Brain cannot actually multi-task - CNN

You've got a smartwatch on your wrist, Siri in your palm, and emails notifications popping up on your computer screen all day long. Nope, you're not the only one who's been trying to master multi-tasking all these years.

Yet, the truth is our brains can't actually multi-task. Why? 

Our minds are programmed to think about just one thing at a time. So what we're really doing is switching from one chore to the next and back again ... and it's not helping our productivity. Worse yet: We're not being mindful of why or how we're doing each task, because we're so rushed to move on to the next one.

In fact, we finish about 50 percent less when attempting to tackle a few duties at once, instead of focusing on each one individually, says James Rouse, naturopathic doctor, author of Think Eat Move Thrive and co-founder of Healthy Skoop.

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While experts used to give tips on how to improve multi-tasking skills, that approach to plowing through a to-do list is no longer in vogue. What they advocate works better: Being present in the moment so you can concentrate on one activity -- and one activity only. In other words, single-tasking. (Translation: Putting your phone away, way more often.)

To help you get more done in less time, de-stress and actually enjoy life a little more, we had Dr. Rouse share his tips on becoming a better single-tasker. So stash away your smartphone, turn off your email notifications and read on for the need-to-know. Your challenge: Do not do 101 other things while reading this article.

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7 Productivity Tips for Living in the Moment

1. Start with one change.

Your Brain on Multitasking

Eating lunch while catching up on email; G-chatting while writing a work proposal; scouring social media during a corporate meeting. Are you guilty of these multi-tasking crimes? Don't worry, so is everyone else. What you should do instead is pick one activity and focus on it, knowing that you'll see better results from your efforts. "People think of single tasking as underachieving," says Dr. Rouse. "We have to dispel the myth that if you're only doing one thing you're not doing as much." Putting more energy into one thing really means you'll get more out of it.

Approach your day-to-day differently by choosing one activity that you'll solely concentrate on this week. That could mean eating breakfast mindfully, putting your phone in a drawer while checking emails in the afternoon or simply commuting to work without your normal podcast or book. The more you learn to let go of distractions (even during small tasks), the more you'll be able to expand that streamlined focus into other projects.

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2. Encourage single-tasking with others.

"Multi-tasking is contagious," says Dr. Rouse. "We're social creatures who see people doing three or four things at one time and we want to emulate what we see. So it's hard not to multi-task when you're surrounded by it." To counteract that, eliminate disruptions when you're around other people. If you're out for drinks with a friend or having dinner with your family, put your phones away and turn off the TV so everyone is present for that time. (Seems simple, but do you ever actually do it?)

Having your phone in your pocket or face down on the table doesn't count, either. As soon as you feel the vibration of a text or see your device light up, your mind will instantly go elsewhere. "No matter how much willpower you think you have, you won't be able to resist all the other things going on around you," says Dr. Rouse. "So don't even allow yourself that temptation."

3. Begin your day the right way.

Lots of people sleep with their phone by their bed, but we challenge you to put it across the room. That way, you won't feel obligated to check it before you even put your feet on the ground in the morning. Bringing technology into your sleep space has a way of triggering distractions and stress, Rouse says. Not to mention, it can keep you from getting enough zzz's. Start your day with a light stretch or a deep breath, so you're present right from the start.

4. Take a walk outside.

Study: Multitasking hinders youth social skills

One of the best, most mood-boosting ways to learn to single-task is to get outside more often, says Dr. Rouse. It's not just the endorphins that will instantly make you feel happier. Walk without your phone and you won't be tempted to check emails or respond to texts. Then you'll be able to tune into the sights, smells and noises around you. Don't have time for a mid-day hike? If you've been running around doing what felt like 100 things at once, take a 10-minute stroll outside when you get home from the office. We promise it'll have some pretty great payoffs, and even if you have more work to do, you'll feel much more focused afterward.

5. Schedule time for your toughest task.

Whether you often put off a to-do like writing, drawing or creating lesson plans, set aside the same time every day to tackle it, even if the creative juices aren't flowing. "The greatest way to avoid distraction is to avoid procrastination," says Dr. Rouse. If at noon every day, you sit down and just start typing, your brain will adjust to it. Then, the work will flow better -- without you feeling like you need to check Facebook for hours until a great idea pops in your head.

6. Give someone a squeeze.

Think about the last time you gave someone a really big bear hug. Time seemed to stop in that moment, right? Whenever you need just a few seconds to get grounded and have a moment of Zen, Dr. Rouse suggests snuggling up to someone to bring you back to the present. In fact, hugs release the hormone, oxytocin (aka the "love" or "bonding" hormone), which can help reduce stress.

7. Never stop trying

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We get it, focusing on just one activity at a time can seem impossible. Life often pulls us in different directions, so it's hard to stay straight. But as long as you keep working at single-tasking -- try it with different duties throughout the day or week -- the better you'll get, the more you'll accomplish and you'll feel relaxed and productive. Dr. Rouse's favorite way to look at it: "To the expert's mind, nothing is possible. But to the beginner's mind, everything is." Being a student at single-tasking will make it more enjoyable and easier.

Google is Facing a $400 Million Tax Bill and a Criminal Case in Indonesia - TIME Business

Google is Facing a $400 Million Tax Bill and a Criminal Case in Indonesia Posted: 19 Sep 2016 11:39 PM PDT (JAKARTA) — Indonesia plans to pursue Alphabet Inc’s Google for five years of back taxes, and the search giant could face a bill of more than $400 million for 2015 alone if it is found to have avoided payments, a senior tax official said. Muhammad Haniv, head of the tax office’s special cases branch, told Reuters its investigators went to Google’s local office in Indonesia on Monday. The tax office alleges PT Google Indonesia paid less than 0.1 percent of the total income and value-added taxes it owed last year. Asked to respond to Haniv’s comments, Google Indonesia reiterated a statement made last week in which it said it continues to cooperate with local authorities and has paid all applicable taxes. The move comes at a time when Indonesia is eager to ramp up tax collection to narrow its budget deficit and fund an ambitious infrastructure program. Other governments around the world are also seeking to clamp down on what they see as egregious corporate tax avoidance. Haniv added that the tax office planned to pursue other internet firms for back taxes. If found guilty, Google may have to pay fines of up to four times the amount it owed, bringing the maximum tax bill to 5.5 trillion rupiah ($418 million) for 2015, Haniv said. He declined to provide an estimate for the five-year period. Most of its revenue generated in the country is booked at Google’s Asia Pacific headquarters in Singapore. Google Asia Pacific declined to be audited in June, prompting the tax office to escalate the case into a criminal one, he said. “Google’s argument is that they just did tax planning,” Haniv said. “Tax planning is legal, but aggressive tax planning – to the extent that the country where the revenue is made does not get anything – is not legal.” The tax office will summon directors from Google Indonesia who also hold positions at Google Asia Pacific, Haniv said, adding that it is working with the Indonesian police. Globally, it is rare for a state investigation of corporate tax structures to be escalated into a criminal case. Governments hitting back Indonesia‘s move to pursue Google shows that the international tax tide might be turning, said Crawford Spence, a professor of accounting at Warwick Business School in Britain. “In recent decades multinationals have scoured the globe looking for low tax jurisdictions, effectively engaging in rate-shopping as part of tax minimisation strategies,” Spence wrote in an email. “Now, with initiatives at the transnational level…countries are starting to develop the confidence to hit back.” In January, Google agreed to pay 130 million pounds ($185 million) in back taxes to settle a probe by Britain’s tax authority, which had challenged the company’s low tax returns for the years since 2005. The Indonesia case is unlikely to be resolved soon as it normally takes at least three years for a court to make a decision on a tax-related criminal case, said Yustinus Prastowo, executive director of the Center for Indonesia Taxation Analysis. Haniv said the tax office is planning to chase back taxes from other companies that deliver content through the internet (over-the-top service providers) in Indonesia. The Indonesian communication and information ministry is working on a new regulation for OTT providers, and the tax office has proposed that a company with a “network presence” in Indonesia should also be subject to taxation. Total advertising revenue for the industry is estimated at $830 million a year, with Google and Facebook Inc accounting for around 70 percent of that, according to Haniv. A joint study by Google and Singapore state investor Temasek released earlier this year, however, estimated the size of Indonesia‘s digital advertising market at $300 million for 2015.  Reporting by Gayatri Suroyo and Eveline Danubrata; Additional reporting by Miyoung Kim; Editing by Edwina Gibbs and Alexander Smith

George H.W. Bush is voting for Hillary Clinton to snub Trump - Telegraph

George H W Bush will reportedly vote for Hillary Clinton CREDIT: REX

•  Barney Henderson, new york 
 
• Chiara Palazzo 

20 SEPTEMBER 2016 • 7:18AM

FFormer  US president George H W Bush plans to vote for Hillary Clinton in an unprecedented snub of the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, according to a member of the Kennedy family.

Kathleen Hartington Kennedy Townsend, the daughter of the late Robert F Kennedy, posted a picture on her Facebook page in which she is shaking hands with Mr Bush, with the caption: "The President told me he’s voting for Hillary!!”

She confirmed to Politico that the Republican grandee, who served as president from 1989 to 1993 and vice president from 1981 to 1989, would be voting for the Democrat candidate for the White House.

“That’s what he said,” she told the news website.

Mr Bush's spokesman, Jim McGrath, said: "The vote President Bush will cast as a private citizen in some 50 days will be just that: a private vote cast in some 50 days. He is not commenting on the presidential race in the interim."

In May, both Mr Bush and his son, George W Bush, said they would not be backing Mr Trump for the presidency.

The fact that Mr Bush Sr has now, apparently, stated that he will vote for Mrs Clinton, raises questions over whether both his sons - the former president and this year's defeated Republican presidential candidate, Jeb Bush - will follow suit.

If Mr Bush Sr's defection is confirmed, it would be a devastating blow to Mr Trump, who has failed to unite the Republican establishment behind him as a result of his divisive rhetoric and regular insults on the campaign trail.

Mr Bush Sr has strongly endorsed every Republican nominee for the last five election cycles. 

He backed his long-time political rival Bob Dole in 1996. “I’ll do anything Senator Dole wants me to do — I’ll campaign for him,” Bush said. “My heart lies at this level, the Dole level,” he said at the time.

Both former Bush presidents have campaigned enthusiastically for both Republican candidate since - John McCain and Mitt Romney.

George W Bush made his feelings towards Mr Trump known when he campaigned for his brother, Jeb, in February.

In an apparent reference to the billionaire, Mr Bush Jr said: "There seems to be a lot of name calling but, as our dad once told us, labels are for soup cans.

"I understand these are tough times and people are angry and frustrated. But we do not need someone in the Oval Office who mirrors our anger and frustration. Strength is not bluster and theatrics. The strongest person isn't the loudest one in the room."

During a Republican debate in February, Mr Trump accused George W Bush of not keeping America safe and not doing enough to stop the 9/11 attacks.

In April, Mr Bush Jr's wife Laura hinted that she'd rather see Mrs Clinton president.

US election seen as highly negative and you can’t trust millennials: Analyst - CNBC

People's perception of the upcoming U.S. presidential election is highly negative, one researcher has told CNBC, warning that whoever wins will inherit an unhappy and divided nation.

"These candidates are not viewed positively at all," Carroll Doherty, director of political research at Pew Research Center told CNBC's Street Signs Monday. "Voters are less satisfied today with their electoral choice than at any point in the last 25 years," he pointed out.

The American voter's mind has been made up, according to Doherty. "Perceptions of these candidates, even among their own supporters, are pretty baked in at this point" he said. "I would not expect that to change." 

Regardless as to whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump clinches victory in November's election, the incoming president will inherit a "divided nation, and an unhappy one," Doherty said. He blamed "left and right … pulling further and further apart."

Doherty discussed the rise of "negative voting," symptomatic of dissatisfaction with both the present candidates and the political establishment as a whole. 

Doherty's research also highlighted the volatility of the millennial vote. According to Doherty, "very unpredictable" support from 18-35 year-olds was complicated by the unexpected popularity of third party candidate Gary Johnson. Doherty said that one in five millennial voters were in favor of Johnson, though he did acknowledge that this statistic might be inflated. 

Doherty asserted that the figures were "a bad sign for Hillary Clinton" as "60 percent plus of this age group has voted Democrat in the last two elections."

This claim of the Clinton campaign's waning support among millennials has been backed up by a number of recent polls.

CNBC recently spoke to musician and entrepreneur Will.I.Am, who said that: "The problem is that a lot of people feel like there's no one that talks to them and because of that … they're not going to go out and vote." 

He said that the situation was heightened as these were young first-time voters who "don't know the stakes." 

Doherty was ambivalent as to whether the upcoming presidential debate on September 26 would alter public opinion. But, he did suggest that "Trump will raise the level of interest in this debate, if nothing else." Doherty predicted that a lot of people would tune in. 

Doherty suggested that the election result itself might be controversial. "When it's over, it might not be over," he warned.

Exclusive: Lyft CEO Lays Out His Vision of the Driverless Future - TIME

Exclusive: Lyft CEO Lays Out His Vision of the Driverless Future

Posted: 18 Sep 2016 05:45 AM PDT

Lyft, the nation’s second-largest ride-hailing service, expects autonomous vehicles to account for a majority of its rides within five years, CEO John Zimmer told TIME in an exclusive interview. Days after its chief rival Uber’s self-driving cars began ferrying passengers in Pittsburgh, Zimmer also said he expects car ownership will “all but end” in major U.S. cities in less than 10 years.
“There are already specific trips—whether it’s just on this street or just at this time in this perfect weather condition—that an autonomous vehicle could do today,” Zimmer tells TIME. And he believes that this is how the self-driving revolution will come to the masses: not by consumers swapping out their old cars for fully autonomous personal vehicles but by consumers paying for rides in self-driving cars they don’t own, with the type of trip restricted heavily at first and then growing more complicated as technology and regulations advance.

That is also the logic on which his five-year prediction is built. Because Lyft has data about where people’s trips tend to start and end, the company can estimate that a certain percentage of Lyft rides already lend themselves to self-driving cars. Such data also helps the company know where to focus their efforts for work like detailed street mapping, so that they can cover the biggest percentage of trips over the fewest miles. “We know in what order autonomous technology should be built, such that it covers more and more of those trip types,” Zimmer says. As of August 2016, Lyft was doing 14.6 million rides per month, triple their volume one year before.
This news comes as Uber is breaking a barrier in the self-driving race: Google may have been logging test miles longer than Uber and Volvo, their partner in Pittsburgh, but Uber just became the first company to bring self-driving cars to market (even if there are still backup humans in the drivers seats). Earlier this year, Lyft and GM formed a partnership and announced plans to develop autonomous vehicles together, with GM investing $500 million in Lyft. They have since been testing self-driving cars in Phoenix and have promised to deliver their first autonomous rides to customers next year.
In the interview and in a post set to publish on Medium, Zimmer details the ways he believes self-driving cars can potentially revolutionize our cities and our lives. In the not-so-distant future, Zimmer imagines people getting rid of the cars they own—or deciding not to own a car in the first place—and instead buying subscriptions for self-driving services from companies like Lyft and Uber. Think of it like a cell phone plan, with people signing up for monthly pay-per-mile plans in a certain class of car or a flat fee for unlimited miles in another.
“It’s our belief that these cars should run on a network,” he says, and in the extended smartphone metaphor, Lyft is the equivalent of the phone carrier running that network. Partners like GM and Cruise, a self-driving tech startup that GM acquired earlier this year, are responsible for the other two key components: the smartphone hardware (the car) and the operating system (the car’s autonomous brains).
The combined team working on autonomous vehicles from Lyft, GM and Cruise is in the hundreds. While GM and Cruise toil away on tangibles like sensors and algorithms that make sure the car can detect unexpected events in the road, Lyft’s team is working on problems like how to connect users with self-driving cars, how to convey to riders what the car is thinking and doing, and how to personalize the experience for riders (with, perhaps, known preferences for temperatures, music, lighting and routes). The latter is key, Zimmer believes. When customers are faced with the choice of pressing a button to get a self-driving car from different companies at roughly the same prices, they will choose Lyft like they’d choose a hotel chain or airline based on the “interior experience” or quality of service, Zimmer says.
Zimmer declined to comment on whether Lyft will exclusively work with GM in reaching this five-year milestone, nor would he say how many self-driving cars he believes will be required to cover the majority of Lyft trips at that point. “In the U.S. alone, two trillion dollars is being spent on car ownership, and cars are being used only four percent of the time. This makes no sense,” Zimmer says. “So what’s happening here is that there’s no bigger opportunity to create economic value in the country than changing that fact. And that means there are a lot of people that want to take part in that.”
Beyond the potentially massive economic payoff of self-driving cars, Zimmer says he is as taken with their potential to transform the way we live. By building our cities and lives around cars, he argues, space that could be devoted to housing or small businesses or public spaces is instead taken up by parking spaces, garages and wide roads to accommodate the congestion that is choking so many American cities. If networks of self-driving cars become robust enough for people to see them as a cheaper and simpler option than car ownership (which averages an individual about $9,000 per year), efficiencies that come with autonomous vehicles could allow cities to reclaim that space for better uses, he says.
With far less congestion, people could live further outside cities, with more space, less cost and a less taxing, self-driven commute. “If you optimize and eliminate traffic, all of a sudden, the circle around what is valuable near a city expands,” Zimmer says. He also sees Lyft playing a role in the policy debates about how to remake infrastructure that would inevitably define this version of the future. Arguing against parking garages, for instance, works for Lyft on two levels: “It’s both beneficial for us, because it makes it more likely that people will use these services but also we can make a strong argument that it’s beneficial to the cities,” Zimmer says.
The CEO wants to start selling the public and government officials on his vision long before it’s time to make those on-the-ground decisions. “You just have this blank canvas of real estate that was used for empty vehicles,” Zimmer says. “It’s not inevitable that we use that real estate correctly, because we didn’t. But now we have a technology opportunity to redo that.”

Despite iPhone Nits, Apple Looks Stronger Than Ever Right Now - TIME Business

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Despite iPhone Nits, Apple Looks Stronger Than Ever Right Now Posted: 16 Sep 2016 08:13 AM PDT The iPhone seems to confound Apple’s investors as much as it delights its customers. Four years ago, before Apple released the iPhone 5, the stock was up 73% for the year. But thanks to overheated expectations, once the phone was released the stock began a slide that erased more than 40% its value over the next nine months. Two years ago, the opposite happened: The iPhone 6 defied skepticism that Apple’s best years were behind it, propelling the stock to its record high of $134 a share in April 2015. So far, the release of the iPhone 7 is shaping up to be a repeat of the iPhone 6. Apple unveiled the phone at an event that elicited shrugs from many observers. Then the company freaked out investors when it said wouldn’t release first-weekend sales figures for the iPhone 7. The company explained that it expected the new phones to sell out early, but the market took it as a sign that Apple may be concealing low sales figures. And Apple’s stock dropped 5% late last week. This week brought an unexpected reversal. Since its opening price Monday, Apple’s stock has risen steadily, in what CNBC called the stock’s strongest short-term rally since 2009. Apple’s stock has rallied 12.4% in four straight trading sessions, a strong performance for any company, let alone one of Apple’s scale. That rally has added $71 billion to its market value. But wait a minute. Apple said last week it expected the iPhone to sell out, and the headlines this week have only confirmed this. No, Apple didn’t release the actual sales figures for the weekend’s iPhone 7 sales, but Sprint and T-Mobile both said the new iPhones were selling three or four times stronger than earlier models. Later on, AT&T gave a less enthusiastic report, saying that volumes of the iPhone 7 were higher, while Verizon said its volumes were normal. In other words, this is a decent first week for the iPhone 7, but not necessarily spectacular. Everyone knew they would sell out fast, if for no other reason than Apple warned us about it. So why is Apple’s stock having its strongest week in years? Here are a few reasons: The tide of news is turning in Apple’s favor. Not long ago, Apple was facing a spate of bad news, notably the tax complications it’s facing in Ireland. Suddenly, good news is coming: Carriers may be pushing the iPhone7 with what one analyst called “free iPhone promotions that effectively include a phone subsidy.” That, and surveys suggesting strong consumer demand, bode well for strong sales for several months. Meanwhile, Samsung, a key rival, is facing its own problems with spontaneous exploding batteries. No one wants to be left out of an Apple rally. As much as it hurts for an investor to buy a stock and see it decline, it still stings more to miss out when a stock rallies. And there are a lot of big investors who are missing out this week. According to Bloomberg, 295 institutional investors sold out of their Apple positions entirely last quarter, missing out on the 20% rise in Apple share prices since late June. Some of them may be scrambling back in. And shorting Apple seems especially dangerous right now. Shorting – or selling borrowed shares in hopes of making a profit when a stock drops – is appealing if Apple’s best days are indeed behind it. But the memory of the post iPhone 6 rally looms large in the memories of Apple bears, and some may be rushing to buy back shares to avoid future losses. Apple is cheap. At the beginning of this week, Apple was trading at 12 times earnings. Even after this week’s rally, it’s at 13.5 times earnings, compared to a ratio of 24.6 for the S&P 500 Index. And keep in mind, in fiscal 2015 – that is, the year after the release of the iPhone 6 – Apple’s revenue grew by 28%. Apple is a safe haven. And the market is in short supply of safe havens right now. In fact, the overall stock market is looking rather creaky and uncertain, amid expectations that years of record-low interest rates around the world have done all they can do to generate growth. Those concerns have driven down many stocks, but not Apple. By some counts, Apple’s rally this week is pretty much the main thing holding up the S&P 500. Apple still has its share of concerns around it. The Watch may not live up to what Apple hopes it will be, and there are signs that longer-term initiatives like an Apple car may be hitting speedbumps. But the main focus right now is the iPhone, which makes up nearly two thirds of the company’s revenue. Sales aren’t as bad as they looked a week ago, and, over the past 15 years at least, it has rarely paid for long to bet against Apple.

Turkey political purge compared to Medievil witch hunt - New York Times

Istanbul - Candan Badem teaches history at a university in southern Turkey, is a socialist and does not believe in God. But he lost his job and was hauled in by the police and accused of being a loyalist to a shadowy Islamic cleric who lives in exile in Pennsylvania.

The evidence against him: A book written by the cleric, Fethullah Gulen, was found in his office.

“It was like a bad joke,” said Mr. Badem, who says he believes the real reason he was targeted was that he signed a petition opposing the government’s war with Kurdish militants in the southeast. “What kind of reason can this be, for an academic to have a book? It is like the darkness of the medieval ages.”

Two months after a failed military coup, for which officials have blamed the disciples of Mr. Gulen, a wide-scale purge led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has reached witch-hunt proportions, according to a growing chorus of critics. More than 100,000 people — teachers, military officers, judges, functionaries, airline employees, even baklava salesmen — have been arrested or fired from their jobs, all on accusations of connections to Mr. Gulen, who steadfastly denies any involvement.

Mr. Gulen, 75, a moderate Islamist theologian who runs a network of schools and charities around the world, including in the United States, was once an ally of Mr. Erdogan’s before a bitter rift a few years ago. Now Mr. Erdogan calls him a terrorist.

In its early stages, the purge was supported by many of Mr. Erdogan's opponents, who long chafed under what they called the president’s growing authoritarianism but who said that Mr. Gulen’s influence within society needed to be wiped out.

Now, though, many have turned against the president, saying that he is using the failed coup as a pretext for enhancing his own power and that he is wielding a state of emergency to target critics of all stripes, beyond the rule of law.

“After the coup, there was a moment of national unity, as Erdogan reached out to his secular opponents for reconciliation,” said Mustafa Akyol, a leading Turkish columnist who contributes opinion pieces to The New York Times and who initially supported the purges. “That was the hope. But now that spirit is increasingly fading, and there is justified worry that the purges may ultimately serve to cleanse the state of all critics, not just Gulenists who really seem to have masterminded the coup attempt.”

s group of people who intended a coup d’état, we will never accept their excuses if we have enough evidence,” the deputy prime minister, Numan Kurtulmus, said in an interview with the New York Times editorial board on Sept. 7. Asked how thousands could be summarily dismissed before investigations had even begun, he said: “We obey the rule of law. The rule of law is still clear. After investigations, the courts will decide individual cases.”

In Turkey these days, there are many ways to lose your job or land in jail: holding a mortgage from the bank affiliated with Mr. Gulen; current or past enrollment in one of the cleric’s many schools; or simply owning a book or subscribing to a newspaper published by the Gulenists.

License plates with the letters FG, which might suggest an allegiance to Mr. Gulen, draw scrutiny from officials. The president has called on Turks to inform on their fellow citizens, and so the whispered word of a neighbor with a grudge could be enough to land someone in jail. So could a post on Twitter.

And if the police cannot find you, they may look for a family member. That happened in the case of Hakan Sukur, a former top soccer player who had fled to the United States, whose father was arrested. In another example, the wife of a journalist targeted by the government had her passport canceled.

Rather than focusing on people directly accused of participating in the coup plot, the purges have swept through the entire community of people who may have once been sympathetic to the ideas of Mr. Gulen.

That is no small number. A cleric who rose to prominence starting in the 1960s, Mr. Gulen has been embraced in the past by the West for espousing a vision of moderate Islam and interfaith dialogue. Gulenists have also long filled the ranks of the state — the police, judiciary and military — with the blessing of Mr. Erdogan.

While many of those who have lost their jobs, such as Mr. Badem, say they have never been sympathetic to the cleric, others readily acknowledge that they once considered themselves disciples of Mr. Gulen but say they had no role in the coup attempt.

schoolteacher, said she became acquainted with the Gulen movement in the same way many Turks did: by attending a private tutoring school, run by Gulenists, to prepare for her university entrance exams.

“That’s where I met the brothers and sisters of the movement,” she said in an interview. “It all started very innocently. They approached me and invited me to a picnic.”

She said that she had been persuaded in recent years to leave the movement by her husband and father, but that she still lost her job.

“I will never forget the day I was fired,” she said. “It was like someone poured boiling hot water over my head. The principal’s assistant told me by phone and made me pack up all my belongings in 20 minutes. I didn’t even get to say goodbye to the children.”

Ms. Ozyurek said that Mr. Erdogan’s Islamist government was being hypocritical, given the long alliance between his Justice and Development Party and the Gulenists.

“I am no guiltier than the government,” she said. “They were also sympathetic with the movement for many years.”

Searching for historical parallels, analysts have made comparisons with Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunt in 1950s America, the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s and ’70s. Mr. Erdogan’s own spokesman, Ibrahim Kalin, has likened the purges to what a unified Germany did after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 in removing civil servants and military officers who had served communist East Germany.

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In 1926, the discovery of a plot to assassinate Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, prompted a wide crackdown that may be the closest historical similarity to what is happening now.

“That was a real plot,” said Mr. Akyol, the columnist. “But it was also utilized to get rid of a broader circle of opposition and establish Ataturk as the unchallenged leader for the next two decades.”

In purging the Gulenists, Turkey has also seized businesses, transferring about $4 billion of wealth from the private sector to the state, evoking comparisons with the infamous wealth tax in 1942, when Turkey targeted its non-Muslim citizens, including Christians and Jews.

Sitting at a cafe in Istanbul recently, Hakka Azad Akkus, 33, a recently fired teacher, pulled out his iPhone and scrolled through his photographs — evidence, he said, that he could not possibly be involved with an Islamic group.

“I drink alcohol,” he said, showing a picture of him drinking beer at a beachside cafe.

“I smoke,” he said, nodding to the cigarette in his hand.

“I sit with girls,” he continued, showing another picture. “This is my social environment. It doesn’t look Islamic, right?”

But few were holding out much hope that their dismissals would be reversed, at least not overnight.

“I believe my innocence will be proven,” Mr. Akkus said. “But how long is it going to take? Two years? Three years? What happens in between?”

Correction: September 16, 2016 

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the university professor who was dismissed and questioned over a book found in his office. He is Candan Badem, not Candem Bademci.

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  Turkish Cleric, Accused in Coup Plot, Calls Crackdown ‘Dark Pages’ in History SEPT. 15, 2016

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  Turkey Uses Post-Coup Emergency Decree to Purge Mayors and TeachersSEPT. 9, 2016

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  Erdogan Triumphs After Coup Attempt, but Turkey’s Fate Is UnclearJULY 17, 2016

Alarmingly, to his critics, Mr. Erdogan has recently expanded the purge beyond even the pretense of going after Gulenists, removing Kurdish mayors and thousands of teachers in the southeast.

“He is openly purging the democratic society,” said Baskin Oran, a retired professor and prominent writer. “Anyone who opposes him. This is as clear as day.”

Mr. Oran said he lost his job in 1980, after a military coup and subsequent purge of leftists, but was eventually reinstated. “Even under martial law, I was able to go to court and get my job back,” he said. This time, under Mr. Erdogan, he said, the government wants its critics to “get out of the way for the rest of their lives.”

Turkish officials have lately acknowledged that they may have gone too far, and Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has said that crisis centers will be set up in every Turkish province to handle claims from those who feel they have been unfairly accused.

“If a mistake is made, if there is anything contrary to justice and the law, it will be reviewed after operations are completed and mistakes will be corrected,” he said in a televised speech.

But Mr. Erdogan and his subordinates have also been unapologetic about the severity of the purges, and they contend that most, if not all, of the people under suspicion for connections with the plot have been treated fairly.