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Human Behavior

I’m a Body Language Expert. Here’s What I Saw During the Conventions. – POLITICO

At the beginning of Joe Bidens speech, we see the tension of the moment when he does whats called a hard swallow. Even for a gifted speaker who is used to public speaking, this is still a tense moment, as he accepts the nomination. And, for a split second, in spite of his broad, friendly smile, it shows in that one small facial distortion. He compresses his lips after saying, Ill be proud to carry the banner of our party into the general election. With the audio on, you can hear his voice crack slightly, again a result of the natural tension one would expect from such an event. Its obvious that he takes seriously the gravity of whats happening. Hes been preparing all his life for this moment. Its not a stutter or age-related thing, just a subconscious behavior that speakers use to deal with a little bit of stress when we say something of emotional magnitude.

Notice here the squinting of his eyes and the finger pointing. He does this for emphasis, to demonstrate that what he is saying is important, it has gravitas. The furrowing of his glabella, the area between the eyes, conveys that what he is saying should be troubling. Even without sound, you know hes serious about something. When I turn the sound on to see what he said, its: The president still does not have a plan. Well I do. He says these last three words with a firm, assertive voice that makes us pay attention.

We are trained to look at the glabella even as babies. You can do this as an experiment to see it in action: If you furrow your glabella and squint your eyes at a baby, theyll react negatively, probably with crying. From a very young age, were primed to look at this section of the face to gauge whether everything is okay, and when we see this particular look, we recognize it as a serious face.

Notice how Senator Kamala Harris is compressing the lips on each corner of her mouth. This is indicative of disdain and, in this case, as I listened then to the video, for those who would harbor racists views. This is the moment where she says, there is no vaccine for racism. We pinch the corner of the mouth to say nonverbally, Im not satisfied. The moment I saw it, I knew she was saying she was not happy with something. And it turned out I was right. When she talks about racism, shes saying that its just not okay the same way a parent might convey a similar message to a misbehaved child.

When Nancy Pelosi is speaking, notice she arches her eyebrows. This is what I like to call the human exclamation point. Its a gravity defying behavior: We only expend energy when we are passionate about something, and in this case, shes describing how proud she is of the size of her caucus and how many women are in it. She wants the viewer to pay attention to her confidence, and by repeatedly arching her eyebrows, she says: Dont just listen to my words, listen to my body language as well. She finishes her speech with a steeple, the finger points together, which is another sign of confidence.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was only given a very short segment in the DNC, but when it came to her nonverbal presentation, she was very effective. Without listening to what shes saying, you can see that shes a good speaker. Unlike Biden, her eyes are wide open and relaxed. What this tells the viewer is that she is confident and comfortable with what she is saying, and thats really important in public speaking. What we look for as viewers without even knowing were looking for it is whether the speaker makes us comfortable. Thats often conveyed through body language. Ocasio-Cortez is clearly adept with this medium, and it shows in her body language.

Most importantly, shes not overly dramatic; shes not raising her voiceand you can tell even without the sound. Her comfort here should make viewers comfortableand perhaps opponents uncomfortable.

As the camera follows Jill Biden in a classroom, we notice how comfortable she is in this setting, how fluidly she moves and speaks, as if she has done this all her life. Our brains react to movement with an orientation reflex that basically follows any movement, so her walking makes us pay attention to her. We can also appreciate that she comes from a working background, by the environment she has chosen. It humanizes her.

With the wave of a hand, she communicates this is my realm. Its a welcoming gesture. In this particular moment, we also see that her thumbs are in the up position, which we do to let others know that we are speaking with confidence. Shes letting people know that she is confident that she fits right in and that we should be confident with her as a public figure.

Michelle Obama uses a number of hand gestures to emphasize, to demark, to point, to chop effectively, all of which add to the message she is sending. Because its on a Zoom-like medium and not on a stage, these behaviors are elevated to be in frame, but it doesnt look contrived. Whatever she is saying, you know it is important. It made her deliverysaying that we have got to vote like our lives depend on itmore impactful.

Here we see a very powerful gesture with Kimberly Guilfoyles hands spread out wide away from the body, fingers spreading apart for emphasis. These kinds of gestures scream for attention and contribute to understanding the intensity of sentiment expressed. One cannot look away.

However, a very expansive gesture is great if youre in an auditorium, but here you have a small screen. Even the cameraman or director noticed that and switched to a wider shot. Similarly, you can tell even with the sound off that shes talking in a very loud voice. It feels discordant in this setting. This manner of presentation is too theatrical. Performances need to meet the audience, and if theres no audience there, you should shape your performance around that. Most people dont remember what politicians say, but we remember the presentation. Its interesting to me that a woman who has always taken care of how she presents herself, including as a TV host, didnt register that her message would be better conveyed if it were more suited to the format. Viewers register the disconnect, and thats what sticks with them.

During his convention speech, Don Jr. tilts his head, cocking it slightly and squinting his eyes while at the same time making a wide gesture with his hands. Together, it conveys that hes incredulous or suspicious about something. His body language communicates something to the effect of saying sarcastically, Can you believe that? In reality, at this particular moment, he says: People of faith are under attack. Youre not allowed to go to church. But mass chaos in the streets gets a pass. Some of these behaviors, like his slight twitch of the head and askance facial expression, are so fast that theyre whats called tachykinesic. We dont consciously realize that we notice it, but it registers subconsciously.

Senator Tim Scott is clearly a very dynamic speaker. Here we see two behaviors of interest: the furrowing of the glabella that communicates that he is troubled by something (even before he emphasizes that again with the shake of his head), and the pinched thumb and index finger, which is called a precision grip. This is usually used to indicate we are thinking about or articulating something very precisely. Both behaviors add to the message making it more powerful. He also emphasizes his message by leaning in slightly, and he punctuates it by arching his eyebrows, like Pelosi did. The viewer understands without even hearing his speech that he is an important figure with an important message.

What was most noticeable about Melania Trumps speech was that she appeared to be someone who is not used to public speaking. We have to keep in mind that maybe this is not a role she would have wished for, but she is obviously willing to give it her best. Shes clearly reading from a teleprompter, and you see some tension in her face and neck that conveys some nervousness and straining. If you were to show this to an audience unfamiliar with who she is, they might say that she looks a little stressed. I dont want to speculate too much, but the question our brains ask is: Do we see a high degree of comfort? And, politics aside, I dont think we do. We dont see a relaxed face.

What does that ultimately mean? Politics will still dictate how people felt about this, but as an ethologist, someone who studies behavior, I dont think her tension depends on what she had to say but rather on the fact that she had to do this at all. She may not be uncomfortable with the message, but she appears very uncomfortable with the setting.

Kellyanne Conways speech struck me as really strange, because we know she is used to speaking to the public. Here, her arms were stuck to the side of her body, which is not normal for her. She knows how to convey effective messaging, but this is not that. The energy and emphasis that we would normally see is lacking. The human brain seeks to see the hands, and public speakers usually use that to communicate effectively. Ive seen her talk to the media at the White House, but here we see a much more restrained face, and, most noticeably, her arms dont leave her side. You can speculate all you want about what psychological forces might have been acting on her, but what matters to me is that the presentation was unusual and the audience registers that, even if they cant articulate it.

Rep. Dan Crenshaws segment was another that was very effective in terms of nonverbal communication. On mute, his gestures are very relaxed and comforting, and when you turn the sound on, his tone of voice affirms that. His cadence simultaneously puts the viewer at ease and commands their attention. He comes across as cool, calm and collected. The stagecraft also evokes patriotism in a way that makes a lapel flag pin that nearly everyone else feels compelled to wear unnecessary. You understand that he served his country.

As a speaker, it is clear he is confident, and his gesturesopen palms in the vertical receptive positionare consistent with his message. All of whats communicated nonverbally here says: Listen to me because Im important. He does it really well, and without knowing anything about him or his politics, I can tell that hes a leader.

Rudy Giuliani pinches the corners of his mouth slightly, which is a signal of disdain or contempt. When I listened back, I saw that he was talking about progressive Democrats. Anytime you see air quotes, you know someones introducing something theyre going to ridicule, and then you see that reaffirmed with the pinching of his lips. You also can tell that he turns his head a little bit askance, like Don. Jr. did.

While there was no shortage of commentary about Melania Trumps facial expression when Ivanka Trump joined the stage at the White House before Donald Trumps speech, I think many people were reading too much into the moment. It may have appeared like she was betraying some deeper feelings about her daughter-in-law. But in this case, I believe the simplest explanation is likely the right one: that Melanias smile momentarily lapsed as she turned her head. Its certainly awkward on camera, but overall, the First Lady appears much more relaxed and comfortable standing alongside her husband in front of a crowd than she did earlier when she had to speak on his behalf.

You can also see the contempt conveyed during President Donald Trumps speech with the pinching of his lips. When you turn the sound on, you hear that hes talking about mayhem in Democratic cities. But what stands out the most from his performance is the way he leans against the podium. It conveys that this is a very comfortable kind of space for Trump, and you dont really see it in this kind of public speaking. Normally, a president isnt this relaxed. Its more common with smaller groupsfor example, a professor speaking to a class might take on this position. Hes not just holding the podium but putting his weight on it, which you can see by the angle of his shoulders. For viewers, the White House is something almost reverent, and we are primed to want to see nonverbal communication consistent with the highest office. When we see behavior like this, it feels discordant and not very presidential.

Obviously, there are people who like that about Trump, who like that he doesnt adhere to traditional notions of respectability but rather conveys open disdain for Democrats. Is he too cavalier? Thats up to the politics of the viewer. Theres no disagreement that all people are clearly receiving the message hes giving off.

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I'm a Body Language Expert. Here's What I Saw During the Conventions. - POLITICO

Human Behavior

Don’t bank on herd immunity to save us from COVID-19 – Massive Science

There has recently been some speculation that the human population, or at least some segments of it, may already have had sufficient COVID-19 infections to achieve the protective effect of herd immunity. There are also new studies using computational modeling that suggest that the population levels of immunity needed for broad protection are lowerthan the most common estimates of 60-66% immune. While these new and hypothetical constructs of infection-acquired herd immunity show useful directions for the future of public health research for both COVID-19 and other infectious diseases, there are still too many unknowns to use these numbers to design active health policy.

As I wrote earlier this year:

Many hard hit communities, such as the Hasidic community in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklynand other urban neighborhoods in London and Mumbai, have already had a substantial number of infections within distinct spatially contained groups, leading people to speculate that they may have established a protective level of immunity within these areas. In addition, many researchers have developed mathematical models of the outbreak and have come up with values lower than the typical estimates of the population needed for herd immunity for COVID-19, ranging from about 43% to as low as 10-20%.

The classical calculation of herd immunity is based on the infectivity of the virus in question, definedby the mathematical expression, 1-(1/R0). R0 (R-naught) is the basic reproductive number of the virus, which is an indicator of how easily an infection is transmitted. This is an estimate of the number of secondary cases generated by an infectious individual at the start of a novel outbreak, when the rest of the population is susceptible. There are many difficulties in estimating R0 during an active outbreak, resulting in some wide variations in estimates over time anddata coming from different geographic locations. Early WHO estimates turned out to be too low, but the most widely used estimates R0 for SARS-CoV-2 now remain at around 2.5 to 3, meaning that one infectious person will infect 2.5 to 3 others. The calculated estimate based on a R0 of 2.5 to 3 results in 60-66% percent of people needing to have immunity before there is any herd immunity effect for the population.

Herd immunity helps reduce the likelihood of disease transmission from infected individuals to non-immune individuals. Immunity can be acquired from vaccines or, in many cases, previous infection and recovery from the infection.

U.S. Government Accountability Office on Flickr.

A mathematical model recently published by Tom Britton and colleagues in Science suggests that because population groups vary by factors including age and rates of social activity and contact, herd immunity could established through illness and recovery with only around 43% of the population,instead of the 60% required using a classical model assuming an R0 of 2.5.

While this type of mathematical model for herd immunity is theoretically interesting since it attempts to capture contextual factors and elements of population heterogeneity, it is still too early to be directly applied to public policy. Our current knowledge about SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) is incomplete, including a lack of information about how we may develop immunity and how long immunity will typically last.Mathematical modeling isalso based on broad assumptions that are often untested in the real world. Much more research is needed before we know if these new ideas about herd immunity should be applied to public health interventions and planning.

There are generally two broad categories of infectious disease models: mechanistic models, which use scientific understanding of disease dynamics and human behavior, and statistical models, which rely only on patterns in the data

U.S. Government Accountability Office on Flickr.

The most striking example of how fast our understanding can change is the recent confirmation of a reinfection with a second case of COVID-19 after four and a half months in Hong Kong.Unlike earlier reports of reinfection, which were mainly anecdotal, this case was confirmed based on viral genome sequencing, showing that the second infection was from a genetically distinct strain. This suggests that reinfection is an important possibility and that immunity acquired through illness and recovery may last only months. This new case adds additional elements of uncertainty to Britton and colleagues model, since the authors state that their current model was designed based on the assumption that infection with and subsequent clearance of the virus leads to immunity against further infection for an extended period of time.

Reinfection and the typical duration of immunity are not the only uncertainties. It also remains unclear to what degree immunity is antibody-mediated versus cell-mediated, whichkinds of antibodies are most important, whether immunity might prevent future disease or only make reinfections less severe, and whether prior exposure to common cold coronaviruses offer any protection. Immune response also may depend on characteristics beyond age, including biological sex and individual genetic variation, and other factors. The data available is often incomplete, meaning that mathematical models may be based on biased samples; underreporting of data has been high, and areas without sufficient testingdo not provide adequate data.

There are also a number of difficulties inherent in using the basic reproductive rate to predict disease spread, and it is difficult to disentangle the basic rate R0 from the actual transmission rate (Rt), which is impacted by changes in behavior and in population immunity over time. If done properly, all of the measures meant to control the virus, including lockdowns, social distancing, business closures, travel bans, mask wearing, and contact tracing, will reduce the transmission. While this is a good thing for the publics health, it makes the data collected ambiguous: has disease transmission has been slowed by public health measures, or is it waning naturally?

Current estimates suggest that a person infected with COVID-19 will, on average, pass the virus to 2-3 other people.

United Nations COVID-19 Response on Unsplash.

There are also speculations that the amount of virus a person contacts impacts the severity of illness (this is known asa dose-response relationship), potentially explaining why masking is effective. It is still unclear to what degree seasonality plays a role in transmission, and more research is needed on the exact mechanisms of virus spread and persistence in the air and the role of indoor conditions such as humidity, temperature, and ventilation. Finally, once a vaccine becomes available, it will impact herd immunity, though the results will depend both on the effectiveness and the distribution of any future vaccines as well as whether people are willing to get the vaccine at all.

Throughout this pandemic, the concept of herd immunity has been frequent fodder for wishful thinking. Some countries, including Britain and Sweden, attempted to rely on herd immunity rather than implementing broad control measures. Now Britain has reconsidered this plan, and Sweden has sustained much larger spread of the disease and greater number of deaths than its neighbors.

In the United States, wishful thinking about the virus disappearing on its ownhas delayed needed intervention and prompted premature reopening. Pandemic control measures have many unpleasant side effects, and herd immunity can be an appealing concept for those who seek reassurance that the world will eventually return to normal, but our best way forward requires an understanding that conducting quality research and applying it effectively to policy take time and a great deal of work.

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Don't bank on herd immunity to save us from COVID-19 - Massive Science

Human Behavior

Game Theory Explains the Pandemic – India Currents

The COVID-19 spell has left governments, markets, and civil society wobbling through disruptions and damage. The ambiguity that envelops not only the evolution of the disease but also its impact makes it a challenging and complex task for policymakers to devise a suitable policy response.

The pandemic has brought to the forefront some key ethical questions that we must explore. The Human gene is thought of as the most skilled of making a choice based on free will, on reason and rationality. From the study of human behavior, it is widely known that the current setting can be related to the behavior of people, the choices they make, and the human tendency for cognitive error, to be able to forecast patterns and design effective interventions.

Today, the whole world stands on the edge, geopolitics at a cusp, policymakers in a dilemma, to generate an appropriate policy response. This is the classic case for strategic thinking and can, therefore, draw on insights from behavioral economics and game theory. The former is a field of social sciences that is a blend of economics and psychology and looks into human decision-making behaviors, whereas the latter is the study of models based on strategic interactions between players, on rational choice and on maximizing behavior by the people.

In the context of the pandemic, the questions that come to ones mind are:

Game theory is the science of strategy that deals with outcomes that are produced by interactions, based on the behavior of the players. It is a tool to study interactions in the context of interdependencies.

A game is any situation involving two or more players in which the fate of each player depends not only on her actions but also on the actions of the other players. Some notable points are:

The main ingredients of a Game:

The novel Covid-19 pandemic seems like a real-time situation that can be fitted well into the basic game theory model called the Prisoners Dilemma. The prisoners dilemma is basically a game in which there is an incentive to make a choice that may not produce the best possible or optimal outcome for the group as a whole.

Some aspects of this pandemic reflect the same premise, such as the decision to maintain social distancing during a pandemic looks a lot like a move in a multiplayer form of this game. One can either cooperate, and do something that costs a little while helping those around, or deviate, and bring one, a small benefit but at a greater cost to those around oneself.

If one maintains social distancing, it is not necessary that he/she will not contract the virus as it also depends on what others are doing. Thus, it is a game-there are strategic interactions.

Let us say, we have a two-player Prisoners dilemma game. Both players A and B have two choices. Choice C, in which both choose to maintain social distancing and hence cooperate and, choice D, where they both deflect and do not social distance. The payoff matrix is given below:

Player B

Player A

The efficient outcome is (C, C) with respective payoffs (5,5). This occurs when they both agree to cooperate and maintain social distancing. This is the result of Collective rationality. The outcome (5,5) is preferred by both (everyone) but is unstable in that each person has an incentive to cheat there is a temptation to go out when everyone is locked inside their respective homes. However, here both the players have a unilateral incentive to deflect and this outcome becomes unstable and fragile. Each player becomes vulnerable to the so-called selfish gene inside of him and has an urge to cheat and deviate and thus get a higher payoff for oneself. If A falls prey to this temptation, thinking that B would have done the same and drops the precaution of social distancing, then he gets a small benefit (8,0) but at the cost to others in the society. If player B is led off by the temptation to deviate assuming that A would have reacted in the same way and decides not to distance himself, then likewise his payoff is (0,8).

Thus, the Unique dominant (or rational) strategy for each person is Not to Cooperate. There arises a tension between Individual Rationality and Collective Rationality. Individual Rationality leads them to settle at the optimal outcome, where both them end up in deviating with lower payoffs for themselves at (1,1) and a higher risk of getting the virus. This in fact is what is called the Nash equilibrium. Cooperation gets destroyed by the Art of War and paradoxically non-cooperation becomes the dominant strategy.

Ironically, the biggest debate rattling the world is that which political power would emerge as the winner in this COVID stirred race for dominance.

Questions that come to the ground are, whether a country should cooperate with others and share the results of its innovative practices or not? How to get from (1,1) to (5,5)? That is, how can one make a good outcome happen? This requires Cooperation and Trust.

Is there a need for a third party to enforce the peace, to enforce cooperation, to enforce a lockdown? Yes, perhaps and the third party can be the Sovereign (i.e., the State)?

What are the payoffs and the costs?

What should be the geo-political policy response?

Here lies the tight-spot faced by policymakers today

In the current times, the main players are the citizens and the governments whose choices make a difference and to a large extent play a vital role in checking the pandemic, which had constructed the game theory model in question, in the first place. COVID-19 will reshape our world. We dont yet know when the crisis will end. But we can be sure that by the time it does, our world will look very different. How different will depend on the choices we make today. Every stakeholders choice is an externality for others.

Global pandemics need global solutions.Radicalscaling up of international cooperation among scientists, economists and policy-makers is the need of the hour. A cooperative strategy by all the players in the Covid-Game is the optimum one. It is the Nash equilibrium, in the Covid-induced policy-cogmaire!

Malini Sharma is the Senior Assistant Professor and Head of the Department of Economics at the Daulat Ram College, University of Delhi in India.

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Game Theory Explains the Pandemic - India Currents

Human Behavior

Daily Habits That Can Help You Become A Saver – Femina

Source: Pexels

Why do some people succeed at saving while others do not? Read that carefully. I'm not asking why some people are successful investors, while others are not. What I'm asking is why do some people save while others do not save. Or, if they do save, it's not much more than whatever they are forced to do through EPF or NPS or tax-saving, etc.? They never choose to save.

This is something that all of you would have observed. With some people, it almost seems like a law of nature that they will save while with others, it seems to be the opposite. I'm sure you can think of many explanations and so can I. These explanations may or may not be correct. There may be many different explanations, which apply to different people. It does not matter, it's not very interesting actually.

What IS interesting is whether the non-savers can be converted into savers. Those of us who are non-savers, what do we do when we become self-aware of this unfortunate condition and would like to fix it? It isn't easy to drop a life-long habit. It is a habit, you know. Come to think of it, not saving may have more in common with addictions like smoking than anything to do with finance. Which means that what we are talking about has more to do with human behaviour and psychology than with anything else.

Therefore, this is about breaking one habit and taking up another one. Drawing graphs of compounding returns and SIP growth is fine for those who already have the habit of saving, but it does little to convert those who do not yet have the habit. As it happens, habit creation is something that a lot of people from psychologists to self-help authors have paid much attention to. Of course, 'self-help author' sounds a little disparaging but personally, I believewith experience--that for a subset of readers, and a subset of authors, self-help books do help.

About a couple of years ago,I'd written about a book named The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. The book detailsthrough anecdote and science how our routine behaviour is driven mostly by habit or the absence of habit. It also delves deep into how habits get created and changed, and how this can be achieved consciously. Duhigg's book convinced me that investing was not a choice in the normal sense but a matter of habit. However, the how-to part of that book was hard to work at.

Source: Economic Times

Recently, I came across another book, one by a social scientist named B.J. Fogg. Fogg is the founder and director of the somewhat ominously named Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, which was later renamed as Behavior Design Lab which means the same thing. He has written a fascinating book called Tiny Habits. The book goes deep and yet easy into the process of conscious habit formation. Of course, the actual anecdotes and examples are all from the kind of things that people commonly struggle in terms of habits. However, everything that Fogg describes fits very well into modifying personal financial behaviour. It's hard to briefly lay out the methodology that Fogg prescribes in a way that it can be followed here, nor am I going to attempt to short circuit an entire book in a few hundred words. Fogg says that there are three ways to change behaviour: have an epiphany, change the environment, or to create tiny habits. It goes without saying which is the only one achievable for almost all of us.

However, it is well understood by those who do not save that all you have to do is to make a beginning. If you have gotten as far as reading my columns then you probably also know that the ideal first habit to form is to start investing a small regular amount through an SIP. To those who haven't done it, it's hard to believe how change builds upon change and how behaviour changes. Tiny Habits can help.

This article was originally published in Economic Times and has been reproduced with permission.

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Daily Habits That Can Help You Become A Saver - Femina

Human Behavior

ABAC and VSU sign new articulation agreements to bring needed skills to rural communities – Moultrie Observer

TIFTON, Ga. Two freshly-inked articulation agreements between Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College (ABAC) and Valdosta State University (VSU) aim to provide students the skills needed to help build Americas rural communities.

The agreements guarantee qualified Bachelor of Science degree graduates in Rural Community Development from ABAC an interview and consideration for admission into VSUs Industrial-Organizational (I-O) Psychology or Counselor Education masters degree programs.

These new agreements are intended to make advanced training in key areas more accessible to our Rural Community Development program graduates, while also keeping them in the region for their graduate studies, said Matthew Anderson, dean of ABACs School of Arts and Sciences.

We are thrilled to provide a pathway for ABAC graduates to stay in the area by pursuing their graduate degree at VSU, Heather Kelley, interim department head of VSUs Department of Human Services, said. At the conclusion of their graduate program, we hope these new professionals will stay in South Georgia to enhance and build our local communities.

Adrian Israel Martinez-Franco, ABAC department chair of Rural Studies, saidABACs interdisciplinary bachelors degree program in Rural Community Development is designed to prepare students to make a positive impact in rural communities.

In the Rural Community Development program, we prepare students by emphasizing problem-solving skills, Martinez-Franco said. We develop leaders who can find trustable information and make decisions based on evidence with an ethical attitude toward society and our environment. These agreements will help our students become experts in a specific area to create positive change.

The VSU Master of Science degree program in I-O Psychology prepares students for the understanding and application of the science of human behavior in the workplace. I-O psychologists can play a key role in increasing workplace productivity and enhancing organizational development.

Our faculty focus on training our students to aid businesses with a variety of core functions, such as personnel selection, employee development, strategic planning, organization development, job analysis, and program evaluation, Jeremy Bauer, program coordinator of I-O Psychology at VSU, said. Our program places an emphasis on helping local businesses thrive in rural communities.

The VSU Master of Education degree program in Counselor Education prepares students in one of two tracks, either School Counseling or Clinical Mental Health. School Counseling track students go on to careers in P-16 educational settings. Clinical Mental Health students are broadly trained for counseling work in a variety of settings. Professionals with these skills are desperately needed, particularly in rural communities.

Counselor Educators are committed to infusing considerations of culture including regional factors such as those in rural areas, Lee Grimes, program director of Counselor Education at VSU, said. In this program, students have the opportunity to intern in urban, suburban, and rural settings to understand the unique qualities of each.

For more information on the Rural Studies program at ABAC and the application requirements, interested persons can contact Martinez-Franco atamartinezfranco@abac.edu.

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ABAC and VSU sign new articulation agreements to bring needed skills to rural communities - Moultrie Observer

Human Behavior

Could the COVID-19 Epidemic Fade This Fall Without New Lockdowns? – Reason

Human beings are often terrible at foresight and generally learn hard lessons chiefly from failure. That has certainly been the case for the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health officials, politicians, and the public, by means of repeated policy failures, are still learning what works when it comes to mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic.

A partial list of initial failures in the U.S. includes underestimating the virulence of the pathogen by some public health officials; a massive bureaucratic screw-up by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that delayed the rollout of diagnostic testing as the pandemic was taking off; the belief that airborne transmission was not a significant route of infection but instead the virus was chiefly passed along via direct contact with infected people and indirect contact with surfaces in the immediate environment; the early assertion that citizens didn't need to wear face masks to protect themselves from infection; epidemiological models making worst-case projections of millions of COVID-19 deathsby assuming that people wouldn't change their behaviors; the claim that the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine was a "game changer" as a COVID-19 treatment; and a president who has doggedly insisted since February that the virus would miraculously fade or disappear soon.

So what has been learned over the past eight months? While conclusions are still preliminary, researchers now calculate that the COVID-19 coronavirus is about three times more contagious than seasonal flu; the availability of diagnostic testing in the U.S. has greatly improved but is still nowhere near where it needs to be; airborne transmissioncontributes significantly to the spread of the disease; when the background rate of infections is high the widespread adoption offace masksis aneffectiveand very economically valuable method for stemming COVID-19 infections; when epidemiological models took into account actual changes in human behavior, their COVID-19 death projections declined steeply; and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has concluded that hydroxychloroquine is not a useful COVID-19 therapeutic. But what about President Donald Trump's oft-repeated prediction that the virus will one day soon just disappear?

Epidemiological research suggests that COVID-19 will only fade away once the threshold for herd immunity is reached. Herd immunity is the resistance to the spread of a contagious disease that results if a sufficiently high proportion of a population is immune to the illness. Some people are still susceptible, but they are surrounded by immune individuals who serve as a barrier, preventing the microbes from reaching them. Herd immunity can be achieved via mass infection or mass vaccination. Epidemiologists estimate that the COVID-19 threshold for herd immunity is around 60 to 70 percent.

Some of Trump's fans have recently been touting the idea that COVID-19 herd immunity is closer than initial epidemiological projections have suggested. I, too, have reported that very preliminary studies on unsuspected preexisting T-cell immunity to the coronavirus and speculative modeling results suggest that the effective herd immunity threshold may actually be close, at least, in some countries and some regions of the U.S. (In other words, the possibility of a lower herd immunity threshold is a lucky accident, not the result of presidential prescience.)

Now a new modeling study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team of researchers associated with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign suggests that the COVID-19 "heterogeneity-modified herd immunity" threshold has already been reached in some metropolitan areas of the U.S. Their model stands in contrast to many of the epidemiological models noted above that are based on the homogeneous assumption that basically every individual is equally liable to become infected and then to transmit their infection on to others.

The Illinois researchers define heterogeneity as the biological and social susceptibility of individual members of the population to COVID-19 viral infection. Biological heterogeneity takes into account differences in such factors as the strength of immune responses, genetics, age, and comorbidities. Social heterogeneity reflects variations in the number of close contacts that each individual has with different people. Basically the more social a person is, the more likely they are to get infected early in the epidemic and then become immune. The researchers combine biological and social heterogeneity to derive what they call an immunity factor.

The team tests their model on real-world empirical data from hospitalizations, intensive care unit (ICU) occupancy and daily deaths from New York City and Chicago to figure out changes over time in the effective reproduction number for the virus in those cities. The effective reproduction number is the number of people to whom an individual can transmit infection at any specific time, and it changes as more of the population becomes immunized through either infection or vaccination. In addition, the effective reproduction number is affected by people's behaviors such as social distancing and widespread mask-wearing.

Taking the effects of biological and social heterogeneity on COVID-19 transmissibility, the researchers calculate that the herd immunity threshold is likely somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the population. According to recent reports, more than 20 percent of New York City residents have probably been infected with the coronavirus.

Seeking to see what might happen this fall, the researchers model possible outcomes of the second wave of the COVID-19 epidemic in New York City and Chicago. They consider what they call a "worst-case scenario" in which all current mitigation efforts are fully relaxed and bars, theaters, and restaurants open with negligible social distancing and mask-wearing. Their heterogeneity-modified model projects virtually no second wave of COVID-19 cases in New York City which indicates that herd immunity has likely been achieved there.

On the other hand, they calculate that Chicago has not passed the herd immunity threshold. Nevertheless, the effects of biological and social heterogeneity would still result in a substantial reduction of the magnitude of the second wave there, even under the worst-case scenario. The possible good news is that their results suggest "that the second wave can be completely eliminated in such medium-hit locations [as Chicago], if appropriate and economically mild mitigation measures are adopted, including e.g. mask wearing, contact tracing, and targeted limitation of potential super-spreading events, through limitations on indoor bars, dining and other venues."

Based on data from late May, researchers also calculate that most states were then still far away from reaching their heterogeneity-modified herd immunity thresholds. However, this summer's surge in COVID-19 cases may have brought some states closer to herd immunity. While the coronavirus may not just fade away, these calculations imply that the U.S. has a good chance to avoid a potentially disastroussecond wave this fall if the public maintains reasonable social distancing and mask-wearing efforts.

The rest is here:
Could the COVID-19 Epidemic Fade This Fall Without New Lockdowns? - Reason

Human Behavior

Glued to Your Phone? You Could Have These Disorders, New Study Says – MSN Money

It seems everyone is glued to their phones these days, constantly scrolling social media and refreshing their email. However, if you find yourself feeling anxious when your phone dies or when you head out of the house without your phone, you may have what some experts are referring to as "nomophobia." Nomophobia, short for "no-mobile-phone phobia," is not recognized as a formal diagnosis yet, but researchers have been examining how common it is among young people. And one recent study is looking at the concerning link between nomophobia and other psychological disorders.

The study, published in the August-December 2020 edition of Computers in Human Behavior Reports, used a questionnaire to evaluate phone use and the psychopathological symptoms of 495 adults, aged 18 to 24, in Portugal. Researchers found a positive correlation between nomophobia and certain disorders, meaning that if someone has one of these specific mental health conditionsfor example, depressionthey are more likely to also experience anxiety when away from their phone. Each condition correlated with nomophobia has its own symptoms, ranging from insomnia to delusions to digestive problems.

While the researchers acknowledged the positive contributions phones bring to our lives, they reminded readers that there can be negative side effects when people become dependent on their phones. The study showed that the more participants used their phones daily, the more stress they reported feeling without their phone.

These are the nine disorders associated with nomophobia, according to the study, along with the percentage of subjects who experienced them. And if you want to make sure you're keeping yourself healthy, check out these 25 Secret Ways You're Hurting Your Mental Health Without Realizing It.

Original post:
Glued to Your Phone? You Could Have These Disorders, New Study Says - MSN Money

Human Behavior

Podcast 262: Jack Alton of Neuro-ID – Lend Academy

It is a conundrum for every online lender. Why is it that such a small percentage of the borrowers who start at the top of the marketing funnel make it all the way through the online journey? And then a portion of those that do complete the journey are fraudsters.

Our next guest on the Lend Academy Podcast has made it his mission to help solve these problems. Jack Alton is the CEO of Neuro-ID, a new company that is taking the online lending industry by storm, providing new insights that helps reduce friction and recognizes fraud in new ways.

This episode of the Lend Academy Podcast is sponsored byLendIt Fintech USA 2020. The worlds largest fintech event dedicated to lending and digital banking is going virtual in 2020.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION SESSION NO. 262-JACK ALTON

Welcome to the Lend Academy Podcast, Episode No. 262. This is your host, Peter Renton, Founder of Lend Academy and Co-Founder of LendIt Fintech.

(music)

Todays episode is sponsored by Lendit Fintech USA, the worlds largest fintech event dedicated to lending and digital banking is going virtual. Its happening online September 29th through October 1st. This year, with everything thats been going on, therell be so much to talk about. It will likely be our most important show ever. So, join the fintech community online this year where you will meet the people who matter, learn from the experts and get business done. LendIt Fintech, lending and banking connected. Sign up today at lendit.com/usa

Peter Renton: Today on the show, I am delighted to welcome Jack Alton, he is the CEO of Neuro-ID. Now, Neuro-ID is one of the most fascinating companies in fintech right now, in my opinion. They have a very unique product, they call themselves Human Analytics for the Digital World and we get into exactly what that means, but, basically, theyre able to detect real-time fraud and reduce friction really for any company operating online. But, theyve really focused on the fintech space, particularly in the unsecured consumer lending space, and Jack will describe the company and describe the offering in some detail.

We get into all kinds of different examples, but I think what theyve been able to do, and theyve got lots of patents on this, is provide insight where there was limited insight and this is something that chief risk officers/chief marketing officers are crying out for even today with the reduced originations. Everyone wants zero fraud and a perfect kind of customer journey, but thats really what Neuro-ID is all about and we get into this in some detail. It was a fascinating interview. I hope you enjoy the show.

Welcome to the podcast, Jack!

Jack Alton: Thank you, Peter. Greetings from big sky country up here in Montana.

Peter: So, Ive got to ask you.I know this is a podcast, maybe this will entice them to go to YouTube and youve got a great background, a great Zoom background that is pretty spectacular. So, tell us a little bit about that.

Jack: Yeah. Thats actually our family farm, the big reason we moved back to Montana, to raise our kids here and try to keep doing technology things where we wanted to live and that picture is actually this morning. I was on a walk and the sunrise was so amazing that I stopped and took a couple of pictures and I thought this would be a great way to share it with everybody else. Even after growing up here and being five generations from Montana, when you wake up to a sight like that, its hard not to stop and take a picture.

Peter: That is spectacular, spectacular indeed. So, go to YouTube, youll be able to see it there, everybody. Okay so, lets get started by basically giving the listeners a little bit of background, tell us what you did before Neuro-ID.

Jack: Sure, yeah. So, I grew up in Montana, my wife and I both went to college here and then we moved down to Austin, Texas and I got involved in several VC-backed companies. I was involved with a company that invented WiFi which was later on sold to AT&T so that was super exciting and then moved back, wanted to take all that experience I had in Texas and apply it here in Montana. So, Neuro-ID is the third company that Ive done since I returned home here about 12 years ago and its been super cool to be able to demonstrate that you can live, kind of work and play where you want and COVID has really punched that out more than ever. I think our population here in Montana has probably tripled in the last five months.

Peter: Wow! Thats funny because you can live anywhere you want these days if youre just doing Zoom calls. So, yeah, maybe lets just talk about Neuro-ID and what you guys do. I know youve got this tagline on your website, Human Analytics for the Digital World, so lets just dig into that and tell us what you guys do.

Jack: Yeah. Its been super fun, its a cool story of kind of research and scientific discovery and patented technology all coming together to solve a really big need we have right now. You know, lots of scientific research shows that a foreign person, our own AI that we have in our head and in our eyes and in our ears, allows us to make really accurate judgments on trustworthiness and competence and frustration. But, when we moved online, all of that was lost so our two founders who have over 30,000 Google scholar citations in the field of human computer interaction, theyre literally the leaders in the world, they had this question, they said, what if we could digitally communicate the way we used to when we are in person.

That kicked off a bunch of research across several universities. In 2015, the company was founded and then in 2017, after they had proven that this technology, literally how we tap, type and swipe, could be used to understand your intent, to understand your identity, to really facilitate companies and customers online communicating better, they decided they wanted to take it to market so thats when I came in as the CEO of the company and started forming a team together, raising a couple of rounds of capital.

And now, 60 million customer journeys later, were quickly being adopted by leading fintechs, insurance companies and merchant inquirers as they realize whats missing is the human analytics, the human exchanges that we have when we are in person are gone when we moved online. So, thats what were doing, we install our Javascript and literally like a light being turned on, they can, all of a sudden, realize where is the friction in my current process and where is the fraud that I cant see today in historical data.

Peter: So, maybe lets talk about that and talk about the online customer journey that every e-commerce companyanyone whos doing commerce online and wants to optimize that. So, what are some of the things that youve seen thats bad about customer journeys today?

Jack: Yeah. I think that the thing that was most shocking to us ..I think if you dig deeper, you talk to the analyst community, youll see the ugly truth behind our digital transformation, so far, 15 years into that weve stalled out. Weve tried to take the friction out of a customer journey, but we get to that same point where we may have made our offer, selection process easy and your purpose of your loan or your credit card, but then we go to the chief risk officer and here she has a really difficult task of determining, of these 100 people that are coming through, who are my 95 customers that have, you know, a legitimate intent, they are who they say they are and their intent is good and then who are the five that are disguised as good customers but really are fraudsters. And, because we havent had access until now into this in-session behaviors, you know, kind of whats going on as theyre filling out or interacting with your brand online, theyve been forced to make all those decisions on historical data alone.

So, theyre looking at your FICO score, theyre looking at your past credit performance, theyre looking at all kinds of historical data and theyre trying to predict something in the future and the gap that were filling is they still use all that historical data, but now, were giving them a real-time view into how did that customer journey unfold, where are the sticking points and thats really been the big game changer for everybody.

Peter: Right, right. So, Im curious because what you just said there is applicable to just pretty much any industry thats operating online and Im curious about why you decided.I mean, you did mention insurance and merchant acquiring, but why focus on online lending as one of sort of the first places to go?

Jack: Yeah, its a great question. You know, we had patented the technology and validated it in the lab and through research, but we really hadnt commercialized it and used it in the wild. What we found in unsecured consumer lending, specifically, is massive data sets, sophisticated data science teams and teams & organizations that were really trying to figure out how do I improve my customer experience and how do I also detect fraud and they really work hand in hand.

What we found is that if you could see your fraudulent customers better and be more sure about that, you could start to kind of release some of the pressure that youre putting on your best customers so allow them to really start to differentiate and see those good behaviors versus those fraudulent behaviors. Unsecured lending was just a great space for them to share those outcomes for us to train all of our models and then once were able to train those models to these behaviors, were able to move it from vertical to vertical after that.

Peter: Right, right, okay. So, I want to sort of get into.Id love to get a real life example. I mean, you did a session on LendIt Fintech Digital a little while back and did a great kind of visual run through of how this works. So, maybe in the audio kind of environment, maybe you can show us, demonstrate, as best as you can, a real life example of a customer journey and how it looks after youve implemented Neuro-ID.

Jack: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Its literally.our customers have said things like, its like youve turned the light on, I cant believe how blind we were before. You know, once someone sees the demonstration of our technology.one of the things weve heard is, you know, I was literally taking just the last answer that the customer input, if we were sitting across a table from one another and I asked you for your social security number and you wrote it down and then you left and you came back and you changed it four or five times, that would make me ask additional questions.

Today, were blind to that when were just looking backwards to predict the future. And so, when we talk about the customer journey theres always been big blind spots on key fields that are really important if youre going to be optimizing experience or youre going to be trying to detect fraud. There are really two camps we look at, our third party fraud so identity-based fraud. How familiar is Peter with the information that hes putting in, right? We get very familiar with how we put in our first and last name, our date of birth, our social security; those are things that should come literally to the tips of our fingers, whether were using a touch or a mobile device. You shouldnt see a lot of manipulation in that, thats something we ask for on a common basis so, our algorithm is looking for anomalous behavior on that perspective.

The other area that weve come into and its part of our name, you know, if you think of the ID portion of our name a lot of people think its for identification, but really, its for Intent Detect. The technology can also start digging into difficult forms of fraud like first party fraud where theres an intent to fraud someone. In the past, this has been a really difficult field and it was one of the things that was very encouraging to us when we first took our technology to unsecured consumer lenders. They said, you guys are picking up on family fraud that weve never been able to pick up on. They have the credentials, they may live in the same address, but it is not that person that is trying to get a loan.

So, the two areas that were really using it to improve the customer journey are two. Answer that first question, is Peter who he says he is, that identification question, the third party fraud question, but also to look at .in an environment post-COVID, as an example, if we ask are you currently employed and we have 20% unemployment rates, those are things that really had people pulling back on issuing loans because they just couldnt get comfortable with what the current state was and thats what were giving visibility into.

Peter: Right, right. Lets just dig into that a little bit because when you did a demo for me months and months ago, I was blown away because you could see in real-time. You also said that you could see when there was an intent to be fraudulent and like you somehowyou have these profiles that a normal person..obviously, everyone has their own typing style and you really get granular with this, like how someone is typing in a field and you can tell with a lot of accuracy whether this is a human or a bot because bots can try and imitate humans, but you said you can pretty much figure that out so, tell us a little bit about that technology.

Jack: Yeah, yeah, its a great.the analogy we use is in person we have body language that were exchanging even if when were on a Zoom call, but when we move online, youre also portraying or projecting a digital body language as you move through. And if youre moving through an application process or an interaction and youre confident and it is you and you are who you say you are and your intent is good, your digital body language will reflect that.

When we see machine-type behavior or bot behavior, the fact of the matter is its pretty much impossible, almost impossible to replicate human behavior because were all different, but what our technology uniquely does is were able to baseline you against you and then you against the journey that youre on. So, it allows us to be able to really understand that digital body language, whats consistent and what is inconsistent.

Peter: So, when you say you against you, you mean you build a profile.like someone is typing in their first name, is that what youre doing? I mean, what does you against you mean?

Jack: Yeah. From the moment you, as an anonymous customer, we collect no PII. From the moment someone arrives on a mobile or a cursor device, our algorithms starts baselining their movements and looking at how you answer questions and comparing them to how you answer other questions.

So, if youre looking at it through a fraud lens, if youre asked a risk-relevant question like do you foresee a change in your income or your ability to pay back a loan and you first answer no, I dont, and you change it to yes, I do and then you go back to no, I dont because you realize you probably wont get the loan, thats behavior that our customers have no access to today that if we were in person would cause you to probably ask a few more questions.

Peter: Right, right, that makes perfect sense. So, obviously, what people get is the end result which is someone says no and thats all you know and you dont know they go back and forth. I remember one of those things you said there was likeone of the things at the demo like a social security number that was edited like 34 times.

Jack: Yeah. When people see that, thats when the light bulb really goes off and theres both an intuitive use of our technology and then the data science use of our technology. Fraud and risk teams are really good at spotting fraud and risk, they just havent had visibility that they used to have in person to be able to do that, conversely, marketing and CX teams are really good at seeing their best customers. Again, theyve just been operating kind of in a dark vacuum and havent been able to personalize that experience is all as theyre going through the journey.

Peter: Right. So, I can see the application there, but I want to also talk about the friction and the process because, particularly pre-COVID, every online lender wanted to make a frictionless process or as frictionless as possible. Some have now introduced friction as theres volumes are down so far, but regardless. So, lets assume that were back to a normal state of the economy and people want to maintain frictionless..one thing that was fascinating that I saw was you can tell not just sort of the page that someone left on, but the actual field so you can say, right, its date of birth or its income, whatever. This is the thing thats saying people get to there and they quit. Tell us about that friction piece.

Jack: Yeah, yeah. The product that we have is called the Friction Index Dashboard and what we realized is that everybodys trying to deliver the best experience possible, but no ones scientifically measured friction, they never quantified it to know where am I starting from and where am I going. Its only been measured really through conversion which doesnt really tell the whole story and, frankly, hasnt been moved upon in the last decade so, the Friction Index Dashboard was really a customer-driven product.

They loved the new scores and attributes we could use to help them build better decision models for fraud, but every time we would give them a glimpse of what their customer behavior was, we noticed that the customer would literally get up out of their chair in a board room and go toward the screen because they have been trying to understand why is it that Im putting a thousand people to the top of my funnel every day only to have, you know, 10% go through, why are 90% ending up in fraud, frustration or failure. These session level behaviors are helping them see exactly where, not just the page or the event, but actually the session.

Where is the friction happening and then what are the underlying behaviors that are causing it. So, why? When you get down to the level of understanding why somethings happening, that gives them all the data they need to make data-driven changes to their form, to their application and then the cool part with our Friction Index is it goes on and it continually monitors that friction across both mobile and cursor devices.

So, CEOs and chief product officers and chief marketing officers dont have to wonder what their customer experience looks like or send a survey out, it literally can log into the Friction Index, can see whether if the consumer friction is going up or down by question, by device type. Its really given them that last leg of visibility that theyve needed to kind of get closer to the same person interactions and move away from just digital transactions and start building a real digital relationship with the customer.

Peter: Right, right, that makes sense. So then on that, Id love to kind of get some sense of, you know, the impact of what youve done. You said a thousand people at the top of the funnel and 10% go through, what have you seen as far as impact on.when someone puts in Neuro-ID, what is the conversion rate, what can it change to?

Jack: Yeah, its a great question. Its really two things and oftentimes our ROI has a component of increasing your conversion and another one of reducing your fraud. Weve seen our technology being implemented at, you know, $70 Billion fintechs, merchant processor payment facilitator-type companies that have had a decade to build their fraud system. They have ten or more third party fraud vendors included and literally install our technology and see the ability to eliminate 35% additional fraud and the cool part is they do that without impeding their conversion. So, they both had a small bump in conversion and they were able to knock out 35% of their fraud.

If I take it to the lending use case, a lot of times lenders are using things like Plaid or Yodlee where they are asking the customer to log into their bank account. The customer may have worked really well to get the customer to the site, theyve selected their loan, theyve selected their purpose, theyve said yes, I want to do this. Their score card says, you know what, this customer looks good, but Im going to ask them to log into their bank accounts so that I can see if the income they stated is accurate and if they are who they say they are. While thats a very valuable fraud tool to verify identity and to verify that they have income there, its not such a good tool from a customer experience standpoint.

In fact, this customer was losing 40 to 50% of their customers every time they would get to that point. So, what we did is gave them a score to say, hey, here are your customers that have exhibited no anomalous behavior, theyve interactive with all of their fields as they should have. You have the opportunity to fast track them around that point on verification friction thats causing you to lose 40 to 50% of your customers every day.

From an impact standpoint, what we saw was that they customers that they fast tracked around that bank verification log-in, they were able to double their conversion without increasing bad debt so that drops straight to the bottom line. For them, it created a better experience, it reduced that unnecessary verification friction that they were putting on everybody and focused it on those that maybe were closer to the threshold of their internal score card or exhibited anomalous behavior.

Peter: Right, right, yeah, thats fascinating and I could see howthere are so many applications to that as well. I want to ask this one follow-up on that, but before I go on, you know, you say thatlike someone may be very legitimate, but they may not know their income because they just got a pay decrease, for example, so they might have been, you know, three minutes on that field typing in multiple things and thats not forging, thats just someone who just doesnt know. I mean, do you have triggers that sort of set up that kind of real behavior that is just a lack of knowledge versus fraud?

Jack: Absolutely. Its a great nuance and its something that our Friction Index Dashboard picks up really well. Example Ill cite is we had one of the lenders that was asking for annual income and the type of clientele that they lend to really look at their income on a hourly basis, what do I make per hour and maybe what do I make per month. What they saw was there was a tremendous amount of friction there a lot of time as these people were literally being forced to take their hourly wage multiplied by their weekly wage multiplied by their monthly wage to come up with a gross income wage.

It was a ton of time that our Friction Index was picking up on a lot of edits, a lot of changes that had nothing to do with fraud or malfeasance, but rather around how they were asking the question. They took this feedback, they implemented a tool tip that moved it back to an hourly rate for their applicants to put in and then they did the math and the background and all of a sudden, the friction went down, the conversion went up and satisfaction role went up as well.

Peter: Interesting, interesting. So then, who are the kind of lenders that youre working with today?

Jack: Yeah. So, they span the gamut really from, you know, I would say 550 and above all the way up to prime lenders, both consumer and business, also a lot of the top merchant processors now are using us and with our new relationship with Trans-Union, they are taking us into the interim space to kind of reinvent that digital quote and digital claim process for the interim space.

Peter: Interesting, interesting. So then, I know you havent been in business a huge amount of time, but.I mean, Id be curious when someone is hooked, when someone is running your data, running your code, I should say, how many of them just.whats your retention rate?

Jack: Yeah, its a great question. We joke around internally that once you see it, you cant unsee it, once you have access to this visibility and you know that its just one partnership away and it literally spans across all your departments to facilitate that collaboration that you need to digitally transform, we have never had a customer that has installed our Javascript move forward as a customer and ever left. In fact, the ones that are on our initial contracts signed multi-year contracts now and continue to see more value as they move from maybe chief risk over to chief marketing and chief product that these insights are invaluable throughout the customer life cycle.

Peter: You dont have lenders that have dropped their originations dramatically, theyre still keeping you on?

Jack: Absolutely. Yeah, I mean if you think about it, a lot of their credit risk models blew up during the COVID pandemic and its going to take time for those historical (garbled) as in to someones credit risk, as an example. But, if they can have it, if their customer journey is implemented with our real-time behavioral analytics, they can have a leading indicator of if theres any type of anomalous behavior, which is really what they are looking for now, is they slowly build their confidence toward lending again.

One of the things they want to do is not lend out a bunch of money and find out that that was wrong. We can give them the behaviors that are occurring in real-time and help them make better decisions as they recover. What we want to point out is the lenders definitely got hit hard, some harder than others, but other aspects of our customer-base, we have seen massive acceleration on the payment side and the merchant inquiry side as people who maybe had visible and digital properties, they are forced to push everything digital and weve seen account openings just spike, weve seen that at some of the major merchant processors out there.

Peter: Okay. So, say there is a lenders listening to the show and theyre interested, whats the process, how complicated is it to sort of just implement your code into their system?

Jack: Yeah, its a great question. Were on our third generation of our Javascript to ensure that its super easy and very light. Everyone says that, we actually do it. Our customers can typically get us up and running in less than one development day so its a pretty easy trade-off for them to go from not having visibility into their real-time behaviors to literally lighting that up in a day.

The other thing thats happened in the last year thats exciting is our first customers.it took us a while to build the models for them, now, weve been able to do what we call Day One Value. So today, when you install that Javascript, we immediately turn on your behavioral dashboard, the Friction Index Dashboard, and then you also start getting a stream of real-time behavioral analytics that feed a new source of data for your AI and ML models so, literally, day one value when you install it.

Peter: Interesting. So, I guess this is a whole. another data stream that all the data scientists can pore over and create new models from using this as a new data source, right?

Jack: Absolutely, yeah. Everything that were measuring and stuff that they havent been measuring so the data scientist would say that its orthogonal lift of the model and they get quite excited about that.

Peter: Right, right, So, you know, as were chatting here, and you know Ive been a big fan of what you guys do, Jack..I mean, when youre in a Zoom call, I guess it would be these days, like a sales call, what are the objections that people and how do you respond to those?

Jack: Were seeing that the market is rapidly adapting behavioral analytics which is terrific, I think, for everybody. Its great for consumers, its great for businesses. The biggest objection is just development cycles, product roadmaps, you know, prioritizing this integration and even if it is lightweight and most folks are stuck up six months to a year in their debt cycles so it really requires some executive sponsorship so its really our job to show this behavioral dashboard. Once we do that, that seems to pave the way to getting us integrated and up and running quicker.

Peter: Right, right. So, I know youve got a whole bunch of patents that are pending, I dont know, you tell me, whether theyve been improved. Youre the only company I know doing this, I mean, it seems to me to be something that will..you know, once people see or you get it, this type of thing will be standard at some point. Are you protected, whats stopping someone from just taking. they can see your Javascript and whats stopping someone from going up against you.

Jack: Yeah. So, we do have some really foundational patents in the space which are great, we use those, not necessarily to go after anybody, but to protect our right to do business. Theres a pretty big moat around what we do and what we found is a lot of our customers had been collecting behavior. The real challenge is taking that digital body language, that behavior they are taking.you know, scientifically, its considered a very noisy signal. Theres a big difference between how you interact and how I interact online.

Being able to baseline that, being able to surface the meaningful attributes that are the ones that can help you make better decisions, thats really the key, I think the breakthrough we had to be able to do that in real-time. So, when you think about where the real pinch point is in digital transformation today, were still having a really tough time landing a customer. Youve got one shot to get both the customer experience and the fraud signal right and the evidence is showing that were still struggling mightily there.

Were trying to strip out all of the friction, but then when we go into the verification process, the amount of verification that were throwing at customers that requires interaction, a document upload, a bank verification, a picture of yourself, its so out of the norm of what we would do if we were in person. Its really turning people off and preventing that real transformation to happen. So, were going to continue to use this patents, develop more patents, as I said, weve got four PhDs on staff and two of the brightest founders in the world so we think were at the very beginning of this, you know, kind of digital transformation being filled by behavioral analytics and were going to try to plant our Javascript everywhere we can. (Peter laughs)

Peter: Indeed, Im sure you are. Were almost out of time, but Id love to get a sensemaybe an example or two of insights that people have done that have made.we touched on it a little bit, but what Im talking about iseveryone has the customer journey, whats the theme for improvement like what do people sayeveryone is saying, oh, we need to get rid of this, we need to change that or is it really dependent upon whatever kind of lender is doing it.

Jack: Yeah, I think its a great question. I think there is a collision, a re-occurring collision thats happening every day in every digital lender and that is marketing and CX are trying to take all that friction out of an on-boarding journey so theyre asking the customer for very little information. But then, the chief risk officer is getting very little information and kind of having to start from scratch to ask them basic fundamental questions. It would be like, if we were going down a sales process and everything was going well and then I backed up and I said, well first, I need to ask you your name, are you sure thats your name and are you sure thats your address, it would throw everything that we did.

That collision continues to happen everyday and what we see happen once digital companies can see their customer through the eyes of their customer like see the fact-based behaviors that have happened.weve been in rooms where theyve said, I told you, you know, the risk officer would tell product who have been trying to get rid of a question, I told you that question wasnt causing any friction and thats an important question for us because they can actually see it in the behaviors.

Vice versa, weve seen the product or marketing teams say that question isnt worth the friction that its causing so for the first they time they can move away from these internal debates and this guessing and this endless AB testing to a data-driven approach that says, here is what happened descriptively in the customer journey and then theyre really good at making calls there now that theyre not operating blind.

Peter: Right, right. It goes from a subjective decision to an objective decision.

Jack: Absolutely.

Peter: Okay. So then, whats next for you guys, I mean, you said you wanted to conquer the world. Like in the next 12 to 18 months, what are you guys working on?

Jack: Yeah, yeah. So, the companys accelerating really quickly as you might imagine. Really great people want to work on this opportunity to bring something thats exciting to the market. Youve mentioned as well its horizontally scalable, we can take it to any vertical, any use case where theres digital interaction so next steps will be to continue to lockdown some of the biggest brands in the world across multiple verticals. But, were also be trying to democratize the technology and take it out so that everybody can use this technology, not just the largest corporations in the world.

Peter: Okay. Well, good luck, Jack, I think its fascinating what youve guys have done and its a real service to the industry, I think so. Thanks for coming on the show.

Jack: Thank you very much, Peter, appreciate it.

Peter: Okay, see you.

Jack: Bye, take care.

Peter: As I said, I am a big fan of what Neuro-ID is offering. I think its something that the industry needs and I think every industry needs if youre operating online. The one thing that I was really.one of the highlights, theyve got 100% retention rate since they started because once you see this.you go through a demo and you really see the insight. Once you seeyouve got access to this real-time data and you get to see how much real-time fraud is being detected that wasnt detected before.

I think that just shows you that people arent willing to fly blind and I think its a testament to what theyve done. I think, as I said, this is going to be standard offering online soon, certainly within five years and possibly a lot sooner. Its just something that, you know, you need to know everything you possibly can know about the person on the other end of the screen who is interacting with your website or your app so its really something that.Im very bullish on the whole idea.

Anyway on that note, I will sign off. I very much appreciate your listening and Ill catch you next time. Bye.

Todays episode was sponsored by Lendit Fintech USA, the worlds largest fintech event dedicated to lending and digital banking is going virtual. Its happening online September 29th through October 1st. This year, with everything thats been going on, therell be so much to talk about. It will likely be our most important show. So, join the fintech community online this year where you will meet the people who matter, learn from the experts and get business done. LendIt Fintech, lending and banking connected. Sign up today at lendit.com/usa.

You can subscribe to theLend Academy Podcast viaiTunesorStitcher. To listen to this podcast episode there is an audio player directly below or you candownload the MP3 file here.

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Podcast 262: Jack Alton of Neuro-ID - Lend Academy

Human Behavior

The longer we’re isolated, the less productive we get – Great Bend Tribune

COVID-19 is getting old - particularly for employees whove been working from home for months.

Thats the finding of a Wall Street Journal article, Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isnt So Great After All.

Early on, when millions stopped commuting and started working from home, many companies saw good results. Work was getting done. Most employees enjoyed it. Companies saw an opportunity to reduce future office overhead costs by making remote work part of their long-term strategy.

But that was before cracks began to emerge in the work-from-home model.

According to The Journal, initiatives now take longer. Hiring and integrating new staff is harder. Employees arent bonding or growing with each other. Efforts to collaborate online are going flat.

One CEO puts his finger on the problem: Its vital to have individuals in a room and see physique language and skim indicators that dont come by means of a display screen.

Hes exactly correct. Humans are social animals. Were at our best when we collaborate face to face. Communication theorist Nick Morgan explains why in Forbes:

(W)e share mirror neurons that allow us to match each others emotions unconsciously and immediately. We leak emotions to each other. We anticipate and mirror each others movements when were in sympathy or agreement with one another - when were on the same side. And we can mirror each others brain activity when were engaged in storytelling and listening - both halves of the communication conundrum.

As a freelance writer, working from home for years, I find myself climbing the walls many days. Too much home-office isolation makes getting things done harder.

Though online meetings are helpful, I long for face-to-face interaction. The best ideas come from in-person brainstorming - as one person jots ideas on a whiteboard and others shout out concepts. You just cant do that well in online meetings.

Furthermore, Ive worked for clients I never met in person. Such relationships are never as rich as those in which Im able to meet and work with clients in their offices over time.

In any event, as companies rediscover human natures limitations - that employees isolated at home arent as productive or as engaged with colleagues - they shed light on a growing problem in our society: Increasingly isolated inside our homes, particularly due to the virus, more people are interacting solely through social media and other online platforms.

And these detached means by which we now communicate enable our growing incivility.

This era of smartphones and social media - of nasty tweets and Facebook insults - is making rudeness, reports Psychology Today, our new normal.

The magazine cites research, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, that finds technology-enabled anonymity and a lack of eye-contact are chief contributors to our growing incivility.

This prolonged virus is getting old, for sure, and our patience is running thin. But I hope we will learn from the lessons its teaching us.

I long for a time when pubs are fully operational and we can discuss politics civilly and with open minds over pints of Guinness, with renewed hope that well figure out how to maintain our humanity and civility in our increasingly nutty world when this virus is finally behind us.

Tom Purcell is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review humor columnist. Send comments to Tom at Tom@TomPurcell.com.

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The longer we're isolated, the less productive we get - Great Bend Tribune

Human Behavior

Natural Lithium in Drinking Water Linked to Lower Suicide Rates – American Council on Science and Health

Lithium is quite an element.

Located in the first column of the Periodic Table, it is a metal so soft that it can be cut with a knife. Yet, add a little water and the metal becomes incredibly reactive. If you do it right, you can make it explode. This is because the reaction creates hydrogen gas, which is flammable. It also produces a strong base called lithium hydroxide, which consists of Li+ and OH-ions and is highly corrosive. It's a nasty reaction.

Lithium ions are incredibly useful. Perhaps the two most famous applications are lithium-ion batteries and psychiatric medication. In the former, the lithium ions shuttle positive charges between the two sides of the battery; in the latter, lithium is considered a miraculous drug, dubbed the "penicillin of psychiatry," since it works very well to stabilize mood swings in people with bipolar disorder.

We don't know exactly how it works. Biochemical studies indicate that lithium ions interfere with the inositol signaling pathway inside of nerve cells, ultimately helping to relieve the symptoms of the "manic" phase of bipolar, which is characterized by agitation and hyperactivity. Interestingly, it also helps relieve symptoms of depression, which (as the name "bipolar" implies) is the polar opposite of mania.

Lithium in the Water Supply Linked to Lower Suicide Rates

Because lithium is so reactive, it is never found as a pure metal in nature. Instead, it forms compounds with other elements, like oxygen and chlorine. Though it makes up a measly 0.0007% of the Earth's crust, this trace amount of lithium may have been secretly influencing human behavior for millennia. How so? Through its ability to ameliorate the symptoms of depression.

Since lithium is in the Earth's crust, tiny amounts of it can work its way into the water supply. And because lithiumisn't distributed equally around the planet, some places naturally have more lithium in the water than others. This has allowed epidemiologists to take advantage of this "natural experiment" to investigate if higher levels of lithium are linked to fewer suicides.

Indeed, that is precisely what a new meta-analysis has found. Published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, researchers determined that for every additional microgram per liter of lithium in the water, the suicide rate dropped by 0.27per 100,000 people per year. That's not a lot, but it certainly could have an effect. Consider that the suicide rate in the U.S. is roughly 14 per 100,000 people per year. If everybody had an additional 4g/L of lithium in their water, maybe the rate would be 13 per 100,000.

Public Health Implications

The authors' work has substantial implications. For one thing, we should devise dietary guidelines that ensure that people get enough lithium in their diets. Additionally, the authors suggest adding it directly to the water supply, but this may be too fraught with ethical problems to attempt.

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Natural Lithium in Drinking Water Linked to Lower Suicide Rates - American Council on Science and Health