report not hearing their partner’s gun fire, even though the gun was going off right next to him. However, they’ll often remember hearing shouts from their partner.

Complex motor skills, like gun manipulation or non-armed combatives, begin to suffer in Condition Gray. Gross motor skills, like running, jumping, pulling, and pushing are still at optimal levels.

One possible and positive symptom you may experience in Condition Gray is “bullet time”– a mental phenomenon in which everything around you appears to be moving in slow motion, a la The Matrix. Bullet time can give a fighter more clarity and help him react. In his study on deadly force encounters, Dr. Alexis Artwohl surveyed police offers who had experienced deadly force encounters and found that nearly 62% of them experienced slow-motion time.

It’s called “Condition Gray” because Grossman believes more research needs to be done on arousal levels where the heart reaches 145-175 BPM.  Grossman notes in his book On Combat that while most untrained men will begin to experience the mental and physical deterioration outlined above, some fighters are still able to perform at optimal levels in Condition Gray. Research indicates that with proper training and stress inoculation, fighters can properly and safely “push the envelope” of Condition Red into the elevated heart rates of Condition Gray.

Condition Black

Condition Black wasn’t part of Cooper’s original system either, but was added by the U.S. Marine Corps. When you reach Condition Black, your heart is beating faster than 175 BPM. At this level of arousal, a fighter  — even a well-trained one — experiences catastrophic breakdown of mental and physical performance.

In addition to tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, and deterioration of complex motor skills, other symptoms are present in Condition Black.

Most fighters will experience bladder and bowel voiding — in other words, they poop and pee their pants. In high-stress, life-or-death situations, sphincter and bladder control just aren’t a priority for your body. Moreover, it wants to get rid of as much waste as it can so you’re in a better position to fight or run. At this point, the decisions your physical body makes are overriding any cognitive ones. Lt. Col. Grossman actually discusses this issue in great detail in On Combat. While many soldiers and fighters won’t admit publicly that they messed themselves, in anonymous surveys conducted after WWII, one-quarter of soldiers admitted they peed themselves during combat and one-eighth admitted to defecating. Grossman believes the number was likely even higher than that.

Extreme vasoconstriction is also typically present in Condition Black. Vasoconstriction is when the blood vessels narrow to constrict blood flow. In life-or-death situations, your body wants most of your blood to stay near vital organs and large muscles that can be used to fight or run. One benefit of this is that if you were to sustain a wound, vasoconstriction helps limit the amount of bleeding you experience. Extreme vasoconstriction causes people to look “white with fear” as all the blood has been shunted away from the skin’s surface to more vital parts of the body. While this is a survival mechanism, it unfortunately leads to deterioration of complex motor skills.

Another physical reaction is that your forebrain (the executive part of your brain) shuts down and your more primitive middle brain takes over. Grossman calls this the “puppy dog” brain. Without executive functioning, you’re susceptible to irrational fighting or fleeing. As an example of this type of irrational behavior, many soldiers fighting in the frontlines of WWI and WWII reported seeing comrades run out from behind protection and into enemy fire without any rhyme or reason. As Grossman puts it, “in Condition Black you can run and you can fight like a big, hairless, clawless bear, but that is about all you are capable of doing.”

In that same study conducted by Dr. Artwohl mentioned above, he found that a very small percentage of police offers experienced freezing, or temporary paralysis during a deadly force encounter. In these cases, the body doesn’t fight or run, it just stops cold, leaving the fighter very vulnerable.

Managing Arousal in High-Stakes Situations

Now that we understand how stress alters our performance, let’s take a look at some of the things that combat researchers have found help mitigate its effects. While you can’t completely control where your heart rate goes in a high-stress situation, learning and practicing certain techniques can help you lower it and maximize your resistance to stress, allowing you to perform at optimal levels for as long as possible.

Practice tactical breathing. Tactical breathing was developed by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. It’s a technique that soldiers and police officers use to quickly calm down and stay focused during firefights. Here’s how to do it:

1. Slowly inhale a deep breath for 4 seconds.
2. Hold the breath in for 4 seconds.
3. Slowly exhale the breath out for 4 seconds.
4. Hold the empty breath for 4 seconds.
5. Repeat until your breathing is under control.

Simple. What’s hard is having the discipline to do this when you start feeling stressed out.

Tactical breathing isn’t just useful for deadly force encounters. Use it anytime you’re feeling stressed out and need to bring yourself back down to optimal arousal levels.

Meditate. Studies show that individuals who practice meditation can clear distracting and stressful thoughts (like worry) from their mind more quickly than individuals who don’t meditate. That sort of ability comes in handy in high-stress situations like deadly force encounters.

The U.S. military is actually experimenting with mindfulness meditation training with its new recruits. The hope is that meditation’s stress-reducing benefits will help soldiers stay out of Condition Black while in the heat of combat, as well as help them recover more quickly after the encounter.

There’s not much to meditation. Just sit in a quiet place and focus on your breath going in your nose and out your mouth. Whenever a distracting thought pops up, don’t get flustered. Just name the thought, let it go, and focus back on your breath. If you’re like me, you’ll find that when you first start meditating, you get easily distracted by your thoughts. Don’t get discouraged; with time your mind will quiet down, and your ability to dismiss unwanted thoughts will improve.

Start off with one 10-minute session daily, and slowly increase your sessions to 20 minutes. If you have time, you may consider doing a 20-minute meditation session in the morning and another 20-minute session at night.

Practice visualization. Emerging research shows that warriors who visualize hypothetical high-stress scenarios perform better in actual high-stress situations than those who don’t. For example, officers who take part in visual exercises demonstrate better marksmanship than those who skip this technique.There’s also evidence that visualizing successful management of high-stress situations reduces a combatant’s anxiety and stress response when the events actually occur, thus allowing the fighter to stay in optimal Condition Red longer.

Here are some rough and ready guidelines on performing visualization exercise:

• Make the visualization as vivid as possible. Incorporate all your senses and emotions.
• Visualize problems and sticking points, but — and this is the critical part — always visualize yourself successfully overcoming the problem or obstacle. Never visualize failure.
• Never rely on visualization alone. It’s important to combine it with tactical practice and role playing.

Use task-relevant instructional self-talk. To counter the detrimental performance effects of stress, talk yourself through complex actions as if you were an instructor. For example, many police officers are trained to speak out loud during every step in the gun firing process using the acronym BRASS:

• Breathe
• Relax
• Aim
• Sight
• Squeeze

Another example of task-relevant instructional self-talk would be to yell out “Tap, Rack, and Go!” whenever you encounter a gun jam.

Don’t worry if people think you’re crazy. Research has shown that this sort of self-talk can increase performance on both cognitive and physical tasks.

The key with this type of self-talk is to keep it brief and positive.

Stay active and outwardly focused. In the book War, by Sebastian Junger (which I highly recommend), he shares an interesting study done on a Special Forces team during the Vietnam War. The team was stationed at an isolated base along the Cambodian border and knew there was a good chance of the base being completely overrun by a force of Vietcong. Surprisingly, researchers found that in contrast to the officers, the stress levels of the enlisted men actually dropped before an expected attack, and rose when the attack failed to materialize. Researchers offered this explanation: “The members of this Special Forces team…were action-oriented individuals who characteristically spent little time in introspection. Their response to any environmental threat was to engage in a furor of activity which rapidly dissipated the developing tension.” This activity included laying C-wire and mines around the base, which as Junger notes, “was something they knew how to do and were good at, and the very act of doing it calmed their nerves.”

When you’re facing a threat you can anticipate in advance, take a cue from the men of the Special Forces; instead of sitting around navel-gazing, bouncing your leg up and down, and getting your heart rate up before anything even happens, keep yourself occupied with preparations – check your equipment, mentally rehearse your mission, etc.

Stress Inoculation Through Realistic Training

Remember the old saying amongst soldiers: “You do not rise to the occasion in combat, you sink to the level of training.”

Thus, the best way to overcome the detrimental effects of stress on performance is to inoculate yourself from it altogether through consistent, realistic training.

From a self-defense standpoint, this means you need to do more than just go to the gun range to practice your marksmanship or punch the heavy bag in your garage. You’ll actually need to train your techniques under the same sort of pressure you’d experience in a real-life situation. For handgun training, this could be achieved with simunitions or airsoft guns; with hand-to-hand self-defense, live sparring can give you similar stress levels as a real-life fight.

With proper, consistent, and realistic training, you can hone your body to perform at optimal levels, even when the going gets the toughest.

____________________

Sources:

Sharpening the Warrior’s Edge by Bruce K. Siddle

On Combat by Dave Grossman and Loren W. Christensen

Warrior Mindset by Dr. Michael Asken, Loren W. Christensen, Dave Grossman and Human Factor Research

Illustrations by Ted Slampyak

Related posts:

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2. Heading Out on Your Own — Day 30: How to Manage Stress
3. The Warrior’s Guide to True Manliness
4. Are You a Sheep or Sheepdog? Part III: Your Roadmap to Becoming a Sheepdog
5. Be Clutch, Don’t Choke: How to Thrive in High Pressure Situations (Part II)

If you’ve gone all summer without drinking a single slushie, take the rest of the day off and whip up this refreshing motherfucker right here. The watermelon and cucumber in this shit help soothe inflammation and the mint will keep your breath on point. FUCK IT. Splash some vodka in there if you want to take tomorrow off too.

WATERMELON CUCUMBER SLUSHIE

3 pounds of watermelon (seedless is best but some seeds are cool)

½ cup skinned, chopped cucumber

juice from 1 lime (about 2 tablespoons)

8-10 fresh mint leaves

¾ cup coconut or tap water

1 teaspoon agave, maple syrup, or honey (optional)

Cut away the rind and chop up the watermelon flesh into pieces no larger than a quarter. You should get about 4 cups. Don’t stress about some seeds, they will get chopped the fuck up in the blender. Just get rid of any big ones you notice. Freeze the chopped watermelon for at least 4 hours or overnight. The watermelon is going to create the slush factor so you want to make sure that shit really fucking frozen.

When the watermelon chunks are frozen add them along with the cucumber, lime juice, mint leaves, and water to a blender and blend until it is all smooth and icy. If you picked out a shitty watermelon you might need to add a teaspoon of a sweetener to make up for the weak melon. Taste it, you’ll know. Trust.

Had a rough day? Replace up to a ½ cup of the water with vodka and get the fuck over it.

Makes about 2 ½ cups of sweet summer slush, enough for 2 people who need to chill the fuck out. Watermelon chunks will stay good in the freezer for at least a month no problem.

There is a right way and a wrong way to deal with moral outrage. You can vent it impotently, perhaps over social media, or you can channel your frustrations creatively into a personal statement that makes your point in some interesting fashion.

The first way seems to be the preferred method of most people who were offended by the latest Rolling Stone cover, a grainy selfie of Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is quietly boy band-material in the looks department.

However, the staff at Funny or Die chose instead to roll up its sleeves and prepare a takedown of the old school and new media forces competing within Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone empire, which led to this cover. Compare the two versions below. And you’ll also find it worthwhile to read Boston mayor Thomas Menino’s letter responding to Rolling Stone here.

In this tutorial we’ll discuss how to setup a network for multi-machine rendering in After Effects and how we can take advantage of watch folders to help automate the process.

Tutorial

deelekgolo:

givemeajobplease:

This was a man, dressed as a plant, making pigeon noises at people walking by. I said hello, asked if it was okay to take his picture, and then asked why he was dressed as a plant. He said, “I’m just working through some stuff. Thank you for asking. No ones asked yet.”

it’s good to ask, I think, and it’s okay not to answer

This is First Taste, a video created by Saatchi & Saatchi and Heckler for TEDxSydney 2013. It's slo-mo footage of kids eating a variety of foods for the very first time, and it's probably the cutest thing we've ever seen ever. Apart from maybe this.

Fun fact: I've had Vegemite maybe half a dozen times in my life. I've made the same face as that little girl every. Single. Time.

HD, full screen, you know the drill. Here's to the weekend, everyone!

[TEDxSydney]

solistic:

:

Refusing to leave his abandoned apartment building in Jilin City, China, Wen Hsu feared that the uninsulated pipes running through his building would freeze during the winter. His solution? Just leave the tap running.

Wen has lived in this building for 35 years and he's the last remaining resident. He decided to stay put even after real estate investors bought all the apartments in the block in preparation for a new mall.

Worried that his water supply would be cut off by the frigid temperatures, he left the warm water running and diverted it down the side of the building — and this is the result.

Wen says that the developers have offered him too small an amount to be able to buy another apartment, so he's refusing to sell his home.

The incident has drawn attention to his case in the Chinese media and officials are now asking the developers to settle the matter so that the project can move on.

Source.

We've seen lots of fantasy art featuring scantily clad people fighting evil (or sometimes being evil) but we rarely see as much dynamism as in the work of Thai artist Jessada Sutthi. Not to mention so many shiny male torsos.

The above image is called "Angel of War," and it's a nice mix of fantasy touches (the sword, the wings) and technology (the big honking gun.) A lot of Sutthi's coolest works seem to combine different genre elements, filtered through his own style. Check out some of our favorites below, and more at the link. [Jessada Sutthi via InspireFirst]

Warning: one image below could be considered mildly NSFW, depending where you work.

Submitted by: Unknown

I had read about the Leap Motion Controller, but hadn’t seen it in action until SXSW 2013. The super precise motion-sensing device can track up to ten fingers within a three-feet area. Setting aside the obvious opportunities that the Leap opens up for those of us working in the interactive/experiential field, I’d like to focus on how the Leap might enter the workflow of a motion graphics artist.

There are three main ways the Leap’s ability to interpret 3D gestural data will allow for visuals to become ubiquitous that had previously been work intensive or cost prohibitive – as a 3D motion capture device, paired with a 3D sculpting app, and paired with a 3D drawing app. But perhaps the most exciting developments are happening when you modify the Leap to create home brew touch-screens.

Motion Capture for Keyframes

After Effects’s motion sketch is an oldie but goodie that I often go back to when keyframe velocities just aren’t hitting the timing quite right. More recently, the KinectToPin app has allowed for grabbing major joints (knees, elbows, etc.) as motion capture xyz positional data.

The Leap can grab the xyz of ten fingers at once, and lets you work from your desk (as opposed to the Kinect which requires space for the entire body). This could allow for quickly grabbing motion paths using your hands – in effect, creating keyframes in a way that feels more like acting or playing an instrument than point and click.

Perhaps we will use two fingers to experiment with creating a funny character walk, or animate a darting hummingbird with a back and forth of the wrist, or have the camera shake a specific way. This can all be done from scratch, but having the option to quickly motion sketch an idea and then finesse it will be an interesting alternative that may be speedier or create more interesting variations than a blank canvas. Here’s hoping for an z-position option in a future version of AE motion sketch!

Leap Motion Processing Library from onformative

3D Sculpting

One of the demos at SXSW 2013 was clay sculpting, reminiscent of Autodesk’s 123D Sculpt iPad app. Video experiments have already popped up of Unity, Blender, and AutoCAD integration, and I imagine eventually we will be able to get these inputs into Mud Box, ZBrush, etc.

My initial concern with digital sculpting is that instead of getting feedback through your hands, you’re getting it through your eyes. Even when “sculpting” on a Wacom or iPad, you still have the pressure of the stylus to a surface. The Leap allows for multi-touch zooming and rotating while pinching and pulling, but equally important will be how to dynamically and intuitively switch between tool types and controlling the strength of your sculpting tools.

I have yet to see any 3D models built with the Leap that showcase how it can beat a tablet/mouse + keyboard in terms of detail, but I’m not going to write it off yet. Perhaps the Leap’s most helpful role in this area is not necessarily replacing previous input devices, but supplementing them so that you can reserve your stylus/mouse for your sculpting tool, while your other hand gestures through menus or modifies camera views.

The Leap Motion experience at SXSW 2013 from The Verge

Leap Motion hands-on from The Verge

3D Drawing

In the Leap Motion hands-on demo above, and the 35 second mark of the Leap Motion Processing Library at the top of the article, you see a kind of 3D drawing/sculpting hybrid. By tracking the path of a user’s fingers, a model is created that’s a drawing in 3D space, reminiscent of Kinect and iPhone-enabled experiments such as Kinect Graffiti Tool, Graffiti Analysis 2.0, Movosity, and AirPaint. If these quick sketches could be easily exported as an .obj (or maybe even .fbx with animation) they’d provide an intuitive way to create organic looking 3D shapes quickly and easily.

I think this sort of 3D sketching has the most potential for creating new visual styles. For promising precedents, see Amit Pitaru‘s Rhonda and Seok-Hyung Bae, Ravin Balakrishnan, and Karan Singh’s EverybodyLovesSketch.

Amit Pitaru, Rhonda, (2003-1010)

But what about the day to day?

The three examples above indicate visual trends that could arise from the introduction of the Leap, much the way tools like Plexus, C4D’s Mograph, or Trapcode Particular allowed for visuals that were previously labor-intensive to become ubiquitous. The trick with any technique-based visual is that you’re using them on a job-by-job basis. Not all jobs require AE’s Puppet Tool, but when you need it, you’re really glad it exists. My last thoughts on the Leap would impact everyday, regardless of the brief you’ve been handed.

Jared Deckard’s experiments mounting the Leap upside-down to create a touch screen and creating an impromptu $70 Cintiq were the first tests that screamed “killer app”. If Adobe were to get on board with this type of Leap integration, I imagine it’d be a no-brainer for most artists to pick up a Leap to supplement their mouse and keyboard. Even for non-professional artists, combining the Leap with a desktop version of FiftyThree’s Paper could build a huge user base.

Deckard has a Javascript/HTML5 demo up of his open source graphics editor at inkmotion.org. I haven’t been able to test it, as I don’t have a Leap, but I’d love to hear about the experience from other developers (especially if you’re a tablet user).

Leap Motion Draw / Brush Demo by Jared Deckard

The Leap is set to ship on May 13, and has already announced that it will be bundled with ASUS computers. Their approach of opening up their SDK to developers and creating their own app store was a smart move in not going the way of the CueCat.

Gesture-based input technology, be it the Kinect, Leap, or some even newer-fangled thing, is going to become as common as the tiny video cameras that are now housed in every phone, laptop, and desktop monitor. Whether or not it’s a better (or even appropriate) substitute for the tablet or mouse in a professional creative setting will depend on effective software integration and rigorous user beta testing. I see it as a helpful addition to our toolset, rather than a wholesale replacement.

What do you guys think? I’m mainly a Photoshop/After Effects/C4D user with a keyboard, Cintiq, and 3-button mouse at the ready. I’d love to hear more our readers (particularly CG modellers) how they see gestural inputs entering their workspace.

Posted on Motionographer

Keith Kloor:

How does mainstream media not jump all over the news that nuclear power has apparently saved millions of lives? Then there’s the climate change angle, the massive amount of carbon emissions that seems to have been prevented. This strikes me as big!

He’s got a point.

∞

Last Thursday, the New Jersey State Assembly voted 60-5 in favor of a bill banning the use of "gestation crates" on factory hog farms. If the state senate ratifies the bill and Governor Chris Christie signs it into law, New Jersey will be the tenth state to have outlawed this controversial factory-farm technology. Having worked at a facility that uses the devices in neighboring Pennsylvania, I am praying for the law to pass.

Gestation crates are widely used by pork producers like Smithfield and Tyson to confine millions of breeding sows in concrete and metal cages barely larger than their own bodies. The system shaves a few cents off of pork prices, but at a much greater cost to the pig. I've seen these intelligent, social animals driven mad by a lifetime of constant pregnancy and extreme confinement. On the farm where I worked in the spring of 2010, it was common to see sows frantically chewing on or banging their heads against the bars of their cage, clear signs of extreme frustration and anxiety.

Pork industry representatives deny that this practice is inhumane. "So our animals can't turn around for the 2.5 years that they are in the stalls producing piglets," remarked a spokesman for the National Pork Producers Council. "I don't know who asked the sow if she wanted to turn around .... The only real measure of their well-being we have is the number of piglets per birth, and that's at an all-time high."

MORE ON SLAUGHTERHOUSES

• A Call for USDA Vigilance in Humane Treatment of Food Animals
• The Ag Gag Laws: Hiding Factory Farm Abuses From Public Scrutiny

As an undercover investigator for the advocacy group Mercy for Animals, I used a hidden camera to take extensive documentation of what I saw over the six weeks I worked at that Pennsylvania factory farm. The state's animal cruelty law exempts any "activity undertaken in a normal agricultural operation," so instead of seeking criminal charges, we turned to the court of public opinion and put our findings on YouTube. That spurred a needed dialogue about how we treat the animals that become our food. Last week's news from New Jersey is a welcome product of that dialogue.

Not everyone is happy with the progress we're making, though. In fact, Pennsylvania is now one of at least half a dozen states considering laws that would make videos like mine illegal.

Iowa and Utah already passed similar laws last year, and legislation is now pending in Arkansas, California, Indiana, Nebraska, and Tennessee. Other "ag gag" laws, as they're known, were proposed in New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Wyoming but have been put aside for the session. More still are expected to be introduced this year in Minnesota, North Carolina, and Vermont.

Driving this trend is a powerful coalition of agribusiness lobbyists and the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council. Their goal is to stave off calls for factory farm reform by silencing whistleblowers and stopping the embarrassing product recalls, plant closures, and criminal convictions that often result.

Each anti-whistleblower bill is drafted differently but reaches the same end. Pennsylvania's would criminalize anyone who "records an image of, or sound from [an] agricultural operation" or distributes those recordings on the Internet. Arkansas would make it illegal for civilians to conduct an "improper animal investigation" by "collect[ing] evidence into alleged claims of criminal conduct involving an animal." California, Nebraska, and Tennessee would require anyone who photographs an act of cruelty against farm animals to immediately turn their evidence over to law enforcement, thereby blowing their cover and preventing them from documenting anything beyond an isolated incident. Several of these bills carry the potential for felony penalties -- not only for whistleblowers, but also potentially for advocacy and media organizations that share footage.

The laws' proponents say that they're needed to protect farmers from "vigilantes" and "vegetarian people who are trying to kill the animal industry." But the backers of these bills seem less concerned about the 3 percent of Americans who are vegan or vegetarian and more concerned about the growing collection of data showing that Americans believe that animals raised for food deserve our empathy and consideration. I believe these animals at least deserve the freedom to be able to stand up, lie down, and turn around comfortably, as the New Jersey law would provide.

While the industry considers this a radical demand, they can do even better than that. Recently, I visited a modern egg farm outside of Eindhoven, Holland, an hour's drive from my family's home in Belgium. This time, I didn't have to hide my animal-rights affiliations or even apply for a job to get in. I just did what the instructions on an egg carton suggested -- I showed up unannounced and asked for a tour.

As one of the owners led me around, I was encouraged by what I saw. Though the facility keeps 30,000 chickens, each bird had space to forage, tree stumps and perches to climb on, and even some sunlight. They didn't have the tips of their beaks cut off, a standard practice for preventing cannibalism in caged facilities. Of course, conditions weren't perfect -- the hens still live in enormous flocks of 5,000 birds, which is stressful for them -- but they were drastically better off than what I'd seen in the United States. By combining modern design with time-honored husbandry practices, the Dutch farm is also able to provide better working conditions and remain competitive with conventional eggs on price.

This is partly because European producers are legally protected from being undercut by less scrupulous competitors. As of this year, all 27 EU member countries have not only banned gestation crates and barren battery cages for egg-laying hens, they also require minimum stocking densities, bedding and housing enrichments, and other meaningful improvements for nearly all farm animals. The EU also helps producers exceed minimum standards by providing cost defrayments, marketing assistance, certification schemes, and training and advisory services to farmers who convert to higher welfare and more sustainable farming systems. Like their counterparts in New Jersey, EU leaders understand that there's no place in our modern food system for such barbaric abuse.

Unfortunately, there is not a single federal law in the U.S. protecting animals from cruelty on factory farms. Most state laws do little better: Over the past two decades, at least 37 states have amended their animal-cruelty laws like Pennsylvania to exempt "common" or "normal" farming practices. Through the Farm Bill, our economic policy also favors factory farmers by subsidizing billions of dollars in feed and equipment costs. These subsidies distort the market in favor of large, industrial operations, while making it virtually impossible for small, sustainable farmers to compete.

Now, in addition to the "ag gag" bills, Indiana and Missouri are considering constitutional amendments that would forbid state legislators from passing any law that interfered with "the right of farmers and ranchers to employ agricultural technology and modern livestock production and ranching practices" - in other words, an injunction on new animal welfare, labor, food safety, and environmental legislation.

Pork and beef lobbyists were also recently able to thwart discussion of a proposed federal bill, endorsed by the Humane Society and egg-industry representatives, that would have created European-style standards for egg-laying hens.

The answer isn't to give more discretion to an already powerful industry and turn scrutiny away from their farms. As someone who's been inside these facilities, I believe lawmakers need to be addressing the pressing animal cruelty, environmental, and public health threats that I and other whistleblowers have repeatedly documented. Instead of trying to shut us up, they should be following the examples of leaders around the world, including in New Jersey, who are beginning to pave a way forward.

When Eric Molinsky lived in Los Angeles, he kept hearing this story about a bygone transportation system called the Red Car. The Red Car, he was told, had been this amazing network of streetcars that connected the city—until a car company bought it, dismantled it, and forced a dependency on freeways.

If this sounds familiar, it might be because it was the evil scheme revealed at the end of the Robert Zemeckis’s 1988 movie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

But like most legends, the one that Eric heard about the Red Car is not entirely accurate. It’s true that Los Angeles did have an extensive mass transit system called the Red Car, which at one time ran on 1,100 miles of track—about 25 percent more more track mileage than New York City has today, a century later.  

But the Red Car wasn’t the victim of a conspiracy. The Red Car was the conspiracy. 

Our reporter Eric Molinsky spoke with historian Bill Friedricks, who says that to understand the Red Car, you first need to know about Henry Huntington, one of the major power brokers of Los Angeles. If you’ve ever heard of Huntington Beach, Huntington Park, or the Huntington Library, this is that Huntington.

Henry Huntington was the nephew of railroad magnate Collis Huntington, who mentored Henry and taught him the family business. When Collis Huntington died in 1900, Henry expected that he would inherit his uncle’s company, Southern Pacific. But Southern Pacific’s board didn’t want another Huntington in charge. They forced him out, but gave him a $15 million payout (about $400 million today).  

Henry Huntington took his money and headed for Los Angeles. He purchased the biggest transportation system in the city, The Los Angeles Railway (LARy), and then incorporated it into a new company called Pacific Electric. Huntington also started building hundreds of subdivisions on the periphery of Los Angeles, and used Pacific Electric trains—bright red trolleys—to connect the subdivisions to downtown Los Angeles.  

Over time, though, Huntington had built so many subdivisions that his Red Car couldn’t do a good enough job connecting the city’s disparate areas. The Red Car was never designed to be a comprehensive system like the New York City Subway; rather, it existed primarily to get people in and out of Huntington’s subdivisions. Angelenos who could afford cars found it was easier to get around by driving. The Red Car fell into disrepair, and was mocked as a “slum on wheels.”

Eventually, Southern Pacific (the company Huntington thought he would inherit from his uncle Hollis) bought Pacific Electric, and in 1926 they offered Los Angles a massive plan to use public dollars to build subways and elevated trains around downtown L.A. But California voters didn’t trust Southern Pacific, which had meddled in California politics for so long that people called it “The Octopus.” The people voted against the plan.

Red Car routes were decommissioned, and bus routes and freeways would eventually replace the Red Car entirely. The last Red Car ran in 1961.

But if you look carefully, you can still spot evidence of the old Pacific Electric Railroad company, especially around Santa Monica.

To find out more about the Red Car, check out Bill Friedrick’s book, Henry E. Huntington and the Creation of Southern California (which you can read, in entirety, for free!).  

Or, you can just go play L.A. Noire.

No longer an Angeleno, Eric Molinsky is now based in Brooklyn, where he makes radio and draws people on the subway.

solgas/Shutterstock

Is it my imagination, or have you noticed that public high school courses that are now called "honors" are equivalent to the regular "college prep" curriculum of earlier eras? And have you also noticed that what is now called "college prep" is aimed largely at students who are deemed low achievers or of low cognitive ability?

In fact, this trend is nobody's imagination. Over the past generation, public schools have done away with "tracking" -- a practice that began in the early 1900′s. By the 20′s and 30′s, curricula in high schools had evolved into four different types: college-preparatory, vocational (e.g., plumbing, metal work, electrical, auto), trade-oriented (e.g., accounting, secretarial), and general. Students were tracked into the various curricula based largely on IQ but sometimes other factors such as race and skin color. Children of immigrants, and children who came from farms rather than cities, were often assumed to be inferior in cognitive ability and treated accordingly.

MORE ON ABILITY GROUPING

During the 60's and 70's, radical education critics such as Jonathan Kozol brought accusations against a system they found racist and sadistic. They argued that public schools were hostile to children and lacked innovation in pedagogy. Their goal -- which became the goal of the larger education establishment -- was to restore equity to students, erasing the lines that divided them by social class and race. The desire to eliminate inequity translated to the goal of preparing every student for college. The goal was laudable, but as college prep merged with the general education track, it became student-centered and needs-based, with lower standards and less homework assigned.

Some of the previous standards returned during the early 80's, when the "Back to Basics" movement reacted against the fads of the late 60's and the 70's by reinstituting traditional curricula. But the underlying ideas of Kozol and others did not go away, and the progressive watchword in education has continued to be "equality."

As a result, grouping students according to ability -- a practice viewed by many in the education establishment as synonymous with tracking -- has been almost completely eliminated in K-8. Instead, most schools practice full inclusion, which means educators are expected to teach students with diverse backgrounds and abilities in the same classroom using a technique known as "differentiated instruction."

Unfortunately, the efforts and philosophies of otherwise well-meaning individuals have eliminated the achievement gap by eliminating achievement. Exercises in grammar have declined to the point that they are virtually extinct. Book reports are often assigned in the form of a book jacket or poster instead of a written analysis. Essays now are "student-centered" -- even history assignments often call upon students to describe how they feel about past events rather than apply factual analysis. Math classes are now more about math appreciation and being able to explain how a procedure works rather than the mastery of skills and procedures necessary to solve problems.

An exception can be found in gifted and talented programs. These programs -- some of which begin as early as third grade -- are a reaction against the low expectations brought on by full inclusion. These programs often make matters worse. They can be rigid, excluding late bloomers by testing them into a "non-honors" track early in life. In other words, the elimination of ability grouping has become a tracking system in itself that leaves many students behind.

Interestingly, new reports suggest that ability grouping may be making a comeback. The National Bureau of Economic Research has released a study that examines the effects of sorting students by ability. The study examined data from the Dallas Independent School District and found that sorting by previous performance "significantly improves students' math and reading scores" and that the "net effect of sorting is beneficial for both high and low performing students." The same benefits were found among gifted and talented students, special education students, and those with limited English proficiency.

The 2013 Brown Center Report on American Education contains a study by Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution that also looks at ability grouping and tracking in schools. The study found a recent increase in both practices -- a trend Loveless finds noteworthy, given the long-term resistance to each. He suggests a few possible reasons for the reversal: The emphasis on accountability, started by No Child Left Behind, may have motivated teachers to group struggling students together. The rise of computer-aided learning might make it easier for them to instruct students who learn at different rates. And a 2008 MetLife Survey of the American Teacher reports that many teachers simply find mixed-ability classes difficult to teach.

If ability grouping is indeed making a comeback, education may benefit significantly. Instead of relying on "gifted" and "honors" programs -- which are, in effect, tracking systems -- the ability grouping now being practiced in some schools allows for greater flexibility. When properly executed (as it was in my school during the 1960s), this enables students placed in lower-ability classes to advance to higher-ability classes based on their performance and progress.

Ability grouping by itself, however, will not be enough. Schools also need better K-8 curricula and more academic extracurricular opportunities at all levels. Most importantly, they need to hold students to specific expectations rather than leaving achievement up to some vague "natural process," like the student-centered assignments that essentially protect children from learning.

If implemented correctly, the new ability grouping will allow the curriculum to be better tailored to meet the needs of students at all levels. Such classes would help students get up to speed more effectively. This would not only make tutors much less necessary but would also have the advantage of making advancement easier for students whose parents cannot afford tutors or learning centers. Otherwise, it will be nobody's imagination if students continue to fulfill the low expectations that have been set for them.