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Pence Capital Management Achieves More Than $1 Billion In UIT Assets Across The Firm’s Fast-Growing Portfolio Strategies – PRNewswire

September 10, 2020 medical

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif., Sept. 10, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Pence Capital Management ("the firm" or "PCM"), a leading investment adviser firm, announced today that it has surpassed $1 billion in assets across five fast-growing Unit Investment Trust (UIT) strategies for which the firm serves as Portfolio Consultant. This includes the Ubiquitous Strategy Portfolio, which Nasdaq ranked No.1 in Capital Appreciation for Domestic Equity UITs by five-year composite performance as of June 30, 2020.

Dryden Pence, Founder of Pence Capital Management, said, "We are thrilled by the success of our unit investment trust offerings, including one that is in the top of its class compared to industry peers. That so many investors have sought to meet their needs and objectives using these strategies is a validation of all the hard work our team has put in to coming up with a unique approach that seeks to spot future value. Because UITs typically issue redeemable securities, conduct a one-time public offering of a fixed number of units and are created with a termination date until which time they hold a relatively stable portfolio, they are an ideal vehicle to ride companies poised to benefit from specific investment themes."

The firm's Unit Investment Trusts that collectively have exceeded $1 billion in assets are the Ubiquitous Strategy Portfolio UIT, the Building America Strategy Portfolio UIT, the Human Behavior Strategy Portfolio UIT, the Recovery Strategy Portfolio UIT and the Transformers Strategy Portfolio UIT. Advisors Asset Management (AAM), an SEC registered investment advisor based in Monument, Colorado, is the distribution sponsor of these UITs.

Nasdaq Information Services publishes a monthly UIT Scorecard in partnership with Investment Goal Strategy that breaks down top performers by asset classification, performance timeframe, distribution sponsor, strategy cumulative return and strategy compound annual growth rate (CAGR). Pence Capital Management's Ubiquitous Strategy Portfolio UIT outpaced all others in the Domestic Equity category with a strategy cumulative return of 180.20% and a strategy CAGR of 22.88% for the five-year period beginning July 2015.

Dryden Pence continued, "Our success has been driven by a unique understanding of consumer behavior, which allows us to identify big knowable themes and critical supply chain choke points. This approach has only become more vital in the current macroeconomic environment, where dire challenges to public health are reshaping commerce trends and consumer attitudes."

About Pence Capital ManagementFounded in 2015 and based in Newport Beach, CA, Pence Capital Management (PCM) is a leading investment adviser firm that delivers unique, proprietary strategies and portfolio consultant services involving Unit Investment Trusts (UITs). Our disciplined methodology understands the role of psychology and competitive strategy in maximizing investment opportunities. As of June 30, 2020, Pence Capital Management advised or consulted on sevenUITs with total combined assets of approximately $1.3 billion. These UITs are distributed through Advisors Asset Management and First Trust Portfolios. For more information, please visit https://pencecapital.com/

Our services are limited to the structure or design of each UIT and do not include a periodic review of performance. Clients are responsible for the direct use of the UITs and the management of underlying client assets.

Past performance is not indicative of future results. Different types of investments involve varying degrees of risk, and there can be no assurance that the future performance of any specific investment, investment strategy, or product (including the investments and/or investment strategies made reference to directly or indirectly in this message) will be profitable, equal any corresponding indicated historical performance level(s), be suitable for your portfolio or individual situation, or prove successful. You should not assume that any discussion or information contained in this message serves as the receipt of, or as a substitute for, personalized investment advice.

Media Contacts:Michael DuganorMitch ManningHaven Tower Group LLC424 317 4852 or 424 317 4858[emailprotected]or[emailprotected]

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Pence Capital Management Achieves More Than $1 Billion In UIT Assets Across The Firm's Fast-Growing Portfolio Strategies - PRNewswire

Human Behavior

SIUE Hiring New Faculty Members to Increase Diversity in Educators – Diverse: Issues in Higher Education

September 10, 2020 medical

September 9, 2020 | :

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) is hiring four new faculty members at the urging of Dr. Robin Hughes, dean of the SIUE school of education, health and human behavior, KMOV4 reported.

Dr. Robin Hughes

The cluster hire was requested by Hughes, who stressed the need for hiring more faculty of color, according to KMOV4.

We know that it not only translates in the classrooms but it also translates to sending out good folks into the workforce that are prepared for globalization, Hughes said.

According to KMOV4, the hires were achieved through the universitys strategic hiring funds made available through the office of the provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs and the office of institutional diversity and inclusion.

Human Behavior

The Economics of Violence by Giant Oak Founder and Georgetown University Professor Gary M. Shiffman, Recognized for Contributing to the Professional…

September 10, 2020 medical

ARLINGTON, Va., Sept.10, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --Giant Oak is delighted to announce that our founder and CEO Gary M. Shiffman's new book, The Economics of Violence: How Behavioral Science Can Transform Our View of Crime, Insurgency, and Terrorism, has been selected as a finalist for "Best New Nonfiction Book" and as a winner by the American Book Fest's 2020 International Book Awards (IBA) in the category "History: Military." The creator of the Machine Learning platform GOST, Shiffman leverages his deep study in human behavior and organized violence and coercion to offer tools to promote peace and liberty.

The American Book Fest's Best Book Awards, now in its 17th year, represent one of the largest and most competitive mainstream book awards in the United States. Jeffrey Keen, president and CEO of American Book Fest, said, "This year's contest yielded over 2,000 entries from authors and publishers around the world, which were then narrowed down to the final results."

"It is an honor to have The Economics of Violence recognized by the International Book Awards," said Shiffman. "I wrote this book to empower those engaged in keeping us safe and free, and to inform the public on new approaches to enhancing public safety and security. I use case studies to make arguments articulating a new analysis of violence based on economics and using the terminology of markets."

Shiffman is a U.S. Navy Gulf War veteran, a former chief of staff for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and a former U.S. Senate National Security Advisor. He teaches at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Screeners at financial institutions and government agencies use GOST to detect threats to public safety and security, including human and drug trafficking, money laundering, and terrorism.

To learn more about The Economics of Violence, click here.

About Giant OakAt Giant Oak, we build trusted tools at the frontiers of behavioral science and artificial intelligence that enable you to make both rapid and informed decisions in an increasingly dynamic security environment. Giant Oak Search Technology (GOST) makes screening easy. GOST is an open-source search and triage tool that builds a custom internet domain and organizes information to detect suspicious behavior. GOST re-indexes the open and deep webs to return publicly available electronic information (PAEI) in prioritized results relevant to the user's requirements. By deploying machine-learning algorithms to refine search results and generate analytic scores, entities are sorted by relevance and threat level. For more information, visit http://www.giantoak.com.

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Human Behavior

Amid Protests And Change, Iowa Police Training On Implicit Bias Varies – Iowa Public Radio

September 10, 2020 medical

In 2015, the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy lacked training on implicit bias.

As a cadet there then, Natasha Greene sought discussions on her own about some of the mistaken beliefs officers might hold of others, such as expecting a black person to be dangerous or more crime prone from stereotypes, ideas that could come from television or passed from family and friends.

Now an Iowa State Police Department officer, Greene said these conversations were uncomfortable, as awkward as telling someone the zipper on their pants is down but you still do it.

If Im talking to somebody I care about and their flys down, of course Im going to tell them their flys down because it would be more harmful for me to just let them carry on without knowing, Greene said.

Today those discussions are more serious and more uncomfortable as the May 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police brought the Black Lives Matter movement and calls for defunding police. Implicit bias and training officers became part of the national conversation.

In Iowa, protests and demonstrations, at times destructive, ensued after Floyds death. In June, lawmakers and Gov. Kim Reynolds responded with a law banning the use of chokeholds and requiring yearly implicit bias training for in-service officers.

The protests and cases continued. In Indianola last week, Simpson College classes were canceled for a daylong and peaceful protest in which Black students demanded action from school leaders. In Rochester, N.Y., last week video of police apprehending David Prude was released. Prude later died after that March incident. In Wisconsin, protests persist after the police Aug. 23 shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake, who is now paralyzed.

IowaWatch

The ILEA, which trains hundreds of the states officers, added the implicit bias training last fall to its future classes, Director Judy Bradshaw said. This action is several years behind other Iowa police training programs and other states, a monthslong IowaWatch review found.

Before attending the academy, Greene, whose family includes minorities, confronted her unknown racial biases while working for an organization for victims of sexual assault and abuse.

I think its important for people to also understand that while their intentions may be to treat everyone equally, or that they truly believe that theyre able to look impartially on every situation, psychology just says that thats not the case, Greene said.

Human condition

Implicit bias is a human condition, said Kevin Pokorny, who owns a Des Moines consulting company and has taught businesses and police departments on the topic. It is the idea that people all have biases, often unbeknownst to them, that could affect decisions, behaviors and actions.

People hold unknown biases about religions, race, gender and age groups, said Amanda Greider, Cedar Rapids Police Department public safety program manager. Greider, who is white, teaches implicit bias at their police academy.

The topic is often part of the conversation after police killings of Black people such as Floyd because it is believed these biases can affect quick-second decisions officers make on a daily basis.

The brain categorizes things very quickly in our subconscious, Pokorny said, to the extent that when we get involved in situations where we have to make decisions about people or places or things, our brain just makes unconscious associations, and evaluations about it and we act on it.

Implicit bias training around the state

The Iowa Law Enforcement Academy currently includes several courses on race relations, cultural competency and de-escalation but never a class focused on the officers implicit biases.

The 625-hour program averages between 76 to 96 trainees a session, or 228 to 288 trainees a year.

The Cedar Rapids Regional Police Academy added implicit bias training four years ago.

Greider said the push to add the program came from their police chief, Wayne Jerman, after he said other programs around the country incorporate it. Even with the pandemic, the annual two-hour training for their officers will take place virtually.

It has to be top of mind to be successful, Greider said.

The Des Moines Police Academy and the Iowa Department of Public Safety offer courses that include implicit bias like the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy, but do not have a specific implicit bias course.

Bradshaw, who formerly served as Des Moines police chief, said now is the time for those in law enforcement to sit back and listen.

Its truly about respect, and thats showing respect on both sides, Bradshaw said. Part of the problem is that weve created these divides, and the we/they. So really the discussion is: how do we come together and strengthen the relationship?

How do we get that trust back and build on it?

Training around the state

The ILEA council aoversees regional police academies in Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, the Iowa Department of Public Safety, and the Hawkeye Community Technical College and Western Iowa Technical Community College police programs though their coverage of cultural competency and implicit bias looks different at each agency.

The new hires at the Cedar Rapids Regional Police Academy have taken 3.5 hours of implicit bias training since 2016. The program also includes four hours of instruction on cultural competency, an hour on race relations, two hours on hate crimes and an hour on civil rights.

Cedar Rapids officers also take two hours of implicit bias training annually.

Other Iowa academies include implicit bias training but incorporate it into their cultural competency courses.

The Iowa Department of Public Safety has a four-hour de-escalation course, implemented in 1993 as verbal judo. The four-hour cultural responsive law enforcement course, which included implicit bias, was added in the early 2000s.

In an email, DPS Lt. David Halverson wrote 10 officers were certified in their fair and impartial policing curriculum that focuses on the science of implicit bias. Iowa DPS plans to expand this to the rest of their officers this year.

The Des Moines Police Academy includes five hours of a cultural awareness course, which was created in 2017. Sgt. Paul Parizek wrote in an email implicit bias training is included in this course and their 44 hours of critical incident training. In-service officers have taken two hours of implicit bias training annually since 2017.

The practices also vary from state to state.

The University of Illinois Police Institute offers an optional nine-hour course on police in a multiracial society, which includes implicit bias training. Missouri requires an hour of racial profiling training annually.

Bradshaw said the academy needs to do more research to determine how many hours of implicit bias will be incorporated into their program.

Changes in Iowa bittersweet

The death of Floyd sparked calls to action across the country.

In Iowa, the governor, Reynolds, signed a bipartisan police reform bill June 12 after it passed unanimously in the Iowa House and Senate. Iowa is one of 11 states to enact legislation and Iowa and New York were the first to do so, according to data tracked by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The bill, on top of creating more police accountability and putting restrictions on chokeholds, required the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy to create and disseminate yearly training on bias prevention and de-escalation. (Reynolds also signed an executive order to restore felon voting rights.)

Legislators like Rep. Ras Smith, D-Waterloo, said the action was a first step, but more needs to be done.

It was bittersweet because I understood what it took to get here but I also understand that this was an easy first step, Smith said. So now its maybe a little bit of frustration with people who are willing to stand up and say that they were supportive of equity, equality, and justice in some scenarios. I want to see where they stand on this when its not so posh to do it, when its not so convenient.

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Smith and other Democratic representatives wrote House File 2646, which would have required each state and local law enforcement agency to collect data on each traffic, bicycle or pedestrian stop, to be reported July 1 each year.

The agencies would report the race and ethnicity of the person stopped by an officer, paired with what the reason for the stop, whether force was used and if a search was conducted.

This language did not progress this legislative session, even though police reform across the country is data-driven. Smith said Reynolds rejected the data study and worked with the Senate to draft the training portion of the bill.

Reynolds office did not respond to a request to comment asking about why the data study was rejected.

Smith said the data could have created more specific training for Iowa officers.

The bill and implicit bias training are a start, but individuals get to reflect also, said Sharon Zanders-Ackiss, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement special projects organizer. Iowa CCI is a community activist group based in Des Moines. The group worked with the Iowa-Nebraska NAACP and ACLU of Iowa to get a racial profiling ordinance passed through the Des Moines City Council in June.

You can have all the implicit bias training in the world, but if youre not changing as an individual and how you can see people that dont look like yourself, well, training may not necessarily help you, Zanders-Ackiss said. If it did, we wouldnt keep having the same problems that were having.

Zanders-Ackiss said she wants to see more of a focus on de-escalation, instruction on how to resolve a situation without physical force.

Mixed results?

There isnt clear evidence implicit bias training works.

A 2017 meta-analysis in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found implicit bias training could have an impact on implicit measures but little evidence shows impact on explicit behavior. Studies on implicit bias training showed that white people could learn the correct answers for a bias quiz but did not retain the information, according to the Harvard Review.

Smith, the state lawmaker, said one of the priorities when drafting police reform legislation was holding officers accountable. The Iowa Attorney General can now investigate deaths caused by law enforcement and block the hiring officers with prior felonies.

Bradshaw agreed the training piece needs to be paired with accountability.

The accountability part is purely cultural with law enforcement entities and agencies, Bradshaw said. We can train you, and you are going to go back to your own culture. You are going to go back to the personality of your police department and you are going to go back to doing things your way if the strategies and the procedures remain the same.

How bias training came to ILEA

The Iowa Law Enforcement Academy, based in Johnston, is overseen by a council, comprised of current and former police chiefs, officers and private citizens, that assists, advises and approves the curriculum. The council has one Latino member and the rest are white. Seven members are male and three are female.

After the fall curriculum review, the academys council recommended a recognizing bias course be incorporated into the basic academy.

The academy educates officers from departments across the state. The vast majority of sheriffs deputies around the state train there, Linn County Sheriff Brian Gardner, president of the ILEA council, wrote in an email to IowaWatch. Linn County has the second-largest sheriffs office in Iowa.

IowaWatch

The academys decision to include bias training in the fall basic academy was independent of the recent protests, though President Obamas Task Force on 21st Century Policing recommended the training following the Ferguson unrest in 2014. The 2014 mass demonstrations came after an officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed Michael Brown.

The future officers will take five hours of cultural competency and two hours of race relations, according to the academys training schedule. The training also includes four hours of use of force, eight hours of verbal defense a term for deescalation and an hour of ethics and professionalism.

In the last week, trainees take a class called blue courage, which helps officers identify why they joined the force, what their role means and their biases.

Iowa Code requires 30 hours of training be devoted to human behavior courses, which include studying community relations, ethics and ethnic and minority groups.

Other ways the training is taught

Outside training hours required, practices tend to differ as well.

These are grownups, these are adult learners that we are teaching at the police academy. Its not like we are teaching sixth-graders where there is some room for maneuvering and shaping and conditioning of peoples minds, Bradshaw said. For folks to think that trainings the answer to this, were just a piece of this.

Officer Natasha Greene (left) poses with students and a former Iowa State officer at the 2019 Destination Iowa State, a welcome week for incoming students. As an engagement and inclusion officer, Greenes job includes creating relationships with marginalized groups around campus and educating fellow officers on diversity and inclusion. (Photo courtesy of Natasha Green)

The Des Moines Police Department focused on community policing in the mid-90s, Ackiss-Zanders said, something she hopes they return to. During that time, Ackiss-Zanders said she saw more officers in Black-majority neighborhoods, getting out of their patrol cars and interacting with the people.

Right now the police talk about a murder happens here. They cant get any information from the community, Ackiss-Zanders said. Well, how about this. If you continue building relationships with people in the community, Im sure you probably get a bunch of information.

This is the concept at Iowa State where Greene is an engagement and inclusion officer. The EIO officers, on top of typical police responsibilities, create relationships with minority groups on campus and educate fellow officers on cultural competency.

The EIO model works partially because officers learn lessons of bias from their fellow officers, Greene said. The Cedar Rapids Police Academys implicit bias class is taught by former officer Grieder. She said a lot of the training has to do with trust since officers are sharing their biases.

My background (as an officer) is really crucial, otherwise they just make this assumption that this is a person who doesnt get our job, Greene said, adding a fellow officer could also be dismissed if there is a bias against them. I think there are benefits to both, which is why we do utilize both internal and external sources.

Danielle Gehr, an Iowa State University graduate, fulfilled a summer 2020 reporting internship for IowaWatch.

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Amid Protests And Change, Iowa Police Training On Implicit Bias Varies - Iowa Public Radio

Human Behavior

Combatting COVID-19 misinformation with machine learning (VB Live) – VentureBeat

September 10, 2020 medical

Presented by AWS Machine Learning

As machine learning has evolved, so have best practices, especially in the wake of COVID-19. Join this VB Live event to learn from experts about how machine learning solutions are helping companies respond in these uncertain times and the lessons learned along the way.

Misinformation around COVID-19 is driving human behavior across the world. Here in the information age, sensationalized clickbait headlines are crowding out actual fact-based content, and, as a result misinformation spreads virally. Conversations within small communities become the epicenter of false information, and that misinformation spreads as people talk, both online and off. As the number of misinformed people grow, this infodemic grows.

The spread of misinformation around COVID-19 is especially problematic, because it could overshadow the key messaging around safety measures from public health and government officials.

In an effort to counter misinformed narratives in central and west Africa, Novetta Mission Analytics (NMA) is working with Africa CDC (Center for Disease Control) to discover and identify narratives and behavior patterns around the disease, says David Cyprian, product owner at Novetta. And machine learning is key.

They supply data that measures the acceptability, impact, and effectiveness of public health and social measures. In turn, the Africa CDC analysis of the data enables them to generate tailored guidelines for each country.

With all these different narratives out there, we can use machine learning to quantify which ones are really affecting the largest population, Cyprian explains. We uncover how quickly these things are spreading, how many people are talking about the issues, and whether anyone is actually criticizing the misinformation itself.

NMA uncovered trending phrases that indicate worry around the disease, mistrust about official messaging, and criticisms of local measures to combat the disease. They found that herbal remedies are becoming popular, as is the idea of herd immunity.

We know all of these different narratives are changing behavior, Cyprian says. Theyre causing people to make decisions that make it more difficult for the COVID-19 response community to be effective and implement countermeasures that are going to mitigate the effects of the virus.

To identify these narrative threads, Novetta ingests publicly-available social media at scale and pairs it with a collection of domestic and international news media. They process and analyze that raw social and traditional media content in their ML platform built on AWS to identify where people are talking about these things, and where events are happening that drive the conversations. They also use natural language processing for directed sentiment analysis to discover whether narratives are being driven by mistrust of a local government entity, the west, or international organizations, as well as identifying influencers that are engendering a lot of positive sentiment among users and building trust.

Pieces of content are tagged as positive or negative to local and global pandemic measures and public entities, creating small human-labeled data sets about specific micronarratives for specific populations that might be trading in misinformation.

By fusing rapid ingestion with a human labeling process of just a few hundred artifacts, theyre able to kick off machine learning and apply it to the scale of social media. This allows them to have more than one learning model that is used for all the problem sets.

We dont have a one-size-fits-all approach, says Cyprian. Were always tuning and researching accuracy for specific narratives, and then were able to provide large, near-real-time insights into how these narratives are propagating or spreading in the field.

Built on AWS, their machine learning architecture allows their development team to focus on what they do well, which is develop new applications and new widgets to be able to analyze this data.

They dont need to worry about any server management, or scaling, since thats taken care of for them with Amazon EC2 and S3. Their microservices architecture uses some additional features that Amazon offers, particularly Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), to orchestrate their services, and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), to store images and run vulnerability testing before they deploy.

Novettas approach is cross-disciplinary, bringing in domain experts from the health field, media analysts, machine learning research engineers, and software developers. They work in small teams to solve problems together.

In my experience, thats been the best way for machine learning to make a practical difference, he says. I would just urge folks who are facing these similar difficult problems to enable their people to do what people do well, and then have the machine learning engineers help to harden, verify, and scale those efforts so you can bring countermeasures to bear quickly.

To learn more about the impact machine learning solutions can deliver and lessons learned along the way, dont miss this round table with leaders from Kabbage and Novetta, as well as Michelle K. Lee, VP of the Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab.

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Human Behavior

4 Ways Animals Improve Your Mental Health and Well-being – One Green Planet

September 10, 2020 medical

With a rampant global pandemic, several natural disasters, economic recessions, and many other crises, feelings of anxiety, depression, and loneliness have increased significantly.

In recent months, there has been a more-than-threefold increase in the percentage of American adults who reported symptoms of psychological distress according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University.

While research on human-animal interactions is still a relatively new field, various studies have shown positive health effects of having pets and interacting with animals.

Heres how animals can help improve your well-being:

Living with an animal can lead to a release in calming endorphins such asoxytocin which can stimulate social bonding, relaxation, and trust.

This can happen when spending time with animals or even just through eye contact. Research on mutual gazing between humans and their dogs has shown to increase oxytocin levels inboth species.

Animals can serve as a constant presence, comforting and supporting humans during times of heightened anxiety, depression, or loneliness. Researchers found that people were less stressed when conducting difficult tasks when their pet was present rather than when a friend or spouse was there.

A2016 study also found that pets provide a sense of security and routine that provided emotional and social support to people with long-term mental health conditions. And a 2019 study on college students at Washington State University showed that just 10 minutes of interacting with animals can produce a significant reduction in cortisol, a major stress hormone.

Due to their mental health benefits, therapy dogs are often used to help veterans cope with post-traumatic stress disorder as well as help calm autistic children.

Having a dog leads to increased physical activity which has been shown to enhance your mood, alleviate depression symptoms, and help self-esteem. One study found that dog owners who regularly walked their dogs were more physically active and less likely to be obese than non-pet owners.

Research published in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine also showed that walking dogs promote engagement in and adherence to regular physical activity. Increased physical fitness improves factors linked to heart health, sympathetic nervous system functioning, blood pressure and blood sugar levels, and cholesterol levels.

Having a pet is believed tolower blood pressure and cholesterol, according to the CDC. This may be linked to the increased physical activity from having a pet but could also be connected to the mental health benefits of pet ownership.

A2009 study followed 4435 participants over a 13-year period found a significantly lower risk of heart-attack deaths for the cat owners. Compared with cat owners, people who never had a cat were 40% more likely to die of a heart and 30% more likely to die of any cardiovascular disease, including stroke, heart failure, and chronic heart disease.

Another study, which looked at 240 married couples, corroborated these benefits of having a pet, finding lower heart rates, and decreased blood pressure among those with pets.

Epidemiological studies have shown that children who grow up in households with pets, especially dogs, have a lower risk for developing autoimmune illnesses like asthma or allergies.

Different microorganisms in the human gastrointestinal tract form what is known as the microbiome, which has a major influence on health and disease. Having pets can increase the richness and diversity of the microbiome which can decrease a childs likelihood of developing allergies (related to their home) by 33%.

Pets often carry a diversity of microbes from the outside world into our homes, teaching our bodies from an early age how to respond to certain bacteria. Dog ownership has been shown to raise the levels of 56 different classes of bacterial species in the indoor environment, while cats boosted 24 categories of bacteria.

This positive outcome not only comes from having domesticated pets but also any interaction with animals. A 2016 study in The New England Journal of Medicine found that Amish children in Indiana who grew up close to barnyard animals had far lower rates of asthma than Hutterite children, who were raised apart from animals on large mechanized farms in North Dakota.

The benefits that animals can have on humans are not limited to in-person connections. A 2015 studyin Computers in Human Behavior found that people who watch cat videos online report less negative emotions (less anxiety, annoyance, and sadness) and more positive feelings (more hope, happiness, and contentment).

Although pet ownership is not a prescription for better health, the research indicates several benefits of living and interacting with animals.

If youre thinking about getting a pet thats amazing. Remember: adopt dont shop! Breeding animals is an inhumane business and there already so many amazing shelter dogs that need homes!

For more Animal, Earth, Life, Vegan Food, Health, and Recipe content published daily, subscribe to the One Green Planet Newsletter! Lastly, being publicly-funded gives us a greater chance to continue providing you with high-quality content. Please consider supporting us by donating!

Human Behavior

Modeling the impact of testing, tracing, and quarantine – ScienceBlog.com

September 10, 2020 medical

Testing, contact tracing, and quarantining infected people are all tools in the effort to mitigate the spread of Covid-19. So are mask-wearing and social distancing. But what impact does each have? A study co-authored by MIT researchers finds that robust testing, contact tracing, and quarantining by household can keep cases within the capacity of the health-care system preventing a second wave while allowing for the reopening of some economic activities.

Thepaper, published Aug. 5 inNature Human Behaviour, details a novel model that integrates anonymized, real-time mobility data with census and demographic data to map Covid-19 transmission in the Boston, Massachusetts area. The authors include Esteban Moro, a visiting research scientist in the MIT Media Lab and MIT Connection Science, and Alex Sandy Pentland, director of MIT Connection Science and a professor in the Media Lab and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS).

This research sheds new light on possible pitfalls and solutions as cities look to lift restrictions that have been in place throughout the summer in many locations. Using data from approximately 85,000 people in the greater Boston area, combined with known information about Covid-19 transmission rates, duration of stages, and other data points, the authors model forecasts the number of new cases and hospitalizations under various scenarios of lifted restrictions.

If we want to re-scale our lives, economy, and cities, we need to understand better how the infection is spreading across people and communities, says Moro. Shutting down the whole economy and our cities because of a second wave might not be needed if we include accurate information about how people are behaving, moving, shopping, et cetera in our society.

In establishing a baseline, the study found that unmitigated lifting of restrictions would likely lead to a second wave that would quickly overwhelm Bostons health-care facilities, with peak of daily incidence of 25.2 newly infected individuals per 1,000 people, leading to a need for about 12 times the available intensive-care unit (ICU) beds.

A second scenario, referred to as LIFT, assumed an additional eight weeks of stay-at-home order, followed by another four of partial reopening, including work and community spaces, but not full reopening of restaurants and other spaces with mass social gatherings. After the total 12-week period, there would be a full lifting of all restrictions. In the LIFT scenario, the modeled impact was still well beyond the capacity of health-care facilities, with a need for over nine times the ICU beds available at the peak of the likely second wave.

It might be that only a safe, effective, and widely distributed vaccine will allow the world to return to life as usual. However, the authors propose a third scenario called LET, short for Lift and Enhanced Tracing that keeps cases and hospitalizations manageable while allowing for a wide return to work and social activity.

The LET scenario involves the same LIFT measures, but adds robust testing, contact tracing of symptomatic people, and quarantining of all household members of people who came in close contact with someone who tests positive for the virus. After lifting restrictions, at rates of 50 percent detection of positive cases within two days of onset of symptoms, tracing of 40 percent of contacts, and quarantine of all household members of those contacts, the model shows just 0.29 people per thousand in hospitals per day, compared with more than five per day under LIFT measures alone and more than seven under the unmitigated scenario. ICU beds would be more than adequate at all times under this scenario.

The advantage of whole-household quarantine is that it simplifies contact tracing, working at the level of small groups of people, rather than individuals. Followup calls to check for compliance would also be streamlined. Furthermore, the model assumes no additional precautions, such as masks and social distancing. Therefore, it is expected that new cases and hospitalizations could be even lower if people were to continue some of the practices that have helped combat the spread of Covid-19 thus far.

This approach is not without sacrifice. Quarantining full households presents unique challenges it might be hard for quarantined families to obtain necessities, and quarantining together with others with known risk of infection may not be desirable. The study notes that at the peak, with 40 percent contact tracing, as many as 9 percent of all people in the city could be under quarantine. However, this number would gradually decline to around 3 percent. The total number in quarantine could be further reduced if testing ramps up more significantly. The authors suggest that the trade-off of higher numbers of people in quarantine compared with the massively disruptive long-term social isolation policies that would otherwise be needed to keep new infections manageable is well worth it. Life could return to some degree of normalcy, and the economy could begin to recover.

Since the study was carried out, Massachusetts has moved toward a manual tracing strategy in which thousands of people have been hired to trace potential infections. Moro explains that this could work if the number of cases is small and controlled, but it might be insufficient if the number of cases scales up. He also notes that hiring contact tracers has been problematic. He suggests a possible solution to deal with sudden growth in the number of cases: combine manual and digital contact tracing via an app.

The model used in the study will continue to be developed and enhanced, and the authors plan to examine other cities beyond Boston. They will use real-time behavior data to investigate how infection is actually propagating and detect when, where, and why spreading events are happening.

MIT Connection Science is a research group hosted by the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, a part of IDSS.

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Modeling the impact of testing, tracing, and quarantine - ScienceBlog.com

Human Behavior

Two novellas on the #MeToo issue: Mary Gaitskill’s This is Pleasure and James Lasdun’s Afternoon of a Faun – WSWS

September 10, 2020 medical

By Sandy English 9 September 2020

Mary Gaitskill, This is Pleasure, New York, Pantheon Books, 2019, 83 pp.

James Lasdun, Afternoon of a Faun in: Victory: Two Novellas, London: Vintage, 2019, pp. 103263.

The #MeToo campaign has seized hold of and shaken film, artistic and literary circles in the US and beyond over the last three years.

What it has not done, however, is inspire any great or even serious work of art. Moreover, relatively little fiction has even been written about the complexities and ambiguities of both unsubstantiated accusations and the behavior that may, or may not, bring them on.

No major American or British fiction writer has excoriated the practice of disappearing or canceling important artists and their work overnight. The strain of this campaign on artistic thought and life has no doubt been considerable, but contemporary writers seem largely unequipped to understand the broader ramifications of the #MeToo operation.

However, the silence on the issue has not been absolute. Authors James Lasdun and Mary Gaitskill have each written a novella (short novel) that tries, with some success, to give a nuanced and sympathetic view of peoples feelings and reactions under the weight of attempts to destroy them through allegations of sexual misconduct. Ultimately, both books fall short.

Lasduns Afternoon of a Faun opens with a comment by a lecturer about the 2016 Republican Party presidential candidate at a lunchtime talk whose subject is rape.

In the audience are Marco Rosedale, a documentary film journalist whose career has been flagging for several years and the unnamed narrator, a writer and Marcos boyhood friend. Both are British expatriates (like Lasdun himself) living in New York.

Marco has learned that a woman, Julia Gault, also a childhood acquaintance of the narrator, is publishing a book in which she alleges that Marco raped her in a Belfast hotel room in 1975 while they were working together. The novella depicts Marcos fear and anxiety about the accusation. The narrator becomes involved and visits Julia. A tragedy occurs, and the story ends on a note of ambiguity.

In many respects, the self-centered and deceitful attitude and habits of the milieu that Ladsun writes aboutthe world of well-paid journalists, editors, lawyersseem to be at the center of the tales concerns.

It is more than a little dirty, for example, when a magazine editor who wants to publish an excerpt from Julias memoir tries to gauge Marcos reaction and solicit a reply from him. Memories can be slippery, cant they? he says. Perhaps you might want to remind people that all kinds of behaviors we condemn now were considered perfectly acceptable in those days.

Marcos father, a prominent lawyer, subsequently blackmails the publisher of Julias book by telling her, the wife of a Holocaust survivor, that Julia has also written a proposal for a book about a female Nazi aviator. The narrator remarks to Marco that Julia admires the womans stubbornness, not her actual beliefs. Marco replies, Maybe, maybe not. Either way, it did the trick.

Marco then becomes more relaxed and stops offering categorical denials that he forced himself on Julia in 1975. The narrator is dismayed and irritated. He had thought his defense of Marco to his family and friends was morally upright.

His emotional discomfort increases when he visits Julia and finds himself grilling her and is somewhat ashamed about this. And Julia herself adds in that conversation what she later admits is a lie about Marco sleeping with an underage girl, though she stands by her original accusation.

Lasduns 2002 novel, The Horned Man, also deals with accusations of sexual harassment. The circumstances behind his own memoir, Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (2013), about a systematic campaign of harassment and public accusations of plagiarism and rape by a former student, have undoubtedly attuned him to the feelings of both genuine victims of abuse and victims of false accusations.

But at the same time, the novella cannot escape its allegiance to subjective skepticism and muddiness. The social and political context in which the sexual witch-hunt is taking place, the immense social and political crisis in the US and the disorientation of and shift to the right by substantial layers of the affluent middle class, simply never comes in for consideration, as though it didnt exist.

Early in the story, for example, Marco asks the narrator what he finds fascinating about the unproven accusations against people like the French politician Dominique Straus Kahn, who was accused of sexual assault by a New York hotel maid in 2011 (charges were later dropped), and the journalist and publisher Julian Assange, falsely accused of sexual misconduct by Swedish police and state prosecutors in 2010.

The narrator replies that in these kinds of situations theres no solid basis for judgment other than your own assumptions and prejudices. So youre forced up against yourself, your own mysteries.

The fact that these remarks can be made without a hint of irony about two such politically motivated scandals is telling. Strauss-Kahn was about to run for the French presidency as the candidate of the Socialist Party, and Assange was the object of a CIA smear campaign for exposing American war crimes. But for Marco and the narrator, it remains a matter of perception. And the author seems to share this view. The whole discussion between Marco and the narrator leaves an unpleasant taste.

Lasduns narrator, it is true, is aware that there may be larger processes behind the #MeToo campaign. After Marco tells him about his antics with a female professor at university as a student, in which she referred to the poem Afternoon of a Faun (1867) by French poet Stphane Mallarm, the narrator imagines himself in front of a campus star chamber where he responds to accusers:

They were reactionaries in the guise of progressives, I informed them, puritans whose obsession with female victimhood masked impulses as controlling and infantilizing of actual women as the code of gentlemanly chivalry I accused them of trying to bring back shame as an instrument of social control, of wanting to re-create a world in which a word, a rumor, an anonymous posting, could once again destroy an entire life. Theyd trapped themselves, I declared, in the escalating logic of hysteria that ends, unfailingly, in the witch hunt.

The soliloquy is valuable, but not acted upon and tends to get lost in the eddying moods. The character who has these thoughts but does nothing resembles many professionals and academics at present. They stand on the sidelines, often looking on in dismay at the #MeToo witch-hunt, rampaging racial politics or postmodern fakery, and keep their mouths shut.

The exceptional person, the morally vigorous character who has not been whipped into conformity has not made an appearance for a long time in American literature. Lasdun, one feels, has the artistic strength to bring him or her out, but he has chosen not to do so here.

Mary Gaitskills This is Pleasure concerns figures in New Yorks publishing industry, a social layer not dissimilar to the one Lasdun describes. The work is alternately narrated by a female publisher, Margot, and her friend, Quin, a male publisher, who has been accused in a lawsuit by several present and former subordinates of various sexually inappropriate behavior such as spanking them, sending them suggestive photos and using lewd language.

Quin, a British expatriate (again), is an elegantly dressed man, flirtatious and creative. He comes from a wealthy background. He easily makes friends with the women who work with him, promotes their careers, gives them advice on clothes. He is a certain type of cultured petty bourgeois found in New York City: flippant, unconventional and generally harmless, if somewhat trite and irritating.

Some of his behavior is certainly out of bounds: one of the first times Margot meets him, he attempts to put his hand between her legs (an oblique reference to recorded remarks by Trump released during the election of 2016). NO! I said, and shoved my hand in his face, palm out, like a traffic cop. I knew it would stop him. She proceeds to have a close friendship with him for the next two decades.

Gaitskill has demonstrated that she can accept and treat people as they arefor example, the prostitutes and drug addicts in the stories in Bad Behavior (1988), cultists in Two Girls Fat and Thin (1991), victims of the AIDS pandemic in Veronica (2005) and working class girls in The Mare (2015). She can also subject a social milieu to cutting criticism, as she did with the fashion industry in Veronica.

In this work, though, there is a good deal of empathysorely needed in the period of the #MeToo witch-huntbut too little serious analysis of the circles and moods that spawned it. This comes out when Gaitskill assesses Quins accusers. One of them, Caitlin, who has participated in the suit against him, was his friend for 11 years.

Why do you think she is so angry?, Margo asks Quin. He shrugged. She asked what she had to do to get invited to my parties and I told her she had to flirt with me more. I think that really offended her. Such things can happen, but the resentment and sense of being demeaned referred to provide only a glimpse. Catlins motivations, the motivations of a whole set of people, are not explored by the author or morally weighed by the characters.

The bitterness and envy that seem to preoccupy the Manhattan publishing industry briefly appear again, when, after the papers reveal that Quin has sent Caitlin a suggestive video, he thinks it is absurd that Caitlin holds a position that I helped her get and, from that position, accuses me of things that she was party to. Even more absurd, she is called brave for it.

When Margot looks back on her friendship with Quin, she is angry at him for his foolish behavior. Then she thinks, more than half of the women [in his office] had signed the endlessly circulating online petition, given interviews, demanded that Quin be fired, sought damages, made threats to boycott any company that would dare to hire him. They were angry, too.

Where does this anger come from? Quin later speculates that they are angry at whats happening in the country and in the government. They cant strike at the king, so they go for the jester. Perhaps Quin the character can go no further with this train of thought, but surely the author ought to.

It is no surprise, as in Lasduns work, that the causes of the #MeToo frenzy in American society at this moment do not trouble any of the people in This Is Pleasure. They are probably the last people who would understand the process. Their outlook is self-centered: Quin, like Marco, can ask, Why is this happening to me? but not Why is this happening to society?

What we said in a review of Gaitskills The Mare can apply to both This is Pleasure and Afternoon of a Faun:

Gaitskill has no doubt aspired to be independent ofor even opposethe reactionary official atmosphere that has prevailed and the varieties of crude middle-class public opinion. Unfortunately, it is not so easy to get away from those things.

These are both short fictions about the ambiguity of human behavior and deserve credit for questioning the prevailing witch-hunting disposition in sections of the upper-middle class and, for revealing, to some extent, how the process works.

But a rigor is missing. The real question is the decay of cultural and intellectual life under the impact of brutal social inequality and the disintegration of American bourgeois democracy. Why are Lasduns narrators fantasies of revolt tepid? Why doesnt the publishing world drive Margot crazy? The character in revolt against the conditions at the root of the #MeToo campaign but also against the self-obsession and general callousness toward other people has yet to make his or her appearance in or, more correctly, return to American literature.

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Two novellas on the #MeToo issue: Mary Gaitskill's This is Pleasure and James Lasdun's Afternoon of a Faun - WSWS

Human Behavior

Warning of More Pandemics to Come, Public Health Experts Urge Collective Examination of What it Means to Live in ‘Harmony with Nature’ – Common Dreams

September 10, 2020 medical

As the world continues to adjust to lifeamidst Covid-19, Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top infectious disease expert in the United States,recently pointedto human activityand a disregard of living in harmony nature with as a major accelerator of pandemicspart of a global chorus elevating such concerns.

"Covid-19 is amongthe most vivid wake-up calls in over a century," Fauci,director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) wrote with medical epidemiologist David Morens, in a paper published last month in the scientific journal Cell. "It should forceus to begin to think in earnest and collectively about living inmore thoughtful and creative harmony with nature, even as weplan for nature's inevitable, and always unexpected, surprises."

Public health experts and naturalists called attention to the report, which notesthat while disease development and spread is nothing new, "we now live in a human-dominated world in which our increasingly extreme alterations ofthe environment induce increasingly extreme backlashes fromnature."

Must-read paper by Fauci & Morens in Cell. Living in a pandemic era makes us think in earnest & collectively about living in more thoughtful & creative harmony with nature. #SARSCoV2 is a perfect virus: novel to humans, pathogenic & highly transmissible https://t.co/JRCKcLKj5a

Scientist and researcher Jane Goodall, who has called the Covid-19 pandemic a "wake-up call" for humanity, agrees with Fauci and Morens' sentiment. In an essay for Vogue this week, Goodall wrote that a more environmentally-friendly global economy could help mitigate future outbreaks.

"Covid-19 is a direct result of our disrespect for the environment and animals," she said. "Zoonotic diseases have been getting more frequent, and it's not just a result of the wild animal markets in Asia and bushmeat markets in Africa, but the factory farms in Europe and America too."

Fauci and Morens note that scientific and technological advances remain important, but that they alone will not safeguard humanity from future pandemic-level diseases. They wrote:

Science will surely bring us many life-saving drugs, vaccines,and diagnostics; however, there is no reason to think that thesealone can overcome the threat of ever more frequent and deadlyemergences of infectious diseases. Evidence suggests thatSARS, MERS, and Covid-19 are only the latest examples of adeadly barrage of coming coronavirus and other emergences.

The Covid-19 pandemic is yet another reminder, added to therapidly growing archive of historical reminders, that in a human-dominated world, in which our human activities representaggressive, damaging, and unbalanced interactions with nature,we will increasingly provoke new disease emergences. Weremain at risk for the foreseeable future.

Nature historian and broadcaster David Attenborough, in a BBC documentary set to air September 13, also issued a warning that protecting the planet and wildlife is essential to preserving the human race.

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"This is about more than losing wonders of nature," Attenborough says "Extinction: The Facts," the new documentary. "The consequences of these losses for us as a species are far-reaching and profound."

Robert Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity Ecosystem Services, who is also featured in the BBC piece, told Sunday People, "We need to recognize that the way we're interacting with nature is increasing the probability of those sorts of pandemics in the future.Wet markets for example, where we've got animals and humans together, and animals that don't normally interact with each other."

Watson continued, "We have to realize how we're exposing ourselves to this and the more we destroy nature, the more we are exposed."

Fauci and Morens noted substantial changes to our way of life are necessary in order to prevent future global pandemics:

Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes inhuman behavior as well as other radical changes that maytake decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to waterand sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.

Insuch a transformation we will need to prioritize changes in thosehuman behaviors that constitute risks for the emergence of infectious diseases. Chief among them are reducing crowdingat home, work, and in public places as well as minimizing environmental perturbations such as deforestation, intense urbanization, and intensive animal farming. Equally important areending global poverty, improving sanitation and hygiene, andreducing unsafe exposure to animals, so that humans and potential human pathogens have limited opportunities for contact.

It is a useful 'thought experiment' to note that until recent decades and centuries, many deadly pandemic diseases eitherdid not exist or were not significant problems. Cholera, forexample, was not known in the West until the late 1700s andbecame pandemic only because of human crowding and international travel, which allowed new access of the bacteria inregional Asian ecosystems to the unsanitary water and sewersystems that characterized cities throughout the Westernworld. This realization leads us to suspect that some, and probably very many, of the living improvements achieved overrecent centuries come at a high cost that we pay in deadly disease emergences.

In an opinion for STAT, co-authored withJoel G. Breman, senior scientific adviser of the Fogarty International Center of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Morens wrote Wednesday: "Strengthening basic public health measures, including hygiene and sanitation in all countries, can also make us more secure. Emerging viruses should not find ready pathways to facilitate their spread. A stronger global public health infrastructure is also needed to respond quickly and efficiently to emerging viruses and other pathogens."

Morens and Breman continued, "It may seem strange to compare threats posed by human interactions with winged mammals that sleep upside down in caves to that of a terrorist group or a nuclear-armed nation. But scientific evidenceand our collective daily experience coping with Covid-19tells us that pandemics may equal or surpass these dangers. It is time to significantly elevate our response to them so it is equal to the peril they present."

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Warning of More Pandemics to Come, Public Health Experts Urge Collective Examination of What it Means to Live in 'Harmony with Nature' - Common Dreams

Human Behavior

Sociologist And Author Valda Taurus Debuts Gripping Suspense Novel That Explores The Depths Of Human Behavior: Killing Your Best Friend |…

September 10, 2020 medical

PRN | 1 day ago

Synopsis Tammy Bartow is wrestling with another bout of insomnia when she glances out her bedroom window and sees a shadow creeping along the cold Alaskan ground, near her neighbor's yard. Ever since her neighbor Marta Gray married Alexander (Ax) - an ex-con who has already served time for murder - fear hangs over the community like a dark cloud. But as she eventually returns to bed, Tammy has no idea that in a few hours, she will learn a murder took place in her neighbor's barn. After Marta finds the corpse of Ax's best friend, Ivan, all evidence points toward her husband, who had been drinking all night with the deceased, and eventually blacked out. He cannot remember anything. Marta, blind with love, refuses to believe that Ax could have committed such a chilling act, and she convinces Tammy of the same. Meanwhile, as Detective Andy Mohr attempts to sort out this complex case, he realizes that this is the second time Ax has murdered on Mother's Day. Is it pure coincidence, or a bloody pattern? In this gripping mystery, two determined women and a seasoned detective are led down a complex path to solving a murder.

I wanted to show raw life when things don't always work out as they should, said Taurus. It is a book free of judgement, which appeals to the understanding of action through the prism of our psyche, rather than in terms of approval or disapproval. We cannot change the past because it's gone. And we cannot tell what tomorrow will be like because it has not happened yet. But what we can do is live today - as life is happening.

To learn more about Valda Taurus and her latest book, go online. Or follow her via social media Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube.

About Valda Taurus, M.A.

Valda Taurus is inspired by stories of survival in extreme situations, whether it be a natural disaster or an inner psychological struggle. She holds a master's degree in sociology and a minor in psychology that complements her desire to be a judgment-free observer of people. On the path to becoming a writer, she completed an advanced fiction-writing course. Killing Your Best Friend is her first novel in which she touches on the topic of destructive feelings such as guilt and self-accusation. Explore her latest work by visiting http://www.ValdaTaurus.com.

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