All posts by medical

Human Behavior

‘Devs’: Here’s why it is important to comprehend a universe without free will to understand the Fx series – MEAWW

Can everything be explained? Is everything we do, every action we have taken up until this very point (and beyond it) be necessitated by antecedent events and conditions? Is there no free will; only the mere illusion of it? Alex Garland (of Annihilation, and Ex Machina fame) grapples with these questions in his new Fx series Devs.

In an interview last year, Garland had said, One was getting my head around this principle of determinism, which basically says that everything that happens in the world is based on cause and effect. So nothing happens that isnt the result of a prior cause. And that has all sorts of implications for us. One is it takes away free will, but it also means that if you had a computer powerful enough you would be able to use cause and effect and use determinism in order to not just predict the future but also understand the past.

And that, essentially, is what is at the core of the plot of Devs -- the principle of determinism and a futuristic Silicon Valley company that is using this principle and advanced technology to possibly predict and even control human behavior. Does it sound a little bit like an extended Black Mirror episode? Only if one takes a shallow look at it. Yes, the very basis of the show, if it has to be boiled down to a reduction, is technophobia. Unlike the Charlie Brooker anthology series, however, the fear here is not just human intent and capabilities in the time of powerful technology. Nor is it lukewarm tales of the same human failures and flaws over and over again. Rather, its a more philosophical look at the potential of such technology and the pragmatism of fearing something like that.

Consequently, determinism and fatalism are very important to understand. Essentially, the roots of the notion of determinism surely lie in the idea that everything can, in principle, be explained, or that everything that is, has a sufficient reason for being and being as it is, and not otherwise.

Pierre-Simon Laplace, the French polymath and scholar, wrote in 1820: We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes.

In the eyes of Garland, this core philosophy is what makes everything dangerous. If every decision flows in a fixed path, and free will is a lie, then surely someone with appropriate means would take advantage of that. But there lies the philosophical sinkhole of fatalism. If determinism holds in our world, then there are no probabilities. In which case, the technological dominance the show promises in its plot is essentially inevitable. Mind-bending, isnt it?

Devs airs exclusively on FX on Hulu, every Thursday at 12 am.

The rest is here:
'Devs': Here's why it is important to comprehend a universe without free will to understand the Fx series - MEAWW

Human Behavior

CDC recommends not touching your face to stop spread of COVID-19. It’s harder than it looks. – Fox17

ALLENDALE, Mich. Washing your hands is important. The CDC recommends 20 seconds of scrubbing to prevent the spread of illnesses such as Coronavirus.

Health officials are also recommending people try to stop touching their faces.

Its just a nervous habit I guess, Grand Valley State University student Alexa Philbrick said

Stopping touching your face is easier said than done. Sunday, FOX 17 tested it for ourselves. We observed two groups of Grand Valley State University students for 20 minutes each to see just how often they touched their faces without realizing.

Yeah, I know I do. I mean, I even do it when Im driving. So its just a habit, GVSU student Adrian Hall said.

We told the students we were observing them looking for "a certain human behavior," but didn't tell the students what specifically we were looking for.

The coronavirus has been all over the news and stuff, so I assumed it had something to do with sickness, Alexa Philbrick said.

It happened again, and again, and again. Nearly every student we watched touched their face. It's a hard habit to break. But the first step is to realize you're doing it.

Ive been a lot more conscious of it, now, just because of whats going on, GVSU student Viviana Rubio said.

Excerpt from:
CDC recommends not touching your face to stop spread of COVID-19. It's harder than it looks. - Fox17

Human Behavior

Why robotic process automation (RPA) is the perfect technology for logistics – FreightWaves

Consider the time you spend reading an email, combing through it to harvest relevant information to put into an operating system, and then taking the resulting data from the operating system to craft a response. Email is tedious and requires a significant commitment of time time that brokers could use to cultivate relationships with customers and think strategically about business growth.

Technology is flooding the freight industry, leveraging apps to streamline singular tasks like load matching, and checking in and paying carriers tasks that not too long ago were completed manually. The apps are coded to perform specific, limited functions, but when you consider a task like email, theres more nuance and variation. Frankly, its more human.

A fast-growing technology that imitates human behavior and has taken root in the financial services and hospitality industries is slowly making its way into logistics. Robotic process automation (RPA) is an intelligent automation software that uses machine learning, natural language processing and artificial intelligence to mimic the rote tasks a human performs on a daily basis, whether its reading email or quoting rates. Eventually, RPA technology could provide every broker an assistant to perform lower-level tasks so they can so they can focus on high-level strategy.

RPA is a rapid development environment, so what we can do with RPA that is different than any kind of automation in the past or robotics in the past is apply rapid development tools to fairly quickly build a bot, said Joel McGinley, managing director at Hubtek, a staffing and technology company based in Miami and Medellin, Colombia. We can create a bot in less than a day depending on the complexity of the bot. That same automation, using other tools, would take maybe a month with lots of training and testing.

RPA can integrate with any existing technology infrastructure, regardless of its sophistication or whether the multiple systems it interfaces with integrate with one another. For Amit Bhutani, sales director at Automation Anywhere, an RPA platform based out of San Jose, California, this is one of RPAs biggest advantages.

You tell the bots to go retrieve information from five different systems, they will do it, Bhutani said. Bots dont need systems talking to each other in order to operate. Large companies might have two or three TMS systems at least, and most of the time, they dont integrate with one another, but it does not matter to RPA. Also, users dont need to know Java or C++, this is all user-friendly interface, drag-and-drop functionality.

Not only can RPA be built and implemented quickly, it allows a company to grow while maintaining and enhancing the existing workforce. So RPA can be thought of as a tool for workforce optimization, rather than workforce replacement.

Data entry can be very laborious and the human being is prone to errors, especially with high volume, McGinley said. A robot can handle that entry very efficiently, very quickly and never makes an error. The robot works 24 hours, 7 days a week, never asks for a raise, never has any office drama. So theyre kind of an assistant. Imagine if we could give every worker in this industry an assistant to increase their productivity.

Companies within the logistics industry are positioned well for RPA technology, not just because theyre striving for competitive advantage, but also because of the industrys sophisticated interdependencies. RPA can help the labor pool, particularly the new, tech-inclined generation of workers, pursue work of higher value, reducing busy work and the training it entails. The end result: greater employee satisfaction and higher retention rates for companies. RPA could also improve other areas of the industry, including shipment scheduling, inventory tracking, customer visibility and invoicing.

RPA enablescompaniesto offer a better quality of service while freeing up labor capacity to engage more closely with their customers says Anubhav Saxena, Executive Vice President and Chief of Global Alliances at Automation Anywhere.Shipping and logistic companies can nowofferpremium services to more customers whileprovidingbetter customer satisfaction which helps raise their top line.

McGinley says many logistics companies worry their scale wont support a technology like RPA, but once they see the capabilities and costs of the program, the resistance dissipates. Hubtek has recently partnered with Automation Anywhere to make automation more cost-accessible to logistics companies.

While Automation Anywhere has been innovating its business for 16 years and has deployed 1.8 million bots, Hubtek is one of Automation Anywheres first partners in transportation. Utilizing a partnership like this prevents companies from taking on the cost of licensing, so $10 million-$30 million companies can compete with billion-dollar companies that can invest heavily in technology.

Originally posted here:
Why robotic process automation (RPA) is the perfect technology for logistics - FreightWaves

Human Behavior

The Big Problem With Top-Down Office Design – Propmodo

After enough study of human behavior, it becomes apparent that, oftentimes, leaders dont always act in ways that benefit their followers. Economists and political scientists call this the agency problem. What is a leader if not an agent of the people? They are supposed to lead. They are obligated to consider their principles best interest. This problem has bled into every aspect of how our financial and political systems operate.

Urban planning is a place where agency problems are blindingly obvious to spot. There are notable failures around the world, from poor zoning policy to insufficient planning for growth to legacies of racism and classism, particularly around housing. While the fault gets placed on professional urban planners the disciplines integrative nature, taking cues (and following orders from) other principles, like economics and politics, means that it is particularly vulnerable to being negatively impacted by external forces.

Someone has to make the hard decisions when it comes to space planning, making it a top-down process. This can create opportunities for leaders to focus on the wrong things when it comes to helping the people who use it. A great (horrible) example is Brasilia. The federal capital of Brazil, Brasilia was built in five short years to be the perfect Brazilian city. Rigidly-planned buildings housed governmental offices or living quarters, while expansive parks offered open space. The master-planned portion of the city, with its sweeping highways, long parks and copy-pasted buildings, looks like artwork from the satellite perspective.

This appearance hides a number of major challenges facing the city. The rigidly-planned housing available within the city was unable to absorb the impacts of the construction workers who actually constructed the buildings, as well as the subsequent waves of transplants to the area. Designer Lucio Costas aggressively car-centric design allowed plenty of space for streets and exit ramps of all sorts, but shorthanded the pedestrian in a major way. While Brasilia is loved by some, it has failed to evolve organically as a city, largely the result of its prescriptive design.

The downfalls of top-down design dont just show up at the city level. Take a look at your local architecture and development website, and youll inevitably see tons of people, NIMBY or not, complaining about the newest urban planning initiatives. At an even smaller scale, consider the dynamics of design within office buildings, where spaces are generally expected to be used as-is regardless of the particular needs of their rank and file occupants. If there are cubicles, the employees will get cubicles, even if they primarily need to collaborate. If there are private, enclosed offices, thats what the employees are going to get, even if they were less productive in the privacy of separate workspace.

This is a huge challenge facing open offices today, as well. In our most recent research report, we investigated the studies and media surrounding the increasingly-common open office, the vast majority of which is overwhelmingly negative. This makes sense, since there are a lot of different types of employees who wouldnt like the open office layout: people who have been used to enclosed offices or cubicles for their entire professional lives, people who are easily distracted by noise, people who dont want or need to collaborate, and people who make a lot of calls. For fun, think about the workspace in the television show The Office. Is it any wonder that the employees of Dunder Mifflin waste seemingly 90% of every workday? Its an office full of phone-centric salespeople and concentration-heavy accountants, and the majority of them work in the same open space without even a semblance of privacy or room to focus. Of course, they spend all day planning parties and bothering each other. Theres no way youre buckling down to knock out an expense report or close a big sale in that kind of environment.

As in Brasilia, one of the fundamental challenges of the modern open office (or really, the office in general) is that it prescribes the use of space instead of providing a spatial canvas for employees to use as they see fit. There is no flexibility. Of course, companies have size parameters and budgets to work within, but it doesnt excuse the vast majority of offices that simply tell their employees to sit down at their desk and power through the day, especially in an age when workplace flexibility has been shown to increase productivity. Solutions for these inadequate spaces dont even need to be tech-centric. Urban planners and designers have been using design charrettes to gain stakeholder input for years.

CBREs Peter Andrew, the senior director of workplace strategies in Asia Pacific, mentioned using a similar approach. According to Peter, CBRE has been finding success with rapid two-day workshops where we bring a large group of senior leaders into a room and facilitate a debate and discussion around how [the office space] works, as well as the underlying design principlesin the last 18 months of experimentation, Ive seen more creativity in the completion of work environments than Ive ever seen before.

Whether the scale at hand is the office or the city, spatial planners cannot afford to design from the top down without user buy-in. Imagine taking a software project from alpha to public launch, completely skipping the beta test. What a disaster that would be! The same can be said for physical spaces. Brasilia may have been built half a century ago, but its lessons, and its car-centric streets, live on.

Continue reading here:
The Big Problem With Top-Down Office Design - Propmodo

Human Behavior

Timeline: Singing – The First Art – Vermont Public Radio

In the beginning was the voice. Voice is sounding breath, the audible sign of life. Those beautiful words were written by Otto Jespersen, an early 20th century Danish linguist, in the book Language, Its Nature, Development and Origin. Jespersen was on to something with that statement, voice as the audible sign of life. It reminds me of another popular quote by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Music is the universal language of mankind.

Loading...

On Timeline weve been discovering all the ways in which music has changed world and focusing quite a bit on how musicality has shaped us as a species. Weve already talked about how music and language are connected, and weve discussed the physical, cognitive and emotional benefits making music has on our bodies and our minds. In this episode, lets explore music as the universal language of humanity.

Ancient Hindus called singing The first art. They marked playing instruments as the second and dancing the third. That phrase though, Singing: The First Art is the title of a popular textbook on Bel Canto, or beautiful-singing style, written by Dan H. Marek. The first lesson in that textbook on operatic technique uses a popular quote in Italian, Chi sa ben respirare e sillibare sapra ben cantare, those who know how to breathe and pronounce well, know how to sing well.

Theres not a culture on this planet that doesnt sing. Let me put that statement into perspective. Not every culture wears clothes, especially our Western idea of clothing. Not every culture has developed writing or mathematics. There are even cultures that dont kiss! However, every culture uses their voice in song.

In 2018, Harvard University conducted a study that seems to lend credence to Longfellows words. 750 online participants from 60 different countries were played short, 14-second clips of songs from cultures around the world. The participants were able to identify whether a song was a lullaby, a dancing song or a healing song regardless of where the music came from or their familiarity with the culture. You can take the same quiz yourself at the website of The Harvard Gazette.

The findings of this study run counter to what most ethnomusicologists, psychologists and other experts would have predicted. It has been assumed that the understanding and appreciation of music is a learned trait, tied to our cultural identity. But this study begins to paint another picture; the possibility of an innate human ability to understand music and song. Samuel Mehr is one of the researchers behind the Harvard study. Mehr states that, This kind of basic, cross-cultural fact-finding about human behavior is the first step in developing a new science of music.

Weve always believed that music has the power to cross boundaries and bring people together. It seems that science is starting to catch up as well.

Find out when and how music changed us and the world and follow the Timeline.

Read more:
Timeline: Singing - The First Art - Vermont Public Radio

Human Behavior

When You Hate Your Neighbor, and Then Your Kids Start Dating – The New York Times

In his essay Everybodys Protest Novel, James Baldwin lambastes Harriet Beecher Stowes one-dimensional portrayal of Uncle Tom. The protest novel, he writes, becomes something very closely resembling the zeal of those alabaster missionaries to Africa to cover the nakedness of the natives to reduce all Americans to the compulsive, bloodless dimensions of a guy named Joe. Stowes Uncle Tom, her only black man, has been robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex.

Much like Uncle Tom, Xavier, the perfect biracial teenager, is presented as a nonthreatening fantasy for the books white audience. When a girl sexts Xavier, inviting him for a repeat of an encounter theyve had together, he mechanistically thinks, What straight cis male wouldnt? But Xavier wouldnt, because when it came to hookup culture, hed figured out fast he wasnt built for that. An absurd amount of real estate is given to Xaviers good grades, good work ethic, good recommendations. Before eating an apple, he shines it on his shirt.

Just as Brad Whitman functions as a testimony against flamboyant spending, Xavier operates as a paragon of humility. His car? A paint-flaking Honda. His guitar? He saved up for it by working a minimum-wage job, without a lot of complaint. His matriculation at an elite private college? By means of a substantial scholarship. Xaviers bootstrapping is matched with an active rejection of surface symbols of blackness and hip-hop. I hate cornbread, he says. Out loud. To himself. The idea of wearing diamond earrings? Xavier says, As if. When things turn dire for Xavier, his respectability politics are all he has to cling to: He wasnt just some random black perp, a thug from the hood. He was half white (not that it should matter). Upon discovering the apostrophe in front of the word hood, I was overcome and placed the novel down. As far as Fowlers black characters are concerned, to quote Baldwin, We have only the authors word that they are Negro and they are, in all other respects, as white as she can make them.

A Good Neighborhood is a pitch-perfect example of how literary endeavors of allyship not to be confused with indictments of systemic oppression can limit a novels understanding of human behavior. It provides the same frustration one feels at Thanksgiving, when your self-described open-minded aunt wont shut up about the beautiful gay couple she waves to at the gym. Is it possible to enjoy a work of art with bad politics? Absolutely. Ive seen Pretty Woman nine times, minimum. But when a story is presented as art and activism, it becomes the readers responsibility to take the novel at its repetitive word. Here, in this good neighborhood, it is not a tragedy that violence happens to black men, but rather, that it can happen to one of the good ones. If America is a house on fire, A Good Neighborhood is mostly concerned with exiting quietly, in a single-file line.

Read the rest here:
When You Hate Your Neighbor, and Then Your Kids Start Dating - The New York Times

Human Behavior

This Is What Pro Sports, Youth Sports And Esports Need To Do To Manage Coronavirus – Forbes

Juventus' Portuguese forward Cristiano Ronaldo runs on the pitch in an empty stadium due to the ... [+] novel coronavirus outbreak during the Italian Serie A football match Juventus vs Inter Milan, at the Juventus stadium in Turin on March 8, 2020. (Photo by VINCENZO PINTO/AFP via Getty Images)

By Arthur L. Caplan & Lee H. Igel

Golden State Warriors basketball star Steph Curry was recently sidelined with symptoms of new coronavirus. Fortunately, it was a false alarm. Curry turns out to have come down with a case of the flu, the symptoms of which are easily confused with those of the coronavirus. Still, the scare raises a question: What should the outbreak of COVID-19 infections and deaths mean for those playing sports or attending sporting events?

Many major events, ranging from the Olympic-sized to local pick-up games, are being reorganized to take place without fans, postponed, or canceled. Some are wondering if the gym, locker room, or stands are the place to be right now. Is such an abundance of caution warranted?

In some parts of the world with heavy outbreaks, the answer is Yes.

In Italy's Serie A, soccer matches have already been played without fans in stadiums and there are calls for the league to suspend its current season. In Asia, the Tokyo Marathona primer for the event to be run at the 2020 Olympic Gameswas run by 300 elite athletes instead of its usual 35,000-plus participants and watched by only handfuls of supporters along the route. Events in almost every sport imaginable (and even ones you didn't know existed) have been called off in China, South Korea, and other parts of the region. Even esports is changing its game plan: the three Asia-based teams in the Overwatch League have reportedly traveled to North America to play matches that were originally scheduled to be played in their home cities.

Major sports leagues in locales that are seeing signs of COVID-19 cases beginning to add up are also making plans. The top-tier English Premier League, in which matchday revenues can reach up to $5-million for the home club, is working with government officials and broadcasting executives to determine how things could play out if fans are barred from accessing stadiums. In the United States, decision-makers at the NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, and NCAA are considering when it might be time to play games without any fans in attendance.

All of the above examples speak to the larger events being either postponed, relocated, or canceled. They say almost nothing of the local youth sport and amateur sports events slated to be held everywhere from neighborhood parks to tournacation megacomplexes. At all levels of sport, millions of people's livelihoods and billions of people's lifestyles are being affected.

Sport is a key area of attention in many peoples minds on most days. This is especially true in times of crisis, when we look to what is happening in sport to help us make sense of what is happening in economics, politics, society, and public health. It is no less the case when it comes to noticing news about rising numbers of COVID-19 cases, states of emergency, quarantines, social distancing, and social mitigations that are leading to closures of office buildings, schools, malls, houses of worship and other places in which large crowds gather in confined spaces.

It is possible that people who would otherwise attend a sports event might choose to stay home in an effort to avoid catching the virus. But let's be realistic about this line of thinking. For one thing, there is going to be a healthy dose of optimism bias to go around.

That quirk of human behavior, as Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman has pointed out, is a tendency for individuals to be overly confident and overly optimistic about their prospects for taking-on risks. In other words, it's a It won't happen to me syndrome.

Consider that in the context of COVID-19, with its incubation period of up-to two weeks and the reality that there are people who are infected but don't yet experience the full effect of symptoms. Now, consider that in the context of an opportunity to see a beloved athlete or team play, whether in-person at the venue or via television at a pub. And, oddly, it may be less expensive and more accessible to attend an event if the usual fans stay away or some superstars decide to sit out for a few weeks.

The fans are likely to keep coming. But will the athletes stay home if sick? Look at the recent example of University of Oregon star basketball player Sabrina Ionescu being heralded for speaking at Kobe Bryant's memorial service and later in the day earning a triple-double en route to her team winning the Pac-12 championship while battling the flu.

Ionescu played sick. This, for many people, recalled the career performance that Michael Jordan delivered in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals after showing up at the arena dehydrated and suffering from flu-like symptoms. According to public health guidelines, both should have been holed up at home. But, everybody knows, that's not what champions do; they push through the perceived adversity. Yet that is exactly the wrong lesson when applied to viruses seeking to sicken and kill us. If you have a fever, you dont go to the medical tentyou go home with a mask on.

Once COVID-19 emerges at the human level, it can spread easily from one infected person to others. That can happen, for example, by way of a cough or a sneeze, close personal contact such as a handshake, spitting, or touching an object or surface that has virus particles on it, and then failing to wash hands before touching one's mouth, nose, or eyes.

What, then, does all of this mean for how sports events should be managed right now in the USA with COVID-19 swirling around?

First, big-time athletes, coaches, staff and mascots need to get a flu shot if they haven't received one already. This wont stop new coronavirus infections. But it will help result in reduced incidence of flu cases that stress hospital emergency rooms and intensive care units, which is a duty we all have when there may be a big demand for both services due to coronavirus.

Second, dont practice or play while sick. Stay home. Do not risk infecting others. Take a cue from Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry, who is battling a bout of the seasonal flu and will be sitting out his team's upcoming NBA game. This also means cutting back on trips out-of-townwhether to see your favorite big league team play a game or take-in another of junior's little league tourna-cation weekendsand especially to hot zones that are harboring lots of cases.

Third, make hand washing and hand sanitizer stations available and accessible to anyone who is healthy enough to be at the game. At the same time, use the sports event to educate the public on proper health measures. Play 20-second-long jingles in bathrooms and on overhead scoreboards to remind people how long it takes to thoroughly wash hands. And make sure there are messages telling everyone to stop spitting all over the field and dugouts. For that matter, make sure that no one is sharing water bottles, towels, or oxygen masks.

There are also other typical person-to-person activities that need to be reconsidered in ways that use technology to avoid risky contact. For example, ticket windows and concessionaires need to shift to credit card- and contactless pay-only instead of paper money. Team and athlete visits to childrens hospitals and nursing homes, where patients tend to have especially compromised immune systems, need to go virtual for the time being.

Sports decision-makers have plenty to consider about going forward with games. It is not an easy decision to begin with and the pressure from all cornersplayers and fans, sponsors and broadcasters, government officials, residents and visitorsdoesn't make it any easier.

Plus, what happens when, at a game played behind closed doors, someone shows up with a fever? Does everyone get sent home? Do they quarantine everyone who was there? Should athletes and teams be sequestered to keep things going? Should we agree that if you are not ready to sequester, you can't play?

Above all, sports decision-makers need to loudly affirm that protecting lives takes priority over entertainment and human achievement. Eventually, we will find a cure or a vaccine for COVID-19. Until then, however, public health needs to be sent in off the bench to take a starring role.

Follow this link:
This Is What Pro Sports, Youth Sports And Esports Need To Do To Manage Coronavirus - Forbes

Human Behavior

Stocking up to prepare for a crisis isn’t ‘panic buying’. Its actually a pretty rational – The Jakarta Post – Jakarta Post

Recent days have brought reports of shoppers clearing out supermarket shelves from Wuhan and Hong Kong to Singapore and Milan in response to the spread of coronavirus. This behavior is often described as panic buying.

However, the research shows that whats going on here is nothing to do with panic. Its a perfectly rational response to the situation.

Responding to disaster

Panic is one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted of all human behaviors. The common, traditional understanding of the phenomenon is based on myth rather than reality.

If we understand panic as a state of uncontrollable fear that drives irrational behavior, then how people usually respond in the face of disaster is something else entirely.

Its a common belief that social law breaks down in a disaster. In the Hollywood version, chaos ensues and people act in illogical or unreasonable ways. The reality is very different.

Most research rejects the notion of a disaster syndrome described as a state of stunned shock or the occurrence of mass panic. In real disasters, people usually hold on to tenets of acceptable behavior such as morality, loyalty, and respect for law and customs.

Planning ahead

If we are not seeing panic, what are we seeing? Unlike most animals, humans can perceive some future threats and prepare for them. In the case of something like the coronavirus, one important factor is the speed at which information can be shared around the world.

We see empty streets in Wuhan and other cities, where people are unable or unwilling to go outside for fear of contracting the virus. It is natural that we want to prepare for the perceived threat of similar disruption to our own communities.

Stocking up on food and other supplies helps people feel they have some level of control over events. It is a logical thought process: if the virus comes to your area, you want to be able to reduce your contact with others but also ensure you can survive that withdrawal period.

The greater the perceived threat, the stronger the reaction will be. At this stage it is believed that virus has an incubation period of up to 14 days, so people want to be prepared for at least 14 days of isolation.

A reasonable response

Preparing for a period of isolation is not the result of an extreme or irrational fear but rather an expression of our ingrained survival mechanisms. Historically, we had to protect ourselves from things such as harsh winters, failing crops or infectious diseases, without the aid of modern social institutions and technologies.

Stocking up on supplies is a valid response. It indicates citizens are not helplessly reacting to an outside circumstance but instead are thinking forward and planning for a possible situation.

While part of this response is due to the urge for self-reliance, it may also be a herd behavior to some extent. A herd behavior is one driven by imitating what others do these behaviors can be a kind of conditional cooperation with others (for example, yawning).

Erring on the side of caution

A lot of uncertainty surrounds disasters, which means all advanced decisions are made on the basis of perceived threats not the actual disaster itself. Because of this uncertainty, people tend to overreact. We are generally risk-averse and aim to prepare for the worst-case scenario rather than the best.

When it comes to stocking up (or hoarding) a large private collection of goods to see us through a disaster, we dont know how much we will need because we dont know how long the event will last.

Accordingly, we tend to err on the side of caution and buy too much rather than too little. This is the natural response of a rational person who faces future uncertainty and seeks to guarantee their familys survival.

The importance of emotions

Buying up large stores of supplies which can lead to empty supermarket shelves may seem like an irrational emotion response. But emotions are not irrational: they help us decide how to focus our attention.

Emotions allow individuals to attend to issues longer, to care about things harder and to show more resilience. They are an instinctual element of human behavior that we often fail to include when trying to understand how people act.

Changes in individual behaviors can have large-scale implications. For example, a supermarket will normally organize its supply chain and stocks on the basis of average levels of consumption.

These systems do not handle big fluctuations in demand very well. So when demand surges as it has in parts of China, Italy and elsewhere the result is empty shelves.

Should I be stocking up?

In general Australians are not as well prepared for disaster as our kin across the ditch in New Zealand, who routinely have emergency kits in their homes due to the prevalence of earthquakes. However, the recent summer of fires, floods and disease should have given us all a wake-up call to be prepared.

You dont need to rush out this very minute to buy several dozen tins of baked beans, but you might want to start assembling this kind of kit. Look through the ABCs survival kit list, figure out what you already have and what you need to get.

Then you can make a shopping list and steadily gather the things you need. Done this way, it gives shops time to restock and wont leave the shelves bare.

***

David A. Savage, Associate Professor of Behavioural Economics , Newcastle Business School, University of Newcastle andBenno Torgler, Professor, Business School, Queensland University of Technology

The article was first published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post.

Link:
Stocking up to prepare for a crisis isn't 'panic buying'. Its actually a pretty rational - The Jakarta Post - Jakarta Post

Human Behavior

Stop saying employees are the weakest link in cybersecurity – The Next Web

There are a few things we just wont stand for in 2020 but first on the list is the phrase, employees are the weakest link in cyber security. Its a saying that people really should have ditched in 2019.

You can probably guess that since Im writing this, unfortunately, most people havent. Online and even among cyber security professionals, its still a common thought process.

Whats wrong with believing employees are the weak point?, you might ask. Given the ever-increasing frequency data breaches with human error often being either a cause or catalyst in the majority of cases youd be forgiven for thinking that employees are naturally at fault.

But theyre not and there are a few logical reasons why.

Firstly, framing the conversation like this doesnt get us anywhere. Are football players to blame when they lose a match? Well, in a way, but the players are also to blame when they win. And even when they do lose, telling them that theyre the problem is only going to demoralize and lead to further losses.

[Read: Digital transformation projects dont fail because of a shortage of tech]

Secondly, if blame has to lie somewhere, it surely lies with the security awareness programs rather than the employees who rely on those programs to better protect themselves. The reason that human-error breaches continue to occur at such at rate is that and lets be honest here security awareness training in its current form just doesnt work.

Training doesnt work because, in most cases, it focuses solely on awareness. Awareness is all well and good, but increased awareness by itself is not what necessarily matters. Just because people are aware of cyber risks doesnt mean that, in the real world, they will behave in a more secure way.

To reduce human cyber risk, security awareness training a rather misleading moniker when you think about it must go beyond raising awareness. It needs to focus on also changing behavior and building a culture of security simultaneously. Collectively, you can think of this as ABC.

Doing so creates a virtuous circle in which improvements in one area flow into the next. Raising awareness lays the foundation for changes in behavior. Secure behaviors nurture a culture of security. And, completing the circle, a culture of security advances awareness.

How do businesses improve behavior and, in turn, begin to develop a positive culture? While theres no short answer, the first step for any business new to the principle of ABC is to try to understand the origins of undesirable behavior. One of the most useful questions to tackle early on is, Why are my people not complying with security policies?

When businesses begin to probe why, they tend to find that motivation, or rather lack of it, is at the root. Staff are failing to take security on-board as part of their everyday job: They dont see it as a serious issue; they dont see it as their responsibility; they dont see it as something they have much control over; or a combination of the above.

More often than not, businesses also discover that the relationship between security and staff has become strained. In extreme cases, its become adversarial. Security is seen as an inconvenience, an annoyance, as something that exists just to get in the way.

Businesses will likely need to address both before significant improvements are seen. Making cyber security more personalized and relatable to staff, gamification, bringing leaders on-board, and getting employees involved in cyber security conversations, will all go some way to boosting motivation. Meanwhile, making security policies and procedures simple ensuring that doing the right thing is the easiest thing will help to address issues of tension between security and staff.

So, if I could ask businesses to adopt two new approaches to cyber security this year, the first would be to leave behind the weakest link language. The second, to hopefully avoid a data breach in next years stocking, would be to pay more attention to behavior and culture.

By treating people as a useful and powerful security asset, and by addressing security awareness, behavior and culture in tandem, businesses can bring about real and tangible reductions in their human cyber risk.

Published March 10, 2020 06:00 UTC

See the article here:
Stop saying employees are the weakest link in cybersecurity - The Next Web

Anatomy

The anatomy of handling: What makes the perfect driver’s car? – Autocar

We can boil things down further still. Forget the way a car steers, its grip or on-limit balance and simply ask yourself this: can you see out of the bloody thing? One of the legacies left over from Gordon Murrays McLaren F1 is that all McLarens made today have glasshouses like goldfish bowls. And when youre in a car that wide, low and fast, just having the vision to place it accurately on the road is not just reassuring and relaxing, in the most real sense, but it also makes for a better-handling car. Last year I drove a Lamborghini Aventador SVJ straight after a McLaren 720S and I found the Lambo immeasurably harder and more intimidating to drive not because it was faster, because it wasnt, but because by comparison you peep out at the world through a letter box.

There are other crucial details. What is the pedal placement like? If the car is manual, can you heel and toe under both light and heavy braking? How do the brakes feel? If you find yourself thinking about your cars brakes, theres almost certainly something wrong with them. Are the pedals directly in line with the seat? If manual, wheres the gearlever? Ideally no more than a splayed hands width from the steering wheel.

What about those safety systems? How intrusive are they, is there an intermediate Sport setting and does it actually make a difference? Can you separate out traction and stability control, can you actually switch everything off when the time comes and does it come back on again if, say, it detects a certain degree of slip with full ABS actuation?

A cars handling should also not fundamentally change through speed or load, although it almost always does, even in these days of computer controlled damping. You dont want a car flopping around all over the place the moment you try to corner fast or load your family and luggage, but the amount of body roll, pitch or heave a car can exhibit matters little so long as that movement is properly controlled. On the other hand, a car that is so tied down on its springs that it doesnt move at all is likely to be deflected by lumps, bumps and changes in road surface, which does nothing for the confidence either.

Which, finally, brings us to the limit stuff. To me the amount of raw grip a road car can generate is not terribly interesting. Actually and often it gets in the way, because theres not much point giving a car great limit balance if that limit is so far away that no one is ever going to reach it. Also, the faster youre going, the quicker things tend to happen, which can create problems all of its own. Thats why cars such as the Alpine A110 and Toyota GT86 have been as praised for the easy access they provide to their limits as they have for their behaviour once you have arrived there.

See the rest here:
The anatomy of handling: What makes the perfect driver's car? - Autocar