Wisely perceived, altruism is not self-sacrifice but rather enlightened self-interest . As the Dalai Lama put it, “If you’re going to be selfish, be wisely selfish—which means to love and serve others, since love and service to others bring rewards to oneself that otherwise would be unachievable” . These benefits of altruism hold major implications for our understanding of health, lifestyle, and therapy. On the basis of their research findings, Brown, Nesse, Vinokur, and Smith wrote an article titled “Providing Social Support May Be More Beneficial Than Receiving It” and concluded that interventions “designed to help people feel supported may need to be redesigned so that the emphasis is on what people do to help others” . Other researchers quipped, “If giving weren’t free, pharmaceutical companies could herald the discoveries of a stupendous new drug called ‘Give Back’—instead of ‘Prozac’” . Contribution and service to others have long been considered central elements of a life well lived. Now they can also be considered central elements of a healthy life.A culture’s technology has far-reaching effects on people’s psychology and lifestyles , and modern technology is now affecting our psychology, biology, society, and lifestyles in ways we are only beginning to comprehend. Moreover,vertical hydroponics technological innovations and their lifestyle effects are changing “more quickly than we know how to change ourselves” .

Many of the resultant costs are doubtless as yet unrecognized, and this raises a disconcerting question: Could some of our patients be “canaries in the coal mine,” warning us of ways of life that may exact a toll on us all? This is a question that health professionals will need to confront increasingly as technological, environmental, and lifestyle changes accelerate.Fortunately, individual TLCs appear to counter many medical and psychological complications of contemporary pathogenic lifestyles. This raises a hopeful possibility: Might multiple TLCs be even more effective? There is evidence for this possibility in both animal studies and clinical medicine. For example, physical activity increases neuronogenesis in the rat hippocampus. However, the effect is maximal only when the animals are exposed to a rich social environment rather than living in isolation . Similarly, in his program to reverse coronary arteriosclerosis, Dean Ornish employed four TLCs— exercise, vegetarian diet, relaxation and stress management, and social support. Each proved beneficial, and the effects were additive . Might this also be true for psychological disorders? Quite possibly, but as yet we have no clear answer.Given the many advantages of TLCs, why have mental health professionals been so slow to adopt them? The reasons involve patients, therapists, and society. Effective public health programs will therefore need to address all of them. For patients, TLCs can require considerable and sustained effort, and many patients feel unable or unwilling to tackle them. Patients often have little social support, little understanding of causal lifestyle factors, and a passive expectation that healing comes from an outside authority or a pill .

Societally, whole industries are geared toward encouraging unhealthy choices. Patients contend with a daily barrage of psychologically sophisticated advertisements encouraging them, for example, to consume alcohol, nicotine, and fast food in the neverending search for what the food industry calls the “bliss point” of “eatertainment” through “hypereating” . Unfortunately, one can never get enough of what one does not really want, but one can certainly ruin one’s health and life trying . Therapists also face challenges. The first is simply to become familiar with the large literature on TLCs. The second is a professional bias toward pharmacological and formal psychotherapeutic interventions. In addition, fostering patients’ TLCs can be time intensive, can demand considerable therapeutic skill, and is not well reimbursed. Therapists may also harbor negative expectations that patients will not maintain the necessary changes. However, it is crucial to be aware of the Rosenthal effect: the self-fulfilling power of interpersonal expectations. Finally, cognitive dissonance may be at work when therapists’ own lifestyles are unhealthy . Taken together, these therapist beliefs and biases may constitute a variant of what is called professional deformation. This is a harmful distortion of psychological processes such as cognition and perception that is produced by professional practice and pressures. As long ago as 1915, a sociologist observed that “the continued performance of a certain profession or trade creates in the individual a deformation of the reasoning process. . . . such deformation is largely a matter of adaptation to environment” . Professional deformation can be extreme.

Consider, for example, the forced psychiatric hospitalization and drugging of Soviet dissidents by Soviet mental health professionals who believed that the counter conventional beliefs of these “patients” were diagnostic of “sluggish schizophrenia” . However, more subtle forms of professional deformation may be more pervasive and more difficult to recognize. The mental health system’s current pharmacological emphasis—at the cost of psychotherapeutic, social, and TLC interventions—may be one example. This pharmacological bias is heavily promoted by the pharmaceutical industry, and Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, concluded that “one result of the intensive bias is that . . . even when changes in lifestyle would be more effective, doctors and their patients often believe that for every ailment and discontent there is a drug” . An obvious question then becomes: Does the widespread underemphasis on lifestyle factors across mental health professions constitute a further example of professional deformation? Are there additional therapeutic lifestyle factors? Certainly, and examples range from sleep hygiene to ethics, community engagement, and the moderating of television viewing, all of which have demonstrated mental health benefits . Wide-scale adoption of TLCs will likely require wide scale interventions that encompass educational, mental health, and public health systems. Political interventions may also be necessary, for example, to reduce children’s exposure to media violence and unhealthy food advertising. Of course, these are major requirements. However, given the enormous mental, physical, social, and economic costs of contemporary lifestyles, such interventions may be essential. In the 21st century, therapeutic lifestyles may need to be a central focus of mental, medical, and public health.Contests – competitive situations where winners share a reward – describe many economic interactions, including, for example, the rivalry among R&D teams, competition among forecasters or the race among job candidates. In this article, we develop a generalized contest model to describe competition between online news publishers. Largely due to the emergence of the Internet, news media have undergone qualitative change. There are many facets to this transformation but – we argue – an important aspect of it is that news outlets increasingly compete in a contest where they try to publish stories that are likely to become “viral” due to consumers’ online sharing activities and , if successful, they divide online ad revenues closely linked to page views. The resulting contest has important implications for the type and diversity of news that end up being published.

Traditionally,hydroponic vertical farming systems mainstream media had a strong role in so called “agenda setting”. By 2010, the appearence of online media sites combined with the broad adoption of social networks lead to a more “diluted” public agenda where news outlets seem to grab considerable attention from the public by publishing seemingly marginal topics. A 2014 article in the Financial Times, tellingly entitled “You won’t believe what viral content does to news” describes the trend as follows: “In 2014, the fastest-growing form of online ‘content’ is an epidemic of heartwarming videos […], funny lists […] and click-bait headlines from sites such as BuzzFeed, Upworthy and ViralNova. Rather than being found on news sites or through search engines, they flourish on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter” . Indeed, there is ample anecdotal evidence that social media may propel so-called trivia topics in the mainstream news. Competition between online news sites is fierce. Barriers to entry in the news industry have declined substantially in recent years leading to the emergence of new players, such as the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed or The Business Insider, to only name the most prominent ones. Many of these new entrants came to prominence by developing proprietary forecasting technologies to rapidly identify popular themes that are likely to become mainstream online. The Huffington Post pioneered technology to monitor the public’s search behavior to identify emerging topics.

BuzzFeed succeeded by indentifying “trending” content based on technology that monitors sharing behavior on popular social media sites, such as Facebook or Twitter. In a world where social media has become the dominant source of traffic for news1 , such technologies have shown rapid results in terms of page views attracting large investments by established media conglomerates.In fact, the line between traditional and new media is increasingly blurred as even iconic examples of the respective categories copy each other’s strategies. Traditional media have realized the need to link to external sources of content to remain relevant.2 Even television news providers have taken notice of the emerging trend and have launched their own ‘Web corners’ not to miss out on the potential traffic generated by social media. In the meantime, new entrants have hired dozens of reporters, many of them previously employed by traditional news outlets, to improve their content quality. It is important to realize that news sites cannot consider reporting on everything even though they do not face physical space limits. Consumers’ attention is limited and they can quickly switch between pages. Similarly, if consumers use search engines, they only consider the first few items on the search engine’s results list. Thus, to have a chance at becoming the most shared item on a particular topic requires considerable editorial ‘investment’, hence the hiring of traditional journalists at many of the news startups that discover the importance of “curation” beyond just focusing on forecasting algorithms for trending content. In sum, in this new environment dominated by social media, where consumers’ sharing behavior can quickly propel a news item to the top, competition among news providers is best described as a permanent contest where firms have to “bet” on a topics and the “winners” divide the advertising revenues generated from page views .As such, rather than “setting the agenda”, as they did in the past, today’s news providers are “chasing the agenda” mostly set by consumers’ sharing behavior on the Internet. Indeed, the central question of the article is how this contest nature of competition between news providers is likely to influence the public agenda? That is, what type of news will emerge from the massive amount of diverse content available? In particular, will competition focus firms on a relatively few important topics or will such competition lead to the vast proliferation of published topics with a fragmented news scene? How will the distribution of content, the number of competitors and the division of ad revenues across winning firms influence the nature of published news and its diversity? Answers to these questions are important to understand our political/social environment. In the second part of the article, we focus our analysis on firms’ competitive strategies. Specifically, we ask how asymmetries across news providers impact equilibrium outcomes? In particular, we explore firm assymmetries in forecasting capabilities and customer loyalty . To answer the above questions, we develop a generalized contest model in which firms have to choose one news item from a large set of items with varying prior probabilities of success. We allow for the simultaneous and/or correlated success of multiple items. Importantly, we model all relevant ways in which ‘winning sites’ may divide the reward for successful news. This ensures that we capture a broad range of competitive scenarios between publishers. We generally find that the variety/diversity of topics as well as the weight given to ‘marginal’ topics increases the more correlated the success of a priori likely topics are. In other words, whereas topics with high prior probabilities of success are obvious targets for publishers, their likelihood of being chosen is greatly reduced if their success is correlated. More importantly, the number of competing firms has a non-trivial effect on the diversity of news. Interestingly, as long as the contest is “not too strong” among sites, their choice of published topics is concentrated on the ones with the highest prior success probabilities and this is even more so the more sites enter the market. In this case, increased entry actually reinforces the concentration of news .