Category: English

Source: The Conversation – USA – By William Akoto, Assistant Professor of Global Security, American University

Michigan may be more than 6,000 miles away from the war in Iran, but, virtually speaking, it’s well within striking distance.

An Iran-linked group calling itself Handala claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on Portage, Michigan-based medical device maker Stryker Corp., carried out on March 11, 2026. Handala said the attack was in retaliation for events related to the conflict in Iran.

The cyberattack affected Stryker’s internal Microsoft software system, disrupting the company’s order processing, manufacturing and shipping.

As a scholar who researches cyber conflict, I’ve found that in periods of geopolitical tension such as the current U.S./Israel-Iran war, cyber operations often sit right next to missiles and airstrikes as a tool that states and state-linked groups use to inflict damage, probe weaknesses and signal resolve to their enemies.

The Stryker case is notable because it shows how quickly a regional conflict can translate into disruption for organizations far from the battlefield. It also illustrates the vulnerabilities of U.S. organizations, including those involved in critical infrastructure.

Modern critical infrastructure does not only involve the obvious big targets like power plants or water utilities. It also relies on suppliers and service providers that sit one or two links upstream – such as managed information technology providers, cloud and data center operators and specialized parts suppliers – that keep everything from hospitals to transit systems running.

This is one reason U.S. officials emphasize critical infrastructure as a whole-of-society problem, not a niche government issue. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s “Shields Up” guidance is written for exactly this reality: a world where geopolitical shocks can threaten organizations that did not think they were part of the battlefield.

Cyber operations are often about options

When people imagine cyber warfare, many often picture dramatic outcomes. The lights go out. The water turns toxic. The trains stop. Those scenarios are real risks. But they are not the only objective, and often not the main one. The real strategic value is access.

Cyber access is like a set of keys. If you can get into a network quietly, stay there and learn how it works, you create options for later. You can steal information, map dependencies and position yourself to cause disruption. You can keep the option to strike in your pocket, so that in a crisis, you can cause or credibly threaten to cause harm.

That is why U.S. agencies took the China-linked Volt Typhoon group’s hacking activity so seriously. In joint advisories, U.S. officials described a campaign that compromised the information technology systems of organizations across multiple critical infrastructure sectors and used so-called living-off-the-land techniques that can blend into normal administrative activity.

This is an important point. A lot of state-linked cyber activity is not designed to create immediate, visible chaos. It is designed to build leverage.

How state-sponsored cyberattacks typically work

Most state-backed cyber operations, including those carried out by the United States, follow a common sequence.

First, the attackers gain initial access through techniques such as phishing, exploiting known vulnerabilities or abusing weak remote access. Once inside, attackers try to learn where the valuable data and sensitive systems are. They seek higher privileges and move laterally, often using legitimate administrative tools to blend in.

That stealthy maneuvering is one reason campaigns like Volt Typhoon raised alarms. Defenders can have a hard time distinguishing an intruder from a normal administrator in a busy environment, especially when the intruder is deliberately trying to make their actions look like ordinary activity.

The attackers then establish persistence, meaning they can sustain their access. If the goal is leverage, the attackers want to survive defenders’ cleanup efforts after they discover they’ve been hacked. That can mean gaining multiple footholds, altering authentication settings or gaining access via third parties.

Finally, they choose the effects they want to have. Consider the “Shamoon” attack in 2012 in Saudi Arabia. After gaining access, the attackers used malware to wipe data on thousands of computers at oil giant Saudi Aramco, disrupting business operations.

But not every intrusion ends in destruction. Sometimes it ends with data theft, where the prize is information rather than causing downtime. An example is the 2015 breach of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, in which attackers stole sensitive personnel data. Other times, the point is disruption designed to send a message such as the cyberattack on Sony Pictures in 2014, when hackers sought to keep the company from releasing the comedy film “The Interview.”

What defenses does the US have?

The U.S. has a growing defense ecosystem, but it is not a single shield you can switch on. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency encourages organizations to heighten their cybersecurity vigilance during periods of elevated geopolitical risk. The agency, along with the FBI, the National Security Agency and international partners, also publishes advisories with indicators and recommended mitigations when they see active campaigns.

Because critical infrastructure is mostly privately owned, federal defense also depends on partnership. For instance, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative is designed to support coordinated public-private planning and information sharing around major cyber risks.

Congress has also pushed the private sector toward reporting incidents more quickly. The Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022 sets reporting timelines that include reporting cyber incidents within 72 hours and ransomware payments within 24 hours after payment. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has been implementing these requirements through ongoing rulemaking.

These are meaningful steps, but they do not erase the basic constraints: uneven resources, uneven incentives and the reality that many targets sit outside direct federal control.

Lessons from the Stryker hack

The Stryker episode is a reminder that cyber operations are now a routine tool that state-linked actors can use to project power during international crises. They can aim at theft, disruption or signaling. Sometimes they hit government networks, and other times they hit private companies that sit inside essential supply chains.

Either way, the consequences can be felt far from the conflict itself.

In cyber conflict, the quiet part – gaining access, establishing persistence and preparing for deployment – typically comes first. The visible disruption often gets headlines, but it is the hidden positioning that sets the stage for offensive cyber operations in a crisis.

Wars today are not only fought with missiles and airstrikes you can see in the sky. They are also fought with what you cannot see moving through computer networks.

William Akoto does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How Iranian hackers pose a threat to US critical infrastructure – https://theconversation.com/how-iranian-hackers-pose-a-threat-to-us-critical-infrastructure-278377

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Benjamin F. Henwood, Professor of Social Policy and Health, University of Southern California

Can giving homeless people US$750 a month to use any way they choose help them move into long-term housing?

I am the director of the University of Southern California Homelessness Policy Research Institute. My research team, in partnership with Miracle Messages, a San Francisco social services nonprofit, set out to answer that question in a study that will be published in an upcoming peer-reviewed issue of Social Work Research.

In one of the first randomized studies of basic income for homeless people in the U.S., 103 homeless people living in California received $750 payments every month for a year. Then we compared their housing situations with people who were homeless but did not receive this money. All study participants met the federal definition of literal homelessness. That basically means they either stayed in a homeless shelter or lived on the streets.

In 2022, when we began this study, we expected the answer to our question would be “yes.”

Beginning with optimistic expectations

A similar experiment in Canada with 50 homeless participants showed that providing 7,500 Canadian dollars in cash as a lump sum resulted in 99 fewer days homeless over a one-year period.

In addition, Miracle Messages had already completed a similar but smaller pilot in which six of its nine participants moved into long-term housing after receiving $500 monthly for six months.

But the results of pilots with so few participants can be misleading because the people who got money may have found housing anyway. What’s more, an experiment conducted in Canada may not directly translate to the United States – which has a weaker safety net than its northern neighbor.

Homelessness is often short-term for everyone

After receiving monthly payments for a year, nearly half of the participants in our study were no longer homeless.

But almost the same share of people who didn’t receive the payments had also found housing.

This points to an important reality: For many Americans, homelessness – while highly destabilizing – is often temporary. And, most people who are living on the street are actively trying to become housed.

Because the payments did not substantially change the rate at which participants obtained housing, we found ourselves asking another question: If the money didn’t alter housing outcomes, what did it change?

How people spent the money

Basic income programs typically let people decide how to use the funds they get. Critics of giving people money with no strings attached often worry that they will spend it, or even squander it, on so-called “temptation goods,” such as alcohol and illegal drugs.

That isn’t what we observed.

The people taking part in this study overwhelmingly spent this money on basic needs, such as food, housing-related expenses, transportation and health care. Spending on alcohol, cigarettes and illegal drugs accounted for 5% of the money.

But those expenditures only tell part of the story. Cash also allowed people to meet their own immediate and personal needs.

One participant used this money to keep his car running – both for transportation to work and as the place where he slept at night. Another bought birthday and holiday presents for his relatives. One sent money to aging parents. Another donated to a charity because it restored a sense of contribution.

Another paid down credit card debt that had been a source of stress.

While we found no evidence that the basic income payments reduced homelessness, other aspects of the participants’ lives appeared to become more stable. We found no evidence that the money caused them any harm.

Why this result makes sense

The distribution of cash assistance has been evaluated in many places, usually targeting a specific kind of community, such as unemployed individuals or families living in poverty. Studies consistently find that people spend the money on necessities and end up better off.

Homelessness presents a different challenge. Housing requires access to an available and affordable unit. In most U.S. housing markets, a $750 monthly payment doesn’t cover that month’s rent. Nationally, rent for a typical one-bedroom apartment was about twice that amount in February 2026.

Programs tied directly to housing, such as rent vouchers or subsidies, may therefore have a more immediate effect on housing status.

Moving forward, I believe our results suggest that for a basic income approach to help counter homelessness, monthly payments would have to be larger, continue over a longer period – or both. The payments should, that is, be closer to covering the full cost of a month’s rent in the local area.

Benjamin F. Henwood does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Getting $750 a month didn’t end homelessness – but our study shows it still improved the lives of homeless people – https://theconversation.com/getting-750-a-month-didnt-end-homelessness-but-our-study-shows-it-still-improved-the-lives-of-homeless-people-278141

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Brad Badertscher, Professor of Accountancy, University of Notre Dame

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is expected to soon become a public company in what may be the biggest initial public offering in history. But my new research suggests that investors who buy shares of the company are unlikely to see the explosive growth that past IPOs had.

The rocket and satellite maker, which confidentially filed to go public on April 1, 2026, is reportedly planning to raise as much as US$75 billion in the offering, which would give it a valuation of $1.75 trillion.

SpaceX isn’t the only high-profile company expected to sell shares to the public for the first time this year. Artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Anthropic are also expected to list in the coming months in massive IPOs.

For Wall Street, that means blockbuster deals with hefty fees for the banks involved. For early investors and executives, it could mean enormous paydays. For everyday investors, meanwhile, the question is whether a hot company “going public” today represents a good investment opportunity.

What does it really mean when a company “goes public”?

For decades, an IPO marked the moment when ordinary investors could buy into a fast-growing company and share in its future expansion. Today, that moment often comes much later in a company’s life – after much of the dramatic growth has already taken place behind closed doors.

I study financial reporting, executive compensation and initial public offerings. In a recent study of nearly 1,000 U.S. IPOs conducted from 2007 to 2022, my co-authors and I examined what happens in the critical period just before and after companies go public. Our research suggests that the modern IPO increasingly represents a chance for insiders and executives to cash out — not the start of value creation for public investors.

IPOs used to fund growth

An IPO is when a private company sells shares to the public for the first time. Traditionally, IPOs helped young, cash-strapped companies raise money to grow. Investors supplied capital and shared in future success.

Many iconic businesses — including Amazon and Apple — went public early in their life cycles. Much of their dramatic growth happened after they were already public.

That pattern has changed. Research shows the number of publicly traded U.S. companies has fallen sharply since the late 1990s. At the same time, private capital from venture capital and private equity firms has expanded. In our research, we document that the average age of a company when it goes public has more than doubled from four years in the early 2000s to nearly 10 years by 2025.

Companies can now raise billions privately. They do not need public markets as early as they once did.

What we found in nearly 1,000 IPOs

Our research focuses on what regulators and practitioners call “cheap stock.”

This refers to stock options granted to executives before an IPO at a share price far below the eventual IPO price. Stock options give executives the right to buy shares later at a fixed price. If the IPO price is much higher than that exercise price, the options are immediately very valuable.

For example, say you’re a CEO of a company going public. You received stock options that give you the right buy 10,000 shares of your company’s stock at a price of $2. The IPO price is set at $20. After the IPO, you could exercise your right to buy the company’s shares at $2 and then immediately sell those shares for around $20, for a gain of $180,000.

We examined nearly 1,000 IPOs between 2007 and 2022. On average, the IPO price was 5.7 times higher than the exercise price of options granted in the year before the IPO.

In simple terms, executives often held options that surged in value the moment the company went public. Some of this difference may reflect real growth or the fact that private shares are less liquid – that is, less easy to sell – than public ones. But even after adjusting for those factors, the gap remained large.

This matters for future shareholders, namely those buying shares after the IPO, as substantial value has already been transferred to insiders before public investors bought shares.

Incentives to go public

We also found patterns in which companies granted more deeply discounted options.

Companies backed by venture capital and private institutional investors were more likely to show significant gaps between option prices and IPO prices. This supports a straightforward incentive story.

Some early investors want liquidity, or investments that are easy to turn into cash. Granting executives options that become highly valuable at the IPO can help motivate managers to complete the offering. In that sense, the IPO often serves as a liquidity event — a way for insiders to cash out.

That does not necessarily imply wrongdoing, but it does suggest the IPO now frequently reflects insiders’ exit timing rather than simply public investors’ growth opportunity.

What happens after the IPO

The story does not end on IPO day.

Our research shows that companies with more cheap stock options invested less in capital expenditures and research and development after going public. Cheap stock options provide less incentives for the company to take risks. And that in turn can affect a company’s future financial prospects.

Executives who already hold valuable stock options may prefer stable growth over aggressive expansion of the company. Since risk and reward are linked, companies that take fewer risks tend to grow at a slower pace, meaning future shareholders may see smaller gains.

Our research supports this conjecture, as we found that companies with more cheap stock experienced lower stock returns over longer horizons after going public. That matters for new investors who are not only expecting exponential growth after the IPO but also longer-run stock performance.

For public investors, the takeaway is simple: Much of the explosive growth in corporate value now occurs while companies are still private.

Brad Badertscher does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. SpaceX and OpenAI IPOs are unlikely to bring skyrocketing returns that Amazon and Apple did, as companies go public later in life and early investors cash out – https://theconversation.com/spacex-and-openai-ipos-are-unlikely-to-bring-skyrocketing-returns-that-amazon-and-apple-did-as-companies-go-public-later-in-life-and-early-investors-cash-out-276147

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Michael Delayo, Ph.D. Candidate in Communication Arts and Sciences, Penn State

MLB’s past few seasons have been plagued by a spate of gambling scandals.

In April 2024, authorities arrested Ippei Muzihara, the interpreter for Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani, on suspicion of illegally transferring more than US$16 million from Ohtani’s bank accounts to pay a bookie. Muzihara pleaded guilty in February 2025.

Two months later, MLB suspended four minor leaguers for violating the league’s sports betting rules. The league also issued a lifetime ban to San Diego Padres utility infielder Tucupita Marcano – the first active player in a century to receive one due to gambling.

The following season, MLB placed Cleveland Guardians All-Star closer Emmanuel Clase and starting pitcher Luis Ortiz on indefinite leave after suspicions emerged that they’d rigged pitches to help gamblers win bets. In November 2025, both were federally indicted, and each has pleaded not guilty.

But if you thought that MLB might ease up on its embrace of sports betting ahead of the 2026 season, you would be mistaken.

On March 19, 2026, MLB announced a new partnership with Polymarket. The world’s largest prediction market, Polymarket allows users to buy shares on the outcomes of future events – like betting – but with probabilities instead of odds.

For most of baseball’s history, formal affiliation with any form of gambling was inconceivable. That has changed under current MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred who, since the start of his tenure in 2015, has embraced gambling and prediction markets as they’ve become legalized in the U.S.

I’ve researched and written about the league’s abrupt reversal from anti-gambling crusader to sports gambling partner, and how Manfred has justified this pivot to players, fans and the media.

The about-face is even more jarring when you consider the fact that the commissioner position itself was created in the wake of the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal.

A higher standard

During that infamous episode, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Eddie Cicotte, Chick Gandil and five of their teammates on the Chicago White Sox conspired to intentionally lose the World Series, forcing the sport to break from the gambling culture that helped fuel its rise.

With baseball’s integrity in doubt, the league chose an outsider – Illinois federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis – as its first commissioner.

“We have got to have a higher standard of integrity and honesty in baseball than in any other walk of life,” Landis said upon accepting the job. “And we are going to have it.”

Thus began baseball’s century of resisting – and punishing – any whiff of gambling.

In 1947, Landis’ successor, Happy Chandler, suspended Brooklyn Dodgers manager Leo Durocher, in part, for his ties to gamblers.

Bowie Kuhn, who served as commissioner from 1969 to 1984, suspended All-Star pitcher Denny McLain in 1970 for his involvement with bookmakers. He later banned baseball greats Willie Mays in 1979 and Mickey Mantle in 1983 for working as casino promoters, though commissioner Peter Ueberroth reinstated them in 1985.

The most notorious post-Black Sox scandal involved all-time hits leader Pete Rose. In 1989, Ueberroth launched an investigation after hearing that Rose had bet on games while managing the Cincinnati Reds.

A. Bartlett Giamatti, who became commissioner later that year, banned Rose from the sport for life in 1989 at the conclusion of the investigation.

The next two commissioners, Fay Vincent and Bud Selig, consistently denied Rose’s appeals to be reinstated. In 2012, Selig described gambling as “evil,” adding that it “creates doubt and destroys your sport.”

From fantasy to reality

Manfred took the baton from Selig in 2015, just as daily fantasy sports were becoming more popular.

Daily fantasy sports players draft rosters of athletes competing that day, stake money and win cash prizes based on the athletes’ real-life performances. Sports leagues permitted daily fantasy sports, deeming them games of skill, not chance.

Even though daily fantasy sports operated in a legal gray area, Manfred inked a deal with DraftKings in April 2015 to make the fledgling brand MLB’s “Official Daily Fantasy Game.”

“The fantasy space,” Manfred explained at the time, “was really, really important to [MLB] in terms of engaging young people.”

Manfred took pains to distinguish these games from gambling, telling reporters in April 2015 that “there’s a line in the law. And we understand that line very carefully.”

But by the time the Supreme Court decided in 2018 to put the legalization of sports gambling in the hands of the states, Manfred described the league as a gambling authority that was “in a position to meaningfully engage and shape … what the new regulatory scheme looks like.”

Protecting integrity to enable prosperity

Much of MLB’s shift is in response to legal, technological and cultural forces beyond its control.

But there’s a difference between accepting the legality of gambling and actively promoting it, whether that’s through opening sportsbooks at stadiums like Wrigley Field or saturating game broadcasts with gambling advertisements.

Under Manfred, the league’s messaging can be summed up as follows: Gambling is happening whether we like it or not. By going all in on gambling, we can at least control what shape it takes and better shield the sport from those with ill intent.

It’s a bit convoluted, to say the least. But the scandals that have emerged have given Manfred opportunities to double down on the logic.

By giving exclusive data access to MGM Sportsbook, for example, the league claims it can detect and monitor suspicious behavior.

Manfred has said that baseball is “in a better position to know what’s going on today then we were in the old days when it was all illegal,” a position he credits to the league’s work with its gambling partners.

In this way, the league frames its gambling partnerships as protective – even as new scandals emerge.

Numbers games

Other trends have made fans and owners more receptive to gambling.

Baseball’s embrace of gambling and prediction markets – with their spreads, parlays and share prices – is unfolding at a time when people are more comfortable with the integration of data and technology. Rhetoric scholar Michael Butterworth calls this “the statistical frame” – the idea that the world is increasingly understood through data, whether it’s through polling results, blood oxygen levels and, yes, betting odds.

The game has also changed from the owners’ box. Fewer teams are being steered by local, civic-minded businesspeople. In their place are international investment groups and private equity firms that treat franchises as part of a broader asset portfolio. According to sports journalist Bruce Schoenfeld, the sports industry has come to resemble “a mutual fund that includes television and digital content, real estate, retail clothing, hospitality, catering and concessions.”

For a sport increasingly focused on return on investment and growth, a reunion with gambling was a natural next step for baseball. And it’s been a boon for the bottom line.

Baseball’s ‘best interests’

In conjunction with the Polymarket announcement, Manfred also signed a memorandum of understanding with the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, reiterating that “protecting the integrity of the game on the field is our top priority.”

But what about the protection of the athletes themselves?

Baseball players have opened up about the threats they’ve been subjected to since gambling’s legalization.

“You hear it all, man,” Arizona Diamondbacks reliever Paul Sewald told USA Today. “You blow a save, you don’t come through, you get it all. … ‘You cost me all of this money. (Expletive) you. (Expletive) your family. I’m going to kill you and then kill your family.’”

Manfred has said that these developments are “a matter of concern to us that we take really seriously.”

It’s possible that MLB will return to an anti-gambling stance in the face of these mounting threats. But as annual revenues for sports betting soar toward US$20 billion, that’s a tough bet to make.

Michael Delayo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. MLB doubles down on gambling with new Polymarket deal – https://theconversation.com/mlb-doubles-down-on-gambling-with-new-polymarket-deal-279176

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Laura E. Knouse, Professor of Psychology, University of Richmond

Do you ever find yourself at the end of a nonstop day feeling like you haven’t made progress on the things that are actually important to you? If so, you’re not alone.

If you are a person with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, you might find it even harder to direct your effort toward what’s most important – especially if your goal is a ways in the future and you have lots of distractions to manage.

Fortunately, there are research-backed strategies that can help you start and finish a task even when you feel stuck.

I’m a professor and clinical psychologist who has spent my career researching the challenges that adults with ADHD experience and ways to help improve their quality of life. I co-authored a book with Dr. Russell Barkley, a preeminent ADHD expert, published in October 2025 called “Living Well with Adult ADHD: Practical Strategies for Improving Your Daily Life.”

There are a few strategies that may help you more effectively direct your efforts toward the things that matter most.

Tips grounded in cognitive behavioral therapy

One of the most effective nonmedication treatments for ADHD in adults is specialized cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT.

By teaching skills that help manage thoughts, feelings and behaviors, CBT helps people with ADHD learn and use self-regulation skills. Research shows that CBT for adult ADHD can help reduce ADHD symptoms and improve quality of life.

But you don’t have to be in full-time therapy or even have ADHD to potentially benefit from CBT strategies.

If you find that you have difficulty doing what’s most important in our increasingly distraction-filled world, these tips might help.

Before diving in:

• Identify the goals that are most important to you, not just most urgent. Sometimes the most meaningful tasks, like taking steps toward a new career or growing your social network, fall by the wayside because they don’t have external deadlines.

• When testing out new strategies, it can take some time to see results. But if you could take meaningful action just 10% more often, that could add up to much better outcomes. So choose one of the following tips and practice until it becomes a habit.

Tip No. 1: Break it down

Important tasks are often also bigger, scarier and more ambiguous, which can make it hard to get started. Imagine you want to get a new job and the next step is to draft your cover letter.

If you saw “Write cover letter” on your to-do list, would you jump right into that task? Maybe. But if you’re like me, this task might be daunting and vague enough to make you turn to an easier task instead.

To get past that emotional barrier, break the task into much smaller steps. No step is too small if it gets you started.

So instead of “Write cover letter,” try “Outline cover letter” or “Find template for cover letter.” Still in avoidance mode? How about “Create cover letter document with opening line.” Even if you stop there, you’ll be one step closer to the goal.

When breaking down tasks, a timer can be your best friend. “Work on cover letter for 15 minutes” might feel less overwhelming and build behavioral momentum.

Consider, for instance, the Pomodoro technique, invented by a university student in the 1980s who was trying to come up with a strategy to work more efficiently.

A pomodoro, the Italian word for tomato, represents an amount of time – typically 25 minutes – to focus on a task, followed by a short break. The creator of this technique used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer, thus the name.

To practice the technique, write down the task you’ll work on, start the timer and get to work. When the alarm sounds, take a five-minute break to refresh. Then move to the next interval of 25 minutes, until after four repetitions you get a longer break, such as 15 to 30 minutes.

Research shows that this technique may reduce distractibility while working, leading to greater productivity and a sense of completion. It helps me get started on my most avoided task: grading papers. I’m much more likely to commit to 25 minutes of grading than I am to tackle them all at once.

Tip No. 2: Notice your avoidant thoughts

“I have much more time to do that later.”

“I’ll do just one more thing before I leave.”

Do these thoughts sound familiar? If so, you’re not alone. Using mini-surveys sprinkled throughout the day, my lab found that college students reported having thoughts like this about 50% of the time. For non-college adults, the rate was only slightly lower, at about 45% of the time.

We also found that when people had recently had these thoughts, they were more likely to be distracted and avoid something they should have been doing. We decided to call these thoughts “avoidant automatic thoughts” because they pop into your head effortlessly and are associated with putting off doing a task.

Importantly, we found that college students with ADHD report more avoidant automatic thoughts, along with the distraction and procrastination that come with them.

Just becoming aware of these automatic thoughts in daily life is a good place to start. Make a list of the thoughts that you experience most frequently when you go into avoidance mode.

If you catch yourself having one of these thoughts, coach yourself by adding a strategy to your self-talk. For example, when “Write cover letter” results in the thought, “I’ll have time for that on Friday,” say to yourself: “But you can do a little bit now. Maybe just two Pomodoros.” Then add: “After that, you can check your email.”

Tip No. 3: Leverage relatively rewarding activities

When people are avoiding tasks, they’re not usually sitting around doing nothing.

In one study mentioned above, we found that work-related tasks were among the most frequently avoided. What were people likely to be doing instead? Other work-related tasks. A similar example: The only times in college I ever did a dorm room deep-clean was when I should have been studying for finals.

This so-called “procrastivity” might contain some useful clues about how to motivate your way through tasks you tend to avoid.

It’s helpful to think about rewards not as things – like cookies, video games and gold stars – but as activities, like eating cookies, playing video games, seeing gold stars and thinking about what they represent.

There’s a name for this: Psychology’s Premack principle holds that the opportunity to do a more preferred activity can be a reward for doing a less preferred activity. An example would be what’s commonly known as “grandma’s rule” – if you eat your vegetables, then you can eat dessert.

This means that you can arrange the activities on your schedule in a way that uses more rewarding activities to “pull along” your behavior during less rewarding activities. Set up your day to “do the worst first,” and strategically place more enjoyable activities after difficult but important ones. For example, a friend of mine delays her first cup of morning coffee until she completes her workout. It’s not pleasant in the moment, but it helps her get the workout done, and her coffee feels extra rewarding afterward.

What are some relatively rewarding activities that already happen throughout your day? Can you arrange the order of things to leverage them? If you can flip the motivational script even once a day, it might make a big difference in making progress toward your goals.

Remember that better self-regulation is about making small, sustainable changes that fit with your daily life. There will definitely be setbacks: After all, you’ve been doing it the old way for a long time! But be sure to notice and celebrate even the small steps toward your goals.

Laura E. Knouse receives book royalties from Routledge Publishers and Guilford Publications and is a consultant and clinical advisor for Inflow Holdings, Inc., maker of a CBT-based app for adult ADHD. Dr. Knouse is a member of the professional advisory board for CHADD (Children and Adults with ADHD).

– ref. For adults with ADHD – or even those with just some symptoms – using smart strategies to start and complete tasks can make all the difference – https://theconversation.com/for-adults-with-adhd-or-even-those-with-just-some-symptoms-using-smart-strategies-to-start-and-complete-tasks-can-make-all-the-difference-271332

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Gareth Barkin, Professor of Anthropology and Asian Studies, University of Puget Sound

A friend in Indonesia recently told me about a conversation he had with ChatGPT. He had typed a question in Indonesian – Bahasa Indonesia – about how to handle a difficult family dispute. The chatbot responded fluently, in perfect Indonesian, with advice about communication strategies and conflict resolution. The grammar was flawless. The tone was appropriate. And yet something felt off.

What the AI offered was advice rooted in American cultural assumptions: prioritize your own preferences, communicate directly, and if family members don’t respect your boundaries, consider cutting them off.

The response was in Indonesian but shaped by values that centered individual autonomy over the consensus-building, social harmony and collective family dynamics that tend to matter more in Indonesian social life.

My friend was skeptical enough to notice the mismatch and mention it to me. Many users might not. That is what prompted my research, published in the International Review of Modern Sociology, into a pattern I found across major AI systems: Even when they were fluent in several languages, the language models retained their Western worldview. I call this “epistemological persistence.”

Fluency is not the same as understanding

I have studied Indonesian society, media and culture for more than 30 years. That gives me a particular vantage point on a problem that reaches well beyond Indonesia: large language models – LLMs – like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini can now speak dozens of languages with remarkable fluency. That fluency creates the impression that AI understands local cultures.

Producing grammatically correct Indonesian, Arabic, Swahili or Hindi, however, does not change the underlying worldview through which these systems reason. It does not alter how they think about people, relationships, responsibility or what counts as a good outcome.

Those assumptions are shaped by training data drawn predominantly from English-language sources based in the United States. Meta’s open-weight model LLaMA 2 was trained on approximately 89.7% English-language text; LLaMA 3 includes only about 5% non-English data. Major commercial models don’t publish equivalent breakdowns but draw heavily on the same sources. Arabic, the fifth-most-spoken language globally, accounts for under 1% of content in large training datasets. Languages with tens of millions of speakers, including Bengali and Hausa, barely appear.

Beneath the surface of these multilingual conversations, English functions as a hidden intermediary. A study by researchers at the University of Oxford found that LLMs routinely conduct their core reasoning in English, even when prompted in other languages. They translate the output at the final stage. A user receives flawless text in their preferred language, but the underlying logic originates elsewhere.

What the data shows

To examine how this plays out in practice, I ran experiments with ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. I asked questions in both English and Indonesian about concepts such as education, responsibility, well-being and several Indonesian terms that resist direct translation into English. These included terms such as “gotong royong,” which describes a tradition of communal mutual assistance.

Then I asked questions about education in both languages, using the word “pendidikan” in Indonesian. The answers were consistently centered on individual development, personal autonomy, critical thinking and preparation for the labor market.

What largely disappeared were the dimensions of pendidikan that Indonesian educational traditions have historically emphasized. In Indonesia education has long been focused on ethical discipline. Scholars of Indonesian education such as Christopher Bjork and Robert Hefner have documented how distinct these traditions are from models that treat education primarily as a path to individual advancement and career preparation, which is the lens through which the AI tools viewed education.

The Indonesian concept of “malu” offers a starker example. Often translated as “shame” or “embarrassment,” malu has been analyzed by anthropologists Clifford Geertz and Tom Boellstorff as something closer to a shared social awareness.

A person might feel malu when speaking out of turn in front of elders, or when a family member’s behavior reflects poorly on the household. It regulates conduct and signals awareness of one’s position within a web of relationships. It is cultivated, not merely felt. It is a form of relational awareness rather than a private psychological event.

When asked directly to define malu, the models acknowledged its social dimensions. In scenario-based questions that simply used the word without asking for a definition, however, all three fell back on the English translation of shame, consistently framing it as an individual emotional experience.

One representative response framed malu as a normal emotional reaction to be managed through self-reflection and confidence-building – a personal psychological problem rather than a social one. The relational dimensions of the concept disappeared entirely, replaced by the language of individual emotional regulation.

A distinctly American worldview travels inside the translation, largely unannounced.

Why this probably won’t change soon

Translation is far cheaper: Train one model on the vast English-language web, then use multilingual output capabilities to serve global markets. As media scholar Safiya Umoja Noble argues about algorithmic systems more broadly, what looks like a technical outcome is actually a structural one, shaped by who has the wealth and infrastructure to build these systems.

The embedded worldview isn’t a mistake; it’s what happens when knowledge production is profit-seeking.

The main exceptions are Chinese models such as DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. They represent a genuine alternative to the U.S.-dominated pipeline, though research shows they operate through a distinctly Chinese cultural lens. Asked about a workplace disagreement, for instance, they tend to advise silence or indirect phrasing to preserve harmony rather than the direct, private correction that Western models recommend.

Other regional efforts, such as SEA-LION for Southeast Asia and Kan-LLaMA for the Indian language Kannada, use U.S. models as their foundation. They add additional vocabulary and cultural information related to local languages. But the core logic remains tied to the original U.S. training.

Why this matters more than it might seem

One might reasonably ask whether this is simply a limitation users can work around. Decades of media scholarship demonstrate how audiences interpret foreign media through their own cultural frameworks.

For example, anthropologist Brian Larkin documented how viewers in northern Nigeria rework the narratives of Bollywood films to align with local Islamic values. Larkin found that Muslim viewers in Kano reinterpreted Bollywood films through an Islamic moral lens, reading their narratives as reinforcing local values of propriety and ethical conduct. That dynamic depends on encountering media as something with a visible origin. But to do that, you need to know where your media is coming from.

Conversational AI is different. Research at Harvard Business School finds that people increasingly use AI systems for emotional support, advice and companionship. When a culturally specific worldview is delivered through a relationship that feels attentive and empathetic, in your own language, it arrives less as a claim to be evaluated and more as a shared premise within a dialogue. It becomes difficult to notice, and harder to contest.

The concern is that these perspectives become the new normal. Certain ways of reasoning about family life, education and responsibility may come to feel natural and self-evident. Linguistic diversity among AI systems is real and growing. Cultural worldview diversity, however, has not kept pace.

Gareth Barkin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. AI’s fluency in other languages hides a Western worldview that can mislead users − a scholar of Indonesian society explains – https://theconversation.com/ais-fluency-in-other-languages-hides-a-western-worldview-that-can-mislead-users-a-scholar-of-indonesian-society-explains-276865