Monthly Archives: September 2022

Human Behavior

Why heat makes you feel tired and sleepy, according to science – Medical News Today

External temperatures can affect our energy, emotions, and sleep quality. Scientists are still exploring how climate changes bear on human behavior.

Neurobiologists at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, may have uncovered genetic underpinnings influencing the bodys adaptations to climate.

Their recently published study in the journal Current Biology found a distinct thermometer circuit in the fruit fly brain triggered by hot temperatures. It follows a 2020 paper that identified a cold thermometer circuit.

Lead author Marco Gallio, Ph.D., an associate professor of neurobiology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, told Medical News Today:

People may choose to take an afternoon nap on a hot day, and in some parts of the world this is a cultural norm, but what do you choose and what is programmed into you? Of course, its not culture in flies, so there actually might be a very strong underlying biological mechanism that is overlooked in humans.

Medical News Today discussed this research with Dr. Gallio and asked why he chose to examine the fruit fly (Drosophila).

The professor mentioned that sleep is universal throughout the animal kingdom. He also shared that 60% of the insects genes are the same as those in humans.

The common fly appears all around the world due to having a close association with people. Its favorite temperature 77 degrees Fahrenheit is also close to that of many humans.

Dr. Gallio said that fruit flies are gaining momentum in research because they show an array of complex behaviors like people. Yet, they do all that in a brain that is only made up of 100,000 brain cells.

On the other hand, the human brain holds about 86 billion brain cells.

In his article, Ode to the fruit fly: tiny lab subject crucial to basic research, Dr. Gallio wrote that our related anatomy and physiology make the flies ideal for designing experiments of significance to animals and humans alike.

The Northwestern University study draws on a 10-year project that produced the connectome, the first full map of neural pathways in an animal.

The connectome allowed the researchers to analyze all the possible neural connections for every fruit fly brain cell. The present study helped them observe how information in the brain travels from one point to another.

The flys antenna has three organs called sensilla, each containing one hot- and one cold-activated neuron.

The flys head also contains anterior cell (AC) neurons that respond to heat and cold. This research is the first to identify these absolute heat receptors.

During this study, Dr. Gallio and his colleagues noticed that the AC neurons sensitive to heat are part of a wider network that controls sleep.

When the hot circuit was activated by temperatures above 77 degrees Fahrenheit, the cells triggering midday sleep stay on longer. This leads to longer midday sleep, helping the flies avoid movement during the warmest part of the day.

Matthew Walker, Ph.D., who was not involved in this study, is an author and professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Walkers research focuses on sleep and human health.

In a 2019 podcast, Dr. Walker said that temperature is as powerful a trigger of sleep organization and sleep depth as light is. For you to fall asleep and stay asleep, your body needs to drop its core temperature by about one degree Celsius or about two degrees Fahrenheit. Thats the reason that you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room thats too cold than too hot, because the room thats too cold is at least taking you in the right thermal direction for good sleep []

The sleep expert also discussed hunter-gatherer tribe studies that indicate the influence of temperature changes on sleep behavior. The way of life in such pre-industrial societies has remained constant over thousands of years.

Dr. Walker said that these people dont typically retire for the night immediately after the sun sets. Rather, the tribes go to bed several hours later when the ambient temperature falls.

Dr. Walker commented: That seems to be a thermal trigger for them getting sleepy and falling asleep. And [] they typically wake up 15 to 20 minutes before dawn. So, its not light that seems to be necessarily the trigger instigating the awakening. Its actually the rise of temperature, and thats on the circadian rhythm. So, what is entraining us to our natural sleep rhythms is both temperature and light.

Jade Wu, Ph.D., a sleep psychologist, researcher, and speaker who was not involved in the study, told MNT that she was curious whether the studys findings could extend to humans.

We know that when its too hot, humans actually have a harder time with sleep, which appears to be opposite to what happened with the flies in this study, Dr. Wu said.

Dr. Gallio agreed that humans tend to sleep better when its cold.

Dr. Gallio stressed that his work aimed to discover the basic principles driving why we sleep and how temperature affects behavior.

We dont know much about these principles, but we should be spending [more] money on [learning about] those very principles before we try to [focus on] the applied side [of research], he said.

Michael Alpert, first author and post-doctoral researcher with Dr. Gallio, added: We identified one neuron that could be a site of integration for the effects of hot and cold temperatures on sleep and activity in Drosophila. This would be the start of interesting follow-up studies.

Dr. Gallio also told MNT that he hopes his work could inspire others to take the research further, eventually to human investigations.

For instance, this research opens the door to determining specific sensory circuits for brain regions for sleep in humans.

The professor said that his team also wants to consider the effects of climate change on behavior and physiology.

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Why heat makes you feel tired and sleepy, according to science - Medical News Today

Human Behavior

Monkeys Look for Patterns that Aren’t ThereJust Like Humans Do – The Scientist

Faced with an impossible puzzle, lab monkeys in a recent experiment showed unflappable resolve: They continued to guess what they thought must be the correct responses, even when rewards were doled out at random or in ways meant to disincentivize the animals from sticking to their guns. In short, the monkeys spuriously learned convictionstheir seeming insistence that there must be a structure and solution to an unsolvable puzzleoutweighed their desire to maximize rewards during the experiment.

The study, published August 23 in PNAS, suggests that the monkeys create internal representations and assumptions about how to solve a puzzle or address a task that supersede the usual drivers of lab behavior, such as rewards. And even when the puzzle at hand was impossible by design, that internally conjured structure kept the animals guessing long after the Columbia University researchers behind the experiment thought theyd give up. The study suggests that the monkeys did not distinguish between learnable and unlearnable tasks, treating the latter as they had the formera tendency that the studys authors say resembles how humans approach random or impossible challenges.

The original goal of the study was to learn more about the motivations behind learning and exploration, explains coauthor Jacqueline Gottlieb, a Columbia University neuroscientist. The main reward for exploration is finding some sort of pattern or regularity in the world. The problem is that we live in a very complicated world with a lot of patterns [that] might be validand a lot of them are nonsense.

In the study, two rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) were first trained to solve puzzles in which they had to learn through trial and error the correct order of five images that appeared on a touch screen by selecting which of two presented images was ordered first. In the training period, there was a fixed, learnable order to the images, and correct answers were rewarded with a sip of water for the water-deprived monkeys.

Though the images changed for each set, the experience seemed to teach the monkeys that there was indeed a structure to the taskan assumption that they held onto as solvable sets were swapped out for those that were impossible by design.

In later tasks, water rewards were given out not for correct answers (there were none), but first randomly, and then in a way meant to encourage the monkeys to change their answers from what they had guessed before. Weve denied them a logical structure that is internally consistent and coherent, coauthor Greg Jensen, a primate cognition researcher at Columbia, tells The Scientist. In these experiments, the monkeys still proceeded as though they could solve the puzzle, selecting consistent answers even when doing so meant receiving fewer rewards. At this point, the researchers added a third monkey, which had spent less time on the solvable training patterns, to see if their results had somehow been skewed, but it exhibited similar behavior, offering the second-most consistent choices of the three.

We as animals want there to be patterns to the world; we want to be able to learn our environment, learning and memory researcher Natalie Odynocki, who didnt work on the study, tells The Scientist over email. In this case, The monkeys are taking what they have previously learned will give them reward and applying this learning to a new context.

Gottlieb says she expected that the animals would monitor their own learning rates, determining how well they were performing based on how often they received a reward. Instead, they seemed to develop an intrinsic reward that kept them focused on attempting to solve the puzzle instead of gaming the task. Its very motivating when you believe there is a pattern and you believe you are getting it, she says.

A similar phenomenon has been observed in humans. In a study Gottlieb and her colleagues published in Nature Communications last year, for example, people tried to complete a similar unlearnable puzzle (disguised among three solvable ones). Many of the research participants were drawn to the challenge of the impossible task, she says, and some said they were confident they could have solved it if theyd only had more time. In the new paper, the study authors also compare the monkeys behavior to gamblers who believe theyre due for a win, and of sports fans predicting the winner of games despite not having any relevant data.

The problem is that we live in a very complicated world with a lot of patterns [that] might be validand a lot of them are nonsense.

Jacqueline Gottlieb, Columbia University

What we learned is that learning is a complex thing, and if you start with a belief that there is a structure to a task, you can convince yourself that youre learning the structure, Gottlieb says. You can just take internal cues, or whatever it is the monkeys are using, ignore the reward cues, and call that learning.

We were really surprised to see that we put in random inputs and we got very stable outputs, coauthor Vincent Ferrera of Columbia says.

Less surprised was Yael Niv, a Princeton University neuroscientist who didnt work on the study, who says the brain has a tendency to look for patterns and structure even when there are none. One idea [for why this occurs] is that in order to figure out true relationships out there in the world, we have to assume they exist, she tells The Scientist over email. That means we have a prior belief that there is a relationship to uncover, even if we have not yet seen evidence of it in the data.

Jensen tells The Scientist that the experimental tasks likely exploited a mechanism that helps animals quickly determine order or rankings such as social hierarchies, which he adds is shared across multiple clades of life (even wasps can correctly order five items, he adds). That could lead to issues for learning and memory researchers who fail to account for bias in both animal and human research subjects, he says, underscoring the value of carefully thought-out control groups. What a control condition actually means can be very, very tricky once you get into tasks that are somewhat more complicated, Jensen says.

Odynocki suggests that its also possible the monkeys persisted because the experimental task was too similar to the training one. If stimuli were more distinct, perhaps new behavioral approaches would have been employed and less generalization would have occurred, she says. Animals like predictability, and unlearning a behavior thats worked for them in the past can take time.

Odynocki also suggests that the findings may have been different if the monkeys were rewarded with a treat rather than water, as they may have behaved differently if they were seeking out a bonus prize rather than something essential for survival.

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Monkeys Look for Patterns that Aren't ThereJust Like Humans Do - The Scientist

Human Behavior

AI that can learn the patterns of human language – MIT News

Human languages are notoriously complex, and linguists have long thought it would be impossible to teach a machine how to analyze speech sounds and word structures in the way human investigators do.

But researchers at MIT, Cornell University, and McGill University have taken a step in this direction. They have demonstrated an artificial intelligence system that can learn the rules and patterns of human languages on its own.

When given words and examples of how those words change to express different grammatical functions (like tense, case, or gender) in one language, this machine-learning model comes up with rules that explain why the forms of those words change. For instance, it might learn that the letter a must be added to end of a word to make the masculine form feminine in Serbo-Croatian.

This model can also automatically learn higher-level language patterns that can apply to many languages, enabling it to achieve better results.

The researchers trained and tested the model using problems from linguistics textbooks that featured 58 different languages. Each problem had a set of words and corresponding word-form changes. The model was able to come up with a correct set of rules to describe those word-form changes for 60 percent of the problems.

This system could be used to study language hypotheses and investigate subtle similarities in the way diverse languages transform words. It is especially unique because the system discovers models that can be readily understood by humans, and it acquires these models from small amounts of data, such as a few dozen words. And instead of using one massive dataset for a single task, the system utilizes many small datasets, which is closer to how scientists propose hypotheses they look at multiple related datasets and come up with models to explain phenomena across those datasets.

One of the motivations of this work was our desire to study systems that learn models of datasets that is represented in a way that humans can understand. Instead of learning weights, can the model learn expressions or rules? And we wanted to see if we could build this system so it would learn on a whole battery of interrelated datasets, to make the system learn a little bit about how to better model each one, says Kevin Ellis 14, PhD 20, an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University and lead author of the paper.

Joining Ellis on the paper are MIT faculty members Adam Albright, a professor of linguistics; Armando Solar-Lezama, a professor and associate director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and Joshua B. Tenenbaum, the Paul E. Newton Career Development Professor of Cognitive Science and Computation in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a member of CSAIL; as well as senior author

Timothy J. ODonnell, assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at McGill University, and Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Mila -Quebec Artificial IntelligenceInstitute.

The research is published today in Nature Communications.

Looking at language

In their quest to develop an AI system that could automatically learn a model from multiple related datasets, the researchers chose to explore the interaction of phonology (the study of sound patterns) and morphology (the study of word structure).

Data from linguistics textbooks offered an ideal testbed because many languages share core features, and textbook problems showcase specific linguistic phenomena. Textbook problems can also be solved by college students in a fairly straightforward way, but those students typically have prior knowledge about phonology from past lessons they use to reason about new problems.

Ellis, who earned his PhD at MIT and was jointly advised by Tenenbaum and Solar-Lezama, first learned about morphology and phonology in an MIT class co-taught by ODonnell, who was a postdoc at the time, and Albright.

Linguists have thought that in order to really understand the rules of a human language, to empathize with what it is that makes the system tick, you have to be human. We wanted to see if we can emulate the kinds of knowledge and reasoning that humans (linguists) bring to the task, says Albright.

To build a model that could learn a set of rules for assembling words, which is called a grammar, the researchers used a machine-learning technique known as Bayesian Program Learning. With this technique, the model solves a problem by writing a computer program.

In this case, the program is the grammar the model thinks is the most likely explanation of the words and meanings in a linguistics problem. They built the model using Sketch, a popular program synthesizer which was developed at MIT by Solar-Lezama.

But Sketch can take a lot of time to reason about the most likely program. To get around this, the researchers had the model work one piece at a time, writing a small program to explain some data, then writing a larger program that modifies that small program to cover more data, and so on.

They also designed the model so it learns what good programs tend to look like. For instance, it might learn some general rules on simple Russian problems that it would apply to a more complex problem in Polish because the languages are similar. This makes it easier for the model to solve the Polish problem.

Tackling textbook problems

When they tested the model using 70 textbook problems, it was able to find a grammar that matched the entire set of words in the problem in 60 percent of cases, and correctly matched most of the word-form changes in 79 percent of problems.

The researchers also tried pre-programming the model with some knowledge it should have learned if it was taking a linguistics course, and showed that it could solve all problems better.

One challenge of this work was figuring out whether what the model was doing was reasonable. This isnt a situation where there is one number that is the single right answer. There is a range of possible solutions which you might accept as right, close to right, etc., Albright says.

The model often came up with unexpected solutions. In one instance, it discovered the expected answer to a Polish language problem, but also another correct answer that exploited a mistake in the textbook. This shows that the model could debug linguistics analyses, Ellis says.

The researchers also conducted tests that showed the model was able to learn some general templates of phonological rules that could be applied across all problems.

One of the things that was most surprising is that we could learn across languages, but it didnt seem to make a huge difference, says Ellis. That suggests two things. Maybe we need better methods for learning across problems. And maybe, if we cant come up with those methods, this work can help us probe different ideas we have about what knowledge to share across problems.

In the future, the researchers want to use their model to find unexpected solutions to problems in other domains. They could also apply the technique to more situations where higher-level knowledge can be applied across interrelated datasets. For instance, perhaps they could develop a system to infer differential equations from datasets on the motion of different objects, says Ellis.

This work shows that we have some methods which can, to some extent, learn inductive biases. But I dont think weve quite figured out, even for these textbook problems, the inductive bias that lets a linguist accept the plausible grammars and reject the ridiculous ones, he adds.

This work opens up many exciting venues for future research. I am particularly intrigued by the possibility that the approach explored by Ellis and colleagues (Bayesian Program Learning, BPL) might speak to how infants acquire language, says T. Florian Jaeger, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences and computer science at the University of Rochester, who was not an author of this paper. Future work might ask, for example, under what additional induction biases (assumptions about universal grammar) the BPL approach can successfully achieve human-like learning behavior on the type of data infants observe during language acquisition. I think it would be fascinating to see whether inductive biases that are even more abstract than those considered by Ellis and his team such as biases originating in the limits of human information processing (e.g., memory constraints on dependency length or capacity limits in the amount of information that can be processed per time) would be sufficient to induce some of the patterns observed in human languages.

This work was funded, in part, by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Fonds de Recherche du Qubec Socit et Culture, the Canada CIFAR AI Chairs Program, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and an NSF graduate fellowship.

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AI that can learn the patterns of human language - MIT News

Human Behavior

22% of Tenure-Track Professors Have a Parent With a Ph.D. – Inside Higher Ed

Current tenure-track faculty members are up to 25 more times likely to have a parent with a Ph.D. than the general population, according to a new study in Nature: Human Behavior. This rate nearly doubles at highly selective institutions and has remained stable for 50 years. The study involved combining national-level data on education, income and university rankings with a 20172020 survey of 7,204 U.S.-based tenure-track faculty members across eight disciplines in the natural sciences, social sciences, business and the humanities.

Our results suggest that the professoriate is, and has remained, accessible disproportionately to the socioeconomically privileged, which is likely to deeply shape their scholarship and their reproduction, lead author Allison C. Morgan, a recent computer science Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder and current Twitter data scientist, wrote with her colleagues. According to the study, 22percent of tenure-track professors in the eight fields studied report that at least one of their parents holds a Ph.D., and 4percent report both parents have Ph.D.s. Some 52percent report having at least one parent with a masters degree or Ph.D. In the U.S., on average, fewer than 1percent of similarly aged adults hold a Ph.D., and just 7percent hold a graduate degree of any kind.

Other studies have found similar results. Research published earlier this year suggests that economics Ph.D.s, in particular, are increasingly likely to have at least one parent with a graduate degree. (Morgans study previously received attention as a preprint.)

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22% of Tenure-Track Professors Have a Parent With a Ph.D. - Inside Higher Ed

Human Behavior

FAs Weigh In: What Are You Reading? – Financial Advisor IQ

FA-IQ reached out to advisors to ask: Is there a book that has shaped how you work with clients or think about finance?

Mark Mathers is partner and managing director of Beacon Pointe Advisors. Mathers, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, has been in the industry 27 years. His teams client assets total $570 million.

An amazing book that has had a great impact on my life and how I interact with clients is called Tattoos on the Heart by Greg Boyle. The book is a series of short stories about Father Gregs interaction with gang members in LA. Greg speaks about seeing each person at the level of the heart. Its a story about kinship and compassion. At Beacon Pointe we are laser focused on our clients needs regarding their life & legacy planning and their investments. A critical component of our client relationship involves taking the time to see each of our clients at the level of the heart. What are the challenges they are facing in life? What are they struggling with? How can we help them engage their capital in doing good while also doing well financially?

The ability for our team to engage with our clients this way is totally dependent upon how each of our team sees themselves and how we also connect with one another as colleagues. We practice servant leadership at Beacon Pointe. Which means showing up each day with enough humility to realize that we are here to serve other human beings our clients, our colleagues and our community and all of these matter. The fact that one of our specialties is Values Based Investing fits perfectly with our firm culture of servant leadership that clearly involves seeing the other person at the level of the heart, he added.

Karen McClintock is principal and managing director at Robertson Stephens Wealth Management. McClintock, based in Pasadena, California, has been in the industry more than 30 years and has about $174 million in client assets.

She selected Whats It All About, Alpha?: & Other Investment Essays from an Incredible Decade Paperback, by Jason DeSena Trennert.

While an older book, Trennerts comments are timeless. As wealth managers, we engage in research, statistics, trends, economics, analysis, forecasting, and massive amounts of data. Trennert regularly reminds us we are managing other peoples money and it is a sacred trust. We must never neglect history, the social sciences, and human behavior. We must remain ever diligent in suppressing the noise and searching for the big picture, the truth. We must safeguard and develop the finest personal code of ethics possible, McClintock said.

While Trennert is at the helm of an award winning macro-economic research company, he brings a tone of sensibility to our industry, for which we are grateful. This book gives you insights into the foundations of that work, she added.

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FAs Weigh In: What Are You Reading? - Financial Advisor IQ

Human Behavior

Whatever happened to the Malawian anti-plastic activist inspired by goats? – NPR

Gloria Majiga-Kamoto, an activist from Malawi, was one of six recipients of the 2021 Goldman Environmental Prize. Majiga-Kamoto has been campaigning to convince Malawi to implement a ban on thin plastics. Goldman Environmental Prize hide caption

In June 2021, NPR profiled Gloria Majiga-Kamoto of Malawi, who saw goats dying after eating plastic bags and decided to take on her nation's plastic industry. Cheap, single-use plastic is such a problem in Malawi that in 2015 the government instituted a thin plastic ban. But before the ban could go into effect, the country's powerful plastic industry filed an injunction. That's until Majiga-Kamoto, who works for a local environmental organization, came along, organizing protest rallies and marches. In 2019 the nation's High Court finally ruled in favor of the ban. In 2021 she won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for her work. So what's happened to her in the last year?

About This Series

Over the next week, we'll be looking back at some of our favorite Goats and Soda stories to see "whatever happened to ..."

Gloria Majiga-Kamoto says in the past year she's become in her words "the plastic girl." We reached her in Blantyre, the financial capital of Malawi, to get an update on the thin plastic ban, and hear about her new tactics for fighting plastic pollution around the world. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Volunteers with Art Malawi, a local arts organization, clean plastic litter and debris from the Mudi River in Blantyre, Malawi. Volunteers worked for months to clean up the river. Art Malawi/Mudi River Cleanup hide caption

What does being 'the plastic girl' mean?

Being 'the plastic girl' is being that one person that everybody sends pictures to if they see plastic pollution anywhere. [Laughs] Or they're tagging me in everything. So it's a bit mortifying because it also sort of reminds you how little progress you're actually making. The thing with policy is, when it's in place, you almost think everything is just going to magically work out, right? But it's very slow progress and sometimes, to be sort of stuck in the moment, the slow motion, it's a bit frustrating. You want to wake up today and know that things are so different. That's been a bit overwhelming for me personally. I think it's given me more of a sense of responsibility to say, 'What more can I do?'

The point of the law was to ban the manufacturing of thin plastic in Malawi. But it seems there are still thin plastic producers operating in the country. What's going on with you and your supporters?

We've now gone back to the courts. There's been a judicial review application by one of the [plastic] companies with the commercial courts, which is crazy because this issue was resolved in the Supreme Court.

What [the plastic companies] are contesting is the list of the plastics that have been banned. So because that list is [being] reviewed [the government] cannot target the companies. Right now the government can only target the distributors and the users of plastic, which is a very difficult thing to do because these are just local Malawians.

We've been calling for the president to take action because we can't keep on using the courts. [Earlier this month] we had the national cleanup day for civil society organizations. We took a stand and said, 'We're not participating in the cleanup because we cannot keep cleaning up somebody else's mess." The whole point of the ban, the whole point of setting up the cleanup initiative, was to say that once the ban is in place, we come together as a country and clean up.

But if we continue to produce plastics and then we still say people should come out and clean up, it's not fair because we are cleaning up somebody else's mess and [the manufacturers are] making a profit off of it!

So you're now not participating in government-sponsored cleanups and demonstrations as a symbol of your frustration with the government.

Yes. As of now we've actually refused to take part in the national cleanup campaigns, from this month until the president makes a very clear statement on the need for the judiciary to address this issue once and for all. We need him to make a directive on the implementation of the ban.

You don't want the government greenwashing, basically.

No. [Laughs] You know, we're done.

I feel like, if you're 'the plastic girl', people around the world look to you for guidance on how to combat plastic pollution in their countries. So I'm wondering, can you give people some ideas about what you've learned?

We organized a cleanup with support from the Goldman Prize funds. And what we did was when we gathered all the plastics, we took them straight to a plastic company, because we said, 'We don't know what to do with this waste. So you tell us what to do with it. You continue producing it, so take it back!'

We'll do that for every single cleanup. We're taking it back to the plastic manufacturers because we don't want it. And we don't know what to do with it. Don't give us the task of writing proposals to come up with projects that are going to recycle, because we can't. You have to do something about it. And I think that [taking plastic waste back to the plastic companies] showed them that we're watching and we're waiting to see what's going to happen.

I know globally, there's been a campaign to break free from plastic. We're not the only country facing this challenge. This is a very huge sector. It's got huge profits. They've got money, they've got more than we will ever have. But we have got the power and I think that's the most important lesson of all.

So when you gave them back the plastic, did they take it?

They were so reluctant, but we went there with media and then they had to take it back. We don't know what they did with it, but it was such a strong statement.

I think their fear was that if they take it, then everybody starts taking all of their plastic to them on the cleanups. And that's exactly what we want! [Laughs.]

So we've been trying to tell people that if you're doing a cleanup, you need to have a plan for your plastics because you can't throw it at the landfill. That kind of pressure is showing [the thin plastic manufacturers] that we're not backing down.

It's kind of showing the hypocrisy, how you really can't recycle a lot of plastic.

Exactly.

What is your next target?

We still have work to do in plastics. I mean, even [if] the ban comes back into full effect, there will still be a lot of work trying to get people to change. We are working on a program for TV called Waste Talk, it should go live on air next month. It's just 10 minutes every day, a conversation on the types of waste that you experience. Get people to understand what waste is, how they can manage it better, who they can actually take it to, and the incredible people that are managing our waste on our behalf.

So you're focusing on human behavior in addition to targeting manufacturers.

I feel like one of the challenges we have is a disconnection once you throw [plastic] in the bin you get disconnected from it.

So I always ask people, if we're in a meeting and they have a plastic bottle, I say, "After you use that bottle, can you imagine ever meeting that bottle again? Like if you had your name on that and you met it inside an animal or, you know, in the most awkward place, in a fish, in a beautiful lake when you're swimming with your family and then you see your bottle just wash up on the shore toward you. How would you feel?" So getting people to be aware that waste has a life-cycle and we are part of that life cycle to the end of it.

Julia Simon is a regular contributor to NPR's podcasts and news desks, focusing on climate change, energy and business news.

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Whatever happened to the Malawian anti-plastic activist inspired by goats? - NPR

Human Behavior

Drugs Effects of Ketamine in Mice Can Depend on the Sex of the Human Experimenter – Neuroscience News

Summary: Mice respond better to the antidepressant effect of ketamine when the drug is delivered by men, not women, a new study reports.

Source: University of Maryland

Many researchers who work with mice can tell you that mice behave differently depending on who is handling them.

Anecdotal reports and some existing scientific reports indicate that mice tend to be more fearful and uptight around men, and relaxed and comfortable around women. Whether this behavior actually affects research results though, remains a sort of the elephant in the room that not many people seem to want to address.

Now, researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) have shown that mice respond more to the antidepressant effects of the drug ketamine when administered by men and not bywomen.

The group demonstrated that the response of mice detected in a specific region of their brain from handling by a man is essential for ketamines effect to work. Then, the researchers identified the mechanism behind this response.

The researchers say that while the influence of the sex of the scientist administering ketamine is not directly relevant to the human response to ketamine, thebrain mechanismunderlying their findings could help determine why some people do not respond to ketamine anti-depressant therapy and suggest ways to potentially make this therapy work better for those patients who do not respond well.

The findings were published on August 30 inNature Neuroscience.

Our findings in mice suggests that activating a specific stress circuit in the brain may be a way to improve ketamine treatment. Our thought is that you may be able to provide a more robust antidepressant effect if you combine the ketamine with activation of this brain region, either a drug that spurs this process in the brain or even some sort of specific stressor, said Todd Gould, MD, Professor of Psychiatry at UMSOM.

Dr. Goulds team anecdotally noticed that ketamines antidepressant-like effects only seemed to work consistently when male researchers administered the treatment to mice. The team reached out to other labs studying mouse responses to ketamine, who reported the same issues, but no one had yet systematically documented the phenomena and investigated the cause.

At the time, most of Dr. Goulds team was women and so figuring out why the experiments did not work when women performed them was essential to the team getting workable data, so they could move forward with project.

To look into this, they began by observing mouse preference for being around T-shirts or cotton swabs rubbed on the wrists, elbow, or behind the ear that came from men versus women. The mice preferred spending more time around T-shirts and cotton swabs that came from women rather than men. When the researchers used a chemical to block the smell of the mice, they no longer preferred womens T-shirts or cotton swabs over mens.

Compared to humans, mouse sense of smell and their sensitivity to pheromones (airborne hormones) are more keenly developed, so its not surprising that they respond differently to many smells, including those of men compared to women, said Dr. Gould.

Next, they confirmed the original anecdotal findings with a systematic experiment using many researchers to verify that mice responded to ketamine when administered men, but not by women. Then, the researchers wanted to understand the mechanism behind why the mice behave this way.

The researchers investigated several factors potentially involved in mediating ketamines response in mice, but ultimately settled on one: corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF). CRF is located region of the brain, known as the hippocampus, responsible for learning and memory that had previously been associated with depression.

When the researchers had women administer the ketamine along with an injection of CRF, the mice finally responded to ketamine as if they were being treated with an antidepressant.

We think that some people may have higher or lower levels of CRF, and we believe that people do not respond well to ketamine antidepressant therapy might respond if we could administer the treatment with some CRF-related chemical that could induce ketamines effects, said Polymnia Georgiou, Ph.D., a former postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Goulds laboratory, who led the project.

Alternatively, we typically see the antidepressant effects of ketamine lasting 1-3 days, but with CRF administration, it is possible that we may be able to extend the effects to last longer with CRF.

Mark T. Gladwin, MD, Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, UM Baltimore, and the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor and Dean at UMSOM, said, These are exciting new findings that underscore the importance of basic research to lay the foundation for future clinical innovations. Our investigators are leaders in the study of new approaches for the treatment for depression, such asketamine.

They also found an unexpected interaction between the sex of themicestudied and the sex of the scientist administering the drugs, highlighting the importance of evaluating unexpected effects of our experimental systems and approaches.

Author: Press OfficeSource: University of MarylandContact: Press Office University of MarylandImage: The image is in the public domain

Original Research: Closed access.Experimenters sex modulates mouse behaviors and neural responses to ketamine via corticotropin releasing factor by Polymnia Georgiou et al. Nature Neuroscience

Abstract

Experimenters sex modulates mouse behaviors and neural responses to ketamine via corticotropin releasing factor

We show that the sex of human experimenters affects mouse behaviors and responses following administration of the rapid-acting antidepressant ketamine and its bioactive metabolite (2R,6R)-hydroxynorketamine.

Mice showed aversion to the scent of male experimenters, preference for the scent of female experimenters and increased stress susceptibility when handled by male experimenters.

This human-male-scent-induced aversion and stress susceptibility was mediated by the activation of corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) neurons in the entorhinal cortex that project to hippocampal area CA1. Exposure to the scent of male experimenters before ketamine administration activated CA1-projecting entorhinal cortex CRF neurons, and activation of this CRF pathway modulated in vivo and in vitro antidepressant-like effects of ketamine.

A better understanding of the specific and quantitative contributions of the sex of human experimenters to study outcomes in rodents may improve replicability between studies and, as we have shown, reveal biological and pharmacological mechanisms.

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Drugs Effects of Ketamine in Mice Can Depend on the Sex of the Human Experimenter - Neuroscience News

Human Behavior

Bay Area’s summer COVID surge is nearly over. What happens next? – San Francisco Chronicle

The Bay Areas summer COVID-19 surge is winding down as case numbers reach levels last seen in April.

With no new coronavirus variants of concern on the horizon, the region appears headed for a welcome respite in the pandemic. And as early as next week, the federal government could start shipping out updated booster shots that target the latest omicron sublineages and could help extend vaccine protection well into the fall.

Despite the many reasons to feel optimistic, Bay Area health experts caution that weve been here before and that the coronavirus remains an unpredictable foe.

Its tough to say where were going to head next, said Abraar Karan, an infectious disease doctor at Stanford. We dont know when the next big surge is going to be, but we do know in the winter months we have seen resurgences.

One challenge going forward is that tracking case numbers has become increasingly difficult with so many people now testing at home results of which are not usually recorded with the state or counties or not testing at all. The problem could be exacerbated starting Friday, when federal officials are set to stop sending out free, at-home COVID test kits through the mail due to a lack of funding.

As of Tuesday, the Bay Area reported a seven-day average of 18 daily coronavirus infections per 100,000 residents, according to state figures, while Californias seven-day average fell to 21 per 100,000, down from 37 three weeks ago. The statewide test positivity rate has plunged to 8.7% but remains well above the 1.2% average recorded in mid-March following the winter surge.

Schools across the state are reopening without virus mitigation measures that were in place last year but some students are still wearing masks.

COVID deaths, however, have plateaued with the state now averaging 45 per day. The Bay Area is reporting 14 deaths a day, up from just 5 a day recorded a month ago. Hospitalizations also remain stubbornly elevated, with 3,108 patients tallied in California on Tuesday, including 540 in the Bay Area roughly the same numbers recorded in mid-June.

Ive been so humbled by the virus, Im reluctant to make any predictions, said John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert at UC Berkeley. The good news is were coming out of the surge. But that doesnt give me a great deal of comfort because when we reached our nadir the week before Thanksgiving last year, Southern Africa experienced omicron and within six weeks we were in the worst part of the pandemic we ever experienced.

We didnt see it coming until it hit us right in the face, he said, referring to the largest though not deadliest wave of the pandemic yet.

The highly contagious and immune-evasive omicron subvariant BA.5 is still the dominant strain of the virus, making up about 94% of the sequenced coronavirus cases in the Northern California region, trailed by the newer BA.4.6. There are currently no other variants raising red flags, the experts said.

I would say the caseload is still decently high, said Karan. All the metrics are trending downward, but where that settles is unclear.

Other factors could slow the downward trends or even cause a new upswing in the fall, however.

Schools across the state are reopening without virus mitigation measures that were in place last year, in alignment with updated guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that no longer calls for masking inside classrooms or surveillance testing for students and staff.

The number of people getting reinfected with the virus also could create a long tail of infections before the surge fully subsides, especially as shorter days and cooler months arrive and people spend more time indoors.

The things we know contribute to these surges are still in play, Swartzberg said, adding that human behavior could play a role in what comes next. Whats different this year is people have decided the pandemic is over or of negligible import and are acting accordingly.

Dr. Bob Wachter, UCSF chair of medicine, said in a lengthy Twitter thread over the weekend that he still plans to abstain from indoor dining and don a mask in crowded rooms until daily case rates fall below 5 for every 100,000 people in the region. But that puts him in the minority, with a growing number of Americans saying they have returned to living their normal pre-pandemic lives, according to a national survey.

Were facing other forces, Karan said. Were facing politicians who want to move on. Were facing fatigue, where people dont care about getting infected anymore. I see a lot of people trying to downplay the virus because they dont want to change behaviors or see policies they consider intrusive, such as mask mandates.

That could be a dangerous attitude, experts say.

If the general public assumes the pandemic is over, already sluggish vaccine uptake could mean fewer people line up for the new bivalent COVID boosters that target both earlier strains of the virus and later variants in the omicron family.

Only two-thirds of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated, and less than half of those have received their first booster dose, according to the latest figures from the CDC.

And despite the widespread availability of new drugs and treatments that cut down the number of virus-related hospitalizations and deaths, there is increasing concern now about the potential impact of long COVID, which the government has just started researching. Between 2 million and 4 million people are out of work due to the symptoms of the persistent condition, according to a recent report from the nonpartisan Brookings Institution.

It's a mixed bag right now, Swartzberg said. The big question mark is what this virus is going to decide to do. The other question is, what are people going to decide to do?

Aidin Vaziri is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: avaziri@sfchronicle.com

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Bay Area's summer COVID surge is nearly over. What happens next? - San Francisco Chronicle

Human Behavior

Nobel Prize-winning economist says he doesn’t see anything that resembles a recession in the U.S. – CNBC

Thaler, the 2017 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, is best known for his work in behavioral economics.

Scott Olson | Getty Images

Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler says the U.S. may have recorded two successive quarters of economic contraction, but it's "just funny" to describe it as being a recession.

"I don't see anything that resembles a recession. We have record low unemployment, record high vacancies. That looks like a strong economy," Thaler told CNBC's Julianna Tatelbaum on Wednesday.

"The economy is growing, it's just growing slightly less fast than prices. And that means real GDP fell a little bit, but I think it's just funny to call that a recession," he said. "It's not like any recession we've seen in my rather long lifetime."

U.S. gross domestic product, or GDP, fell by 0.9% year-on-year in the second quarter, following a 1.6% decline in the first quarter. Two consecutive falls in GDP growth meet the traditional definition of a recession. Officially, the National Bureau of Economic Research declares recessions and expansions, and likely won't make a judgment on the period in question for months.

Thaler, the 2017 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, is best known for his work in behavioral economics and for explaining the so-called "hot hand" fallacy alongside singer Selena Gomez in the 2015 film "The Big Short."

His work looks at how people make decisions that are seemingly irrational according to economic theory, and his co-written book, "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness," describes how this can be used to create better public policy solutions and "nudge" human behavior.

Asked about U.S. inflation, which rose 8.5% year-on-year in July, Thaler said, "There was this long debate about whether inflation was transitory or not, and team permanent seems to be winning, though I think they may be declaring victory a little too quickly."

Inflation is the rate of change in prices as opposed to high prices, he noted.

"At least some of the high prices we're observing are caused directly either by the war in Ukraine or by supply chain problems from China. And we hope that both of those factors are temporary," he said.

"Maybe a year from now there will still be fighting in Ukraine and there will still be Covid in China, but we hope that that's not the case, and if one or both of those problems is mitigated then I could see some prices going down."

Thaler also addressed U.S. wages, which have stagnated against productivity since the 1970s but recorded sharp rises in the two most recent quarters amid a tight labor market, reportedly spooking the Federal Reserve over the potential for a wage-price spiral.

"If I was the head of a union, I would certainly be asking for a big raise next year to compensate my workers for the higher prices they're facing," Thaler said.

"I would say if that happens once, personally I would applaud that, because people who are getting wages, what we're calling wages, are the people who have been lagging behind the 1% in terms of how much money they're making," he continued.

"Certainly everywhere I go you see signs of a shortage of labor, and supply and demand says wages should go up. I can't go into a restaurant in the U.S. that doesn't have a 'help wanted' sign in the door. So wages are going to go up, and I think that's good."

CNBC's Jeff Cox contributed to this article.

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Nobel Prize-winning economist says he doesn't see anything that resembles a recession in the U.S. - CNBC

Human Behavior

If you want to create a fearless organization, here’s how – WRAL TechWire

Editors Note: Grace Ueng is CEO of Savvy Growth, a leadership coaching and management consultancy founded in 2003. Her great passion to help leaders and the companies they run achieve their fullest potential combined with her empathy and ability to help executives figure out their why is what clients value most. Grace writes a regular column for WRAL TechWire to help readers become happier and therefore, better leaders.

You always give people the benefit of the doubt!

A coaching client recently shared issues he was having with one of his direct reports. When I asked him a question to perhaps see the situation from that persons perspective, he immediately said, You always give people the benefit of the doubt. I left that session not sure about his comment, other than he didnt think that was necessarily a good thing. It sounded like he thought I was too easy on his people.

As I shared in Back in the Classroom at Harvard Business School, I was energized by having a front row seat in the classroom of Professor Amy Edmonson, guru on human behavior and author of The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth.

Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmonson (Photo credit: Harvard)

How to create a fearless organization?

Professor Edmonsons powerful research proves that teams that have psychological safety are those that have the best outcomes. Her lecture and presentation of materials impressed me so much that I wanted to learn more, so I pored myself into her book.

I synthesize her work into my top three findings in the hopes that you will examine just how fearless your organization is today and how you can make it even more so tomorrow.

The relationship between Trust and Psychological SafetyThe importance of both

When you give someone the benefit of the doubt, they then trust you. When you are in a psychologically safe environment, others give you the benefit of the doubt.

That brought me back to my clients comment that he thought I always give people the benefit of the doubt. I realized that what I originally took as a criticism is actually a good thing. I should have realized that I am the opposite of being too easy. I almost always hold people to very high standards.

Consulting clients have said that I have an almost magical ability to get people to open up and share in my discovery process, when I speak to their customers and lost deals. I bring out a-has on why they win or lose to competitors that they had previously had no knowledge. Rather than possessing magical abilties, I simply create a space that is safe for them to open up and share these insights.

Releasing the brakes

Psychological safety is not a perk or a nice to have. It is an essential in creating the passionate employee engagement that leads to the desire to build and innovate, which in turn is essential to be a leader in todays marketplace. While this safety is not the gas that fills the tank, it releases the brakes to help innovation to take hold and then accelerate.

Learning Environment & DEI

Supporting an organization that promotes learning is critical to the scenario of having employees just showing up and doing their jobs. Supporting this requires an environment of listening. Professional development as part of a persons lifelong learning, is often a key attribute of workplace satisfaction.

Psychological safety is essential for any DEI strategy, particularly one that values diversity of thought. A workplace that is truly characterized by inclusion and belonging is by definition a psychologically safe workplace.

Safety: Psychological & Physical

Whether it be innovation, quality, or patient safety, issues and opportunities are best uncovered and brainstormed when team members feel safe to speak their mind without fear of being stigmatized or having their career mobility threatened. In healthcare settings, more errors are reported and therefore safety protected in psychologically safe environments. The more highly complex and interdependent an organization, the more important this is.

Edmonson shared how cancer research teams where psychological safety did not exist, employed workarounds versus figuring out the root cause so that the issue doesnt happen in the first place. Edmonson states that nowhere is employee engagement more important than with frontline healthcare workers where differences in speaking up or not can lead to life or death.

One of the CEOs we work with often tells her frontline and managers to use their voice. And with years of repetition and making sure she is accessible, she has heard from many. Unfortunately, in most companies, this is rare. When they hear encouragement to use their voice, many employees have no idea how. And it is often most difficult not with someone many levels ahead of you, but with your own manager.

The asymmetry of voice and silenceEdmonson discusses at great length how it is much easier not to use your voice. Using your voice is effortful and risky now, with benefits that are realized in the far away future if at all. Silence offers self-protection benefits. Holding back bad news and great ideas, that one is not yet confident is great, is easier and safer. Teams will only use their voice if an environment of psychological safety truly exists. Not speaking up is often simpler than sorry.

Most people go through an automatic calculus in their decision of should I speak up? No one was ever fired for silence. The instinct to play it safe is powerful. We can be completely confident we will be safe if we remain silent. Another one of the implicit theories of voice is related to fear of insulting someone higher in the organization. By suggesting change, you might be calling the bosss baby ugly and they could get defensive. In the end, in being silent, you are depriving customers of many good ideas and your company the opportunity to create impactful change.

How does your team rate? 7 statements to ask each member of your team to rate their level of agreement/disagreement.

If you create a mistake on this team, it is often held against you.

Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.

People on this team sometimes reject others for being different.

It is safe to take a risk on this team.

It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help.

No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.

Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are well utilized.

Powerful & vulnerable phrases

You may need to take interpersonal risk to lower your teams interpersonal risk. When a boss appears to know everything, no one wants to take situational risk. Adopting a humble mindset is realism that gets the most out of your team. Confidence and humility are not opposites. Confidence when warranted is preferable to false modesty. Humility is not false modesty, rather it is the recognition that you dont have all the answers or have a crystal ball. When leaders express situational humility, teams adopt more learning behavior.

Admit your errors and shortcomings

When Anne Mulcahy was named CEO of Xerox, the company was facing going out of business. She quickly became known as the master of I dont know and led Xerox out of bankruptcy and orchestrated a remarkable turnaround.

Express interest and availability.

What can I do to help?

What are you up against?

What are your concerns?

In the moment, be vulnerable, interested, and available. Your attempts may be ignored or rebuffed. But it is a risk worth taking.

You must also be in the room.

American billionaire investor, Ray Dalio, founder of the worlds largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, is known for his gospel of radical transparency.

He began a unique company culture that operated under a rule that you could not talk about others unless they were also in the room, so they could learn from what is being said. Those that talked about colleagues behind their back were referred to as slimy weasels!

Bridgewater even has a transparency library where videos of every executive meeting are kept so that anyone in the company can see how issues and policies are discussed.

Say thanks.

The courage of speaking up and taking the risk must be followed with a word of thanks rather than immediately disagreeing. Give that feedback only after pausing and saying thanks.

Try that this week; you may be pleasantly surprised with the results.

About Grace Ueng

Grace is CEO of Savvy Growth, a leadership coaching and management consultancy founded in 2003. Her great passion to help leaders and the companies they run achieve their fullest potential combined with her empathy and ability to help leaders figure out their why are what clients value most.

Graces core offerings are one on one coaching for CEOs and their leadership teams, facilitating workshops on Personal Branding and Speaking Success and conducting strategic reviews for companies at a critical juncture. A TED speaker, she is hired to give motivational keynotes and lead Happiness Works programs for companies and campuses.

A marketing strategist, Grace held leadership roles at five high growth technology ventures that successfully exited through acquisition or IPO. She started her career at Bain & Company and then worked in brand management at Clorox and General Mills. She is a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School and holds a positive coaching certification from the Whole Being Institute.

Grace and her partner, Rich Chleboski, a cleantech veteran, develop and implement strategies to support the growth of impact focused companies and then coach their leaders in carrying out their strategic plans. Their expertise spans all phases of the business from evaluation through growth and liquidity.

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If you want to create a fearless organization, here's how - WRAL TechWire