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The Kent County Farm Bureau is one of 10 recipients of $1,000 each from the White-Reinhardt Fund for Education, which recognizes the outstanding agricultural literacy efforts of educators and communities across the country.

A total of $25,000 in scholarships and grants was given recently to build on their work to connect students with how their food is grown.

The grant will go to University of Delaware Cooperative Extensions 4-H Embryology Program, which teaches embryology in kindergarten through second grade classrooms throughout Kent County. Grant money will be used to upgrade the incubators used.

This is so awesome, and I know the teachers are going to be so excited to use the new (digital) models, said Kristen Cook, 4-H youth development educator. In doing some test runs and learning about the new incubator, we have seen the hatch rates increase from an average of 60-65% to closer to 90-95%. While this may seem minor, it is a huge improvement on the old model and will improve the experience for the participants even more.

Cook said the older models would be retained to slightly expand our reach within staffing limitations but mostly as back up incubators as the need arises.

The White-Reinhardt Fund for Education is a project of the American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture, in cooperation with the American Farm Bureau Womens Leadership Committee. The fund honors two former committee chairwomen, Berta White and Linda Reinhardt, who were trailblazers in early national efforts to expand the outreach of agricultural education and improve agricultural literacy. Applications for the mini-grants are accepted in October and April.

Cook expressed her gratitude to the White-Reinhardt Fund and the Foundation for making this possible.

She relayed one success story from a teacher who wrote, The childrens interest in this science experiment was the most engaging of any weve done all year. They were able to verbally explain the steps of the life cycle of a chicken, describe the steps of how a chick hatches, learned empathy, how to care for a living thing and describe similarities and differences between the chicks.

The foundation also awarded 10 teachers and classroom volunteers with $1,500 scholarships to attend the National Ag in the Classroom Conference, to be held in Salt Lake City, Utah, June 23-26.

For more, call 697-3183.

Embryology

BizCap Structures and Delivers Financing for Bay Area Medical Clinic – News – ABL Advisor

February 13, 2020 medical

Business Capital structured and delivered approximately $6MM in senior secured loans for NOVA IVF, a clinic established in 1987, providing in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments with a consistent success rate well above average nationwide. With an experienced team of embryology doctors and among the highest percentage success rate, NOVA is reputed as one of the most desired treatment centers of its type, as evidenced by its one-year waiting list. The company is also a leader in egg-freezing technologies, a service which is increasingly in demand. This financing facility will allow the clinic to hire new physicians, take on additional clients waiting for treatment, and increase revenues.

Westhook Capital (Westhook), a Los Angeles-based private equity firm, today announced it has made an investment in Santa Rita Landscaping (Santa Rita), a leading provider of commercial landscaping services in Tucson, Arizona. The Company will continue to be led by Tanner Spross and Kathi Roche, who will remain in their positions as CEO and CFO, respectively. Santa Rita ranks #114 in Landscape Managements Top 150. Its services include the design, installation and maintenance of commercial landscape.

Brian Ham, co-founder of Santa Rita, said, We are very proud of our team and what we have built at Santa Rita. We are excited about Westhooks partnership-driven approach and weve been impressed by their deep expertise in the Green Industry.

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BizCap Structures and Delivers Financing for Bay Area Medical Clinic - News - ABL Advisor

Embryology

Why Women Grieve After Miscarrying And How Their Loss Is Changing The Misconceptions Of Miscarriage – YourTango

February 13, 2020 medical

The grief of miscarriage is a modern phenomenon.

By Lizzy Francis

When Dr. Lara Freidenfelds, a historian of health, parenting, and reproduction,suffered a miscarriage17 years ago, she was shocked and distressed. But what shocked her the most, as a PhD candidate in the History of Science writing her dissertation on the modern period and menstruation in 20th century America, was just howcommon miscarriages were. (Around 20 percent of confirmed pregnanciesmiscarry.)

Even more surprising to her: if you take a pregnancy test as early as you can, about six days before your expected period, theres almost a one in three chance that you are going to lose that pregnancy.

This got her thinking, Why was the information that was out there when I was trying to get pregnant so obscure? she said. Why didnt I know that just getting a positive test didnt really tell me, yet, that I was successfully pregnant?

RELATED:7 Ways To Help Your Relationship After A Miscarriage

Pulling at these threads,Dr. Freidenfeldsdove into the history of miscarriages and came out with a brand new understanding of modern pregnancy and how market forces, medical advancements, pregnancy apps, and birth control have given expecting parents a sense of control and surety over their pregnancy that they just dont have in the first place.

Her new book,The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: A History of Miscarriage in America, is a deeply researched and thoughtful exploration of the history of miscarriages that serves to teach parents about the history of pregnancy, but also lift the shame over it.

Fatherlyspoke to Freidenfelds about the history of miscarriages, how birth control created unrealistic expectations for familys abilities to get pregnant, and how mens roles in pregnancy and miscarriage have shifted right alongside their partners.

What compelled you to write about the history of miscarriages?

I started researching this book, now, about 17 years ago when I had themiscarriage. Itreally made me feel better to start thinking through this. I know, as a historian, that before the 20th century, women didnt think about early pregnancy in the same way they do now. They thought of it as a suspicion, that you could be pregnant, but not being certain about it, looking for symptoms.

But then, if you had a late menstrual period, and even if it was a crampy, heavy one, if you didnt see the form of a child in it, then women would attribute it to either sickness or just a late period or a pregnancy that had sort of begun, that the materials had never really come together into a child.

I thought,why cant I think about my pregnancies that way, too? In some ways, we know a lot now. We know a lot about embryology. But weve lost a lot of really important knowledge about how often embryos dont actually succeed and arent actually viable.

And then, I wanted to know, how did we come to such a different understanding? And how did we, in the process of learning so much science and medicine, actually lose a key piece of knowledge about how uncertain early pregnancy is?

So, how did we lose that key piece of knowledge?

I think that theres some really large and important cultural forces at work. Theyve reshaped modern life in some really positive ways.

Around the time of the American revolution, women and men began to want to have control over their reproduction. At least by 1960,with the birth control pill, we succeeded. Were successful at preventing pregnancies when we dont want them, so now, we feel like when we do decide to be pregnant, that it should be successful.

What do you mean?

Modern birth control is a wonderful thing, but it has given us a misleading intuition about how secure pregnancies are. Secondly, our vision of parenting has shifted in some really important ways.

In colonial America, sure, you would like a child to love, but, parenting happens just because you got married. It was up to God and fate how many children you had, and children were for helping with household work, and working on the farm, and supporting you in your old age, and respecting God.

All of those reasons for being a parent over the last few centuries have dropped away. Today, our parenting is really focused, almost exclusively, on forming a loving bond with a child. That idea ofwhen that bond is supposed to start has moved earlier and earlierinto pregnancy and in recent decades, into even the first weeks of pregnancy.

So, while I think that its wonderful that we focus on having a loving bond with our children now, I do think theres been some really emotionally traumatic side effects with starting to think that way at the very beginning of pregnancy. And then, marketers have gotten in the mix and are important pieces of this.

RELATED:4 Common Relationship Problems That Happen After You Have A Miscarriage

When did this begin?

Some of this begins with the 1920s advertisements for special Sears catalogs the baby edition. But it really gets going in the 1960s, when marketers became a lot more sophisticated about reaching specific segments, and realizethat pregnant women are a really valuable group of consumers, because theyre about to make a bunch of brand choices.

Over the decades, since then, the market has gotten more and more aggressive about reaching women as early as possible in their pregnancy. A lot of pregnancy advice on websites and on apps is actually driven by marketing and advertising.

A responsible pregnancy manual author would never tell you to start browsing baby names at five weeks pregnant. But your app? Or your pregnancy website? It might very well do that, because they have every incentive to feed your excitement and your emotional attachment to your pregnancy.

It has gotten out of control.

Really out of control. So, as nice as it is that we have these wonderful baby products, the consumer culture has really gone in a direction that has not served peoples emotional well-being when it comes to early pregnancy.

And then we have these great medical technologies! Weve made new rituals aroundultrasounds, and home pregnancy testing, that have also contributed to making us feel like its a real baby at a time when, in fact it may not be secure yet.

So, 150 years ago was there not a lot of grief, or even a culture of silence around miscarriage?

Nineteenth century women werent talking about miscarriages in letters or diaries a lot. Part of whats complicated about this is, before people had good control of their fertility, they already had begun wishing for smaller families, and doing what they could to have smaller families.

So, 19th century women were commonly using douching and withdrawal and folk methods, like heavy work or going on a bumpy carriage ride to try to bring on the menses, to try to not have a pregnancy this month.

So, if thats how youre thinking about early pregnancy as something that youre largely trying to avoid youre not that often in the situation of feeling distress about an early pregnancy loss. It took having a certain amount of control over fertility before early losses could seem like something that was clearly undesirable. So thats part of it.

The idea that having a choice in being able to limit pregnancy makesthe loss of wanted pregnancy more jarring.

Part of it also is that when women wrote aboutsecond trimester losses, they were scary medical situations. They were relieved at not dying from them.

So, the loss of the child was secondary to being relieved to have survived the process. Pregnancy and birth has become so much safer that we can focus on the expected child, and not on surviving the birth or miscarriage.

We see how womens attitudes towards miscarriages have changed over the last 150 years or so. Is there a sense that mens attitudes have changed alongside this shift?

Historically, when women had pregnancy losses that they were confident were pregnancy losses, so, later in pregnancy, husbands were part of it in the same way they were part of birth, which is that they were responsible for calling an assistant, or a medical practitioner, to come in and assist and make sure their wife survived.

Men were highly invested, and very concerned, because they had the same concerns that their spouse could lose her life. They werent necessarily expected to be thinking about pregnancy as an already existing baby.

What has changed today as far as mens relationship to miscarriage?

I think that, in many positive ways, the expectations about husbands and male partners being part of pregnancy is a new thing. Thats great for many couples.

In some ways, some of these rituals weve developed around our medicine the ultrasound, going in for the ultrasound to see the baby is partly about helping the father feel involved, because he cant feel the pregnancy. But this way, he has a window into whats going on. Its also not literally the seeing of it. Its having a ritual format where you go in and start imagining yourself as parents, together.

And thats something that fathers can participate in. Thats very nice. But its just really hard on people when you find a miscarriage, instead of seeing the heartbeat.

RELATED:9 Perfectly-Worded Greeting Cards For When Your Friend Loses A Baby

Yes, incredibly.

So, fathers, I think, are experiencing the losses more directly now because of that. And the same thing withhome pregnancy tests, especially with websites suggesting many exciting and sentimental ways for women to share their positive home pregnancy test with their spouse or other relatives.

It can be a really nice way for fathers to be involved in their future parenting right from the same time as their partners. On the other hand, that means that theyre going to face the loss as well.

When parents suffer a miscarriage, its often an incredibly sad time for them. The grief is real.

People grieve in different ways. Part of whats so complicated about the situation, in terms of people giving appropriate emotional support, is that you dont know if your friend or relative who miscarried felt like they lost a child, and are grieving a death in the family, or, if they are very disappointed, but are ready to try again next month and youre going to make it harder for them if you say, Im so sorry your baby died.

Yes, and its hard to know, as a friend or family member, how to discuss it. Or if its appropriate to bring it up. So, its often not addressed.

I think that people are looking for certain kinds of support, because we dont talk about it. And people dont talk about it, partly because they are protecting themselves from the burden of what people might put on them having heard of their miscarriage.

We dont have a standard ritual for handling miscarriage. We often dont know how to feel about it, which is sort of a strange thing.

It is strange.

Thenarratives that tend to get offered are trying to support women who are grieving their miscarriage. I think grievers do need a lot of support. But, its not true that the only way to think about a miscarriage is as the death of a child.

If you tell people that that is the way youre supposed to think about it, its going to hurt people at the same time it helps others. I would like to see more discussion in our popular support literature about the variety of ways people might think about a miscarriage and also, that how you think about your miscarriage might change over the course of your life. Its not something that happens once, you experience it, and its permanently that way.

No life experience is. But this one, more than others, can change in its meaning and how you think about it in the context of your journey to parenthood, depending on how that goes.

So, what do you think is the correct course of action?

We need to have this discussion enough so that people know it might happen ahead of time so that they can go into childbearing with the information that they may get pregnant next month and have a baby in nine months.

They may take six months to get pregnant. They may have a successful pregnancy the first time around or the first one may not stick and it may take another try.

All of those are normal, healthy ways that people have their children and if we can go in knowing that that might be the case, we might be able to handle early pregnancy a little bit differently so that when they dont work out, its not as distressing.

RELATED:The Devastation Of Having A Miscarriage While Your Friend Has A Baby

Lizzy Francis is a writer who focuses on family, parenting, and health and wellness. For more of her family content, visit her author profile on Fatherly.

This article was originally published at Fatherly. Reprinted with permission from the author.

Originally posted here:
Why Women Grieve After Miscarrying And How Their Loss Is Changing The Misconceptions Of Miscarriage - YourTango

Human Behavior

The Father of Siri Has Grown Wary of the Artificial Intelligence He Helped Create – Willamette Week

February 12, 2020 medical

As a psychologist, Tom Gruber is in awe of Facebook. As a computer scientist and citizen of the earth, it scares the crap out of him.

Facebook runs experiments on human behavior that psychologists can only dream about, Gruber says. The trials are done on millions of people, a sample size that's impossible in academia. Dozens of times a day, Mark Zuckerberg tweaks his artificial intelligence to see what will keep his 2.5 billion subscribers scrolling through Facebook, and to make them confuse advertising with news so they click on the ads, Gruber says.

"They have the world's largest psychology experiment at their disposal every single day," Gruber says. "They can do experiments that science can't do, at scale."

Gruber, who speaks at TechfestNW this April, is hardly a bomb-thrower. He is a pioneer in artificial intelligence and the co-inventor of Siri, the digital assistant on the iPhone that uses AI and speech recognition to answer billions of questions each year.

Since selling Siri to Apple in 2010, though, Gruber has become one of a small group of technologists who have grown wary of the AI they helped create. He plans to talk about the dangerand promiseof artificial intelligence at TechfestNW.

Facebook and YouTube have more than 2 billion users each, making them as big as the world's two biggest religions, Christianity and Islam, Gruber says.

"And I would add that even the people who pray to Mecca five times a day, only do it five times a day," Gruber says. "Our millennials check their phones 150 times a day."

Gruber has deep roots in techdom. He earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and psychology from Loyola University in New Orleans, got his Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Massachusetts, then did research at Stanford University for five years.

Siri grew out of a Stanford spinoff called SRI International. Gruber consulted at SRI in 2007, and, soon after, he and two others, Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, spun off newer digital-assistant technology that went beyond the DARPA work. They named the new company Siri, which means "beautiful woman who leads you to victory."

Siri is actually a collection of powerful neural networks: mathematical formulas running on computers that analyze huge amounts of data and learn the patterns within them. Turn a neural net loose on a million samples of spoken language, and it will start to recognize words and their meaning. No longer do programmers have to tell computers what to do, logic step by logic step.

Steve Jobs persuaded Gruber and his partners to sell to Apple in 2010 for some $200 million, according to Wired magazine.

Gruber retired from Apple in 2018 and founded Humanistic AI, a firm that helps companies use machine intelligence to collaborate with humans, not replaceor terrorizethem.

Unlike some AI doomsayers, including Tesla inventor Elon Musk and podcasting neuroscientist Sam Harris, Gruber thinks AI can be tamed. Right now, it's a science experiment gone wrong. Frankenstein never meant for his monster to become a killer, and Zuckerberg, he says, never intended Facebook to set us at each other's throats, over politics or anything else.

"My argument is that this is an unintended consequence," Gruber says. "We'll give them a pass on being evil geniuses. Maybe some of them are. But let's assume good intentions."

When it comes to Zuckerberg, assuming good intentions is controversial. In July, Facebook agreed to pay a record $5 billion fine to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission that it abused users' personal information.

So call Gruber an optimist. He thinks the same algorithms that prey on our bad habits can be used to encourage good ones.

Tech companies make excuses for why they can't police their networks, and most involve money. So far, humans are better at sorting lies from truth, and hate from news. That means you have to hire a lot of humans, which is anathema to the tech monopolies. Gruber says they need to suck it up.

"It's like when the auto industry said, 'Air bags are going to put us out of business, so don't impose this onerous thing on us,'" Gruber says. "It's all bullshit."

And there's more. Why not run all these vast experiments on human behavior to improve human life, instead of wrecking it? Why not use AI to change the habits that lead to type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and suicide?

"We have weak theories about what makes people tick, and what to do to help them do better things," Gruber says. "But AI has shown that if you want to get 2 billion people addicted to something that's not good for them, you can do it."

AI doesn't know if it's operating for good or evil, Gruber says. Someday it may, but for now, it's up to humans to direct it.

So far, we've been crappy shepherds.

GO: TechfestNW is at Portland State University's Viking Pavilion, 930 SW Hall St., techfestnw.com. Thursday-Friday, April 2-3. Visit the website for tickets.

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The Father of Siri Has Grown Wary of the Artificial Intelligence He Helped Create - Willamette Week

Human Behavior

The Illusion of Genetic Romance – Scientific American

February 12, 2020 medical

Genetic matchmaking is entering the mainstream. The prospect of meeting and selecting potential romantic partners based upon purported DNA compatibilityuntil very recently the subject of science fiction from films like The Perfect 46 to independently published romances by Clarissa Lakehas increasingly garnered both scientific and commercial attention. Earlier this year, Nozze, a well-established Japanese dating service, established a DNA Matching Course and hosted a related DNA Matching Party, both first-time offerings in that nation. For 86,400 yen ($790), men are paired with prospective dates based upon 16,000 variations in HLA gene complexes.

Nozze joins a market commercializing the science of attraction that already includes Swiss pioneer GenePartner, Houston-based Pheramor and services that combine genetic and non-genetic profiles like Instant Chemistry and SingldOut. Considerable media attention has been devoted to investigating the science behind these services; unfortunately, both the ethical and sociological implications have received relatively short shrift.

The underlying science itself is hardly convincing. Since the 1970s, researchers have found that variations in the genes of the major histocompatability complex (MHC) play a role in mate selection in mice. Similar patterns have subsequently been found in fish, pheasants and bats, but not in sheep. The possibility that MHC plays a role in human mate selection first arose as a result of a well-known experiment by Swiss biologist Claus Wedekind that is colloquially known as the sweaty T-shirt study. Researchers had men wear T-shirts for extended periods of time before placing the shirts in boxes; then they had women sniff the shirts to rate the former wearers sexual attractiveness. They found an inverse correlation between MHC similarity and attraction score.

Since that time, studies in human beings have yielded mixed results. The most persuasive data come from an investigation of Hutterite couples in North America who appear to display nonrandom MHC assorted mating preferences. But this correlationgiving genetic matchmaking the benefit of the doubtestablishes at most a natural preference, and a natural preference is a far cry from connubial compatibility. To our knowledge, nobody has actually surveyed married Hutterite couples to determine whether MHC compatibility plays a role in their levels of marital bliss, or the quality of their dinner conversation, or the frequency of their escapades between the sheets. On a more global scale, no data have yet established a relationship between MHC compatibility and lower divorce rates.

One must ask precisely what we mean by compatibility. At the most fundamental level, couples with MHC-dissimilarity (and thus more so-called mating compatibility) demonstrate lower rates of spontaneous abortion. The dissimilarity may also increase genetic polymorphism, which in turn may lower the manifestation of recessive diseases. However, the impact of MHC-dissimilarity on either of these phenomena is likely to prove relatively small, and therefore should not be expected to play a significant role in the marital happiness or cohesion of many couples.

In addition, genetic polymorphism may help species survive environmental challengesyet evolutionary advantage is probably not a major variable that most couples consider when seeking romantic bliss. One cannot also ignore the unknowns: Matching couples based on MHC markers may pose some survival benefits, but nobody knows at what cost; it is theoretically possible that the offspring of such couples are also more aggressive or less creative, just to name two traits arbitrarilyand magnifying these effects artificially might prove significantly deleterious to our civilization in the long run.

Harvard geneticist George Church has championed another version of compatibility. Using whole genome sequencing, he hopes to match couples so as to reduce or eliminate many recessively inherited diseases. In Ashkenazi populations, the Committee for Prevention of Jewish Genetic Diseases (better known as Dor Yeshorim) already uses a voluntary testing and matching system to prevent disorders such as Tay-Sachs, Canavan and Niemann-Pick. Church hopes to implement a variation of this program for couples everywhere, claiming it could end some 7,000 genetic diseases and save 50 million lives a year.

The ethical implications of Churchs proposal are complex. If couples are encouraged to use his pairing system, then those who find love outside the realm of genetic matchmaking and produce offspring with genetic disorders may be unfairly stigmatized. At a more practical level, even if the elimination of recessive illnesses is a social good, it is clearly not the sort of compatibility most daters seek in a matchmaking service.

When most people speak of romantic compatibility, the odds are that they mean factors like temperament, tastes and interests. To date, no study has connected these with any genetic variable. MHC-dissimilarity is as likely to lead to partners with temperamental and aesthetic difference as to those with similarities. Ironically, even compatibility appears to have minimal impact on satisfaction in relationships. Multiple studies have shown that universal traits such as kindness, rather than similarities, are the keys to marital happiness.

Genetic matchmaking reflects two concerning trends in modern society. The first is the pandemic loneliness and search for connection that has arisen in the wake of the breakdown of traditional community structures. To use a metaphor first introduced by political scientist Robert Putnam, we are a society bowling alone. We are increasingly willing to shell out a few hundred dollars or a few thousand yen for anything that smacks of a cure.

Genetic matchmaking also manifests the misguided belief that science can solve all of our problems. Unfortunately, we cannot discover, pay or invent our way out of our isolation. Science may ultimately provide tools that help us rebuild societal cohesion, but without meaningful changes in social policy and human behavior, science alone has little to offer. In this case, the science in question is, at best, being misusedand arguably not science at all.

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The Illusion of Genetic Romance - Scientific American

Human Behavior

Vectra Empowers Organizations to Detect and Stop Office 365 Breaches – AiThority

February 12, 2020 medical

As Account Takeovers Continue for Office 365, Controlling Risk Remains the Top Concern for Organizations Adopting SaaS Models

Cyber risk is becoming an escalating concern for organizations around the world, and Office 365 data breaches are at the forefront. Even with the rising adoption of incremental security approaches like multi-factor authentication, access controls continue to be circumvented. In fact, 40% of organizations suffer from Office 365 account takeovers. As these data breaches make headlines with growing consistency, the resulting financial and reputational costs mount.

It is far too easy for an attacker to manipulate human behavior and gain high privilege access to business-critical SaaS resources. According to Microsofts Q3 FY19 earnings call, there are more than180 millionmonthly users on Office 365.With so many users, 100% cyber hygiene becomes impossible. To make matters worse, teams continue to struggle to keep up with weekly vendor-driven configuration changes and new best practices. And once an initial foothold is gained in a SaaS application, it is just a matter of time before they laterally move and cross into other parts of the infrastructure.

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Against this backdrop, amassive number of alerts are flooding Security Operations Centers (SOCs), forcing analysts to spend time manually analyzing and prioritizing which ones deserve attention. This is overwhelming security analysts time and organizations security budgets. As threat actors become more efficient at dodging and targeting the enterprise, most analysts simply cant keep up.

Attackers will follow a path of least resistance and the convergence of these elements makes exploiting the cloud easy for them.In no other construct is it fair to expect a person, or security team, to be correct 100% of the time. This is an unacceptable expectation and entirely unfair to security teams, said Vectra CEOHitesh Sheth. The last thing we want is to create more work for security teams. What is needed is technology that removes the dependency on human behavior and human error and brings control back to the security team. This is what Vectra can provide.

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Credential abuse is the leading attack vector in SaaS, especially for Office 365. In an effort to help organizations securely and successfully protect their applications,Vectra AI, the leader innetwork threat detection and response (NDR), is announcing the launch of Cognito Detect for Office 365. Backed by new detection models focused on credentials and privilege in SaaS applications, Vectra expands cloud coverage from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and extends the ability totrack attacker activity pivoting between on-premise, data center, IaaS and SaaS. Given that attackers dont operate in silos, a security solution shouldnt either. Vectra delivers the complete visibility across your deployment footprint that leaves attackers without a place to hide.

Prevention technology has long been available and continues to evolve, however, it doesnt guarantee that data is safe. The real growth has been in detection and response capabilities, which have been long missing from most organizations resources, continued Sheth. We are the first and only NDR to apply privilege-based detections in SaaS applications. Our AI-driven solution seamlessly ties into your existing Office 365 deployment, and detects privilege-based attacker behaviors, giving you full visibility into your SaaS deployments. We continue to be at the forefront of security by detecting privilege abuse behaviors across the entire lifecycle of an attack in the cloud.

Recommended AI News: NICE Introduces Game-Changing Robotic Process Automation Offering to Fast-Track Adoption and Success

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Vectra Empowers Organizations to Detect and Stop Office 365 Breaches - AiThority

Human Behavior

Study looks into how neurons function in adults with young-onset Parkinson’s – Daily Bruin

February 12, 2020 medical

Adults with young-onset Parkinsons disease may be born with malfunctioning brain cells, a new Cedars-Sinai study found with assistance from UCLA researchers.

This suggests factors other than environmental exposure likely contribute to neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinsons.

Young-onset Parkinsons disease, a type of Parkinsons that develops before the age of 50, accounts for about 10% of all Parkinsons cases. Young-onset Parkinsons is a neurodegenerative disease, meaning it damages the central nervous system and results in a loss of proper motor function.

More than a million people are affected by this in the United States alone, said Zhan Shu, a postdoctoral scholar at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior who participated in the Cedars-Sinai research.

To model the neurons involved in Parkinsons disease, the researchers used induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs adult red blood cells that have been converted into stem cells that can give rise to any type of cell in the body. They converted iPSCs from individuals with young-onset Parkinsons disease into neurons that produce dopamine.

iPSC cells from patients with young-onset Parkinsons showed the signature changes seen in neurons in the brains of those with Parkinsons. Their findings were published in Nature Medicine in January.

Dopamine plays a large role in neural functions, and a lack of regulation of dopamine production causes many neurodegenerative diseases, Shu said. In individuals with Parkinsons disease, neurons that produce dopamine die off, which impairs motor regulation.

This will usually start with a tremor, Shu said. Its pretty obvious for family to see. Once you start to show symptoms, they move from the hands to the legs to the nonmotor parts as well.

The use of iPSCs allows researchers to determine how the disease progresses in absence of external environmental factors, said Alexander Laperle, a co-author of the study from Cedars-Sinai. iPSCs are important for this research because they simulate how diseased neurons form during human development.

Laperle compared the current research technique to a car crash. Researchers can see the impacts and physiology of the disease, however they cant see any of the development, similarly to how seeing a crashed car doesnt tell an observer how the crash occurred.

We dont know anything about how (neurodegenerative diseases) originated or progressed, he said. You cant directly observe this in a person.

Many of Parkinsons neurodegenerative symptoms occur many years before obvious symptoms can be detected, said Nigel Maidment, a professor at the Semel Institute who also participated in the research. Many of the symptoms are not as visible or obvious, Maidment said. Other symptoms can include cognitive issues, digestive tract issues and sleep disturbances.

There are many nonmotor symptoms that patients often describe as more distressing, Maidment said.

Detecting the presence of Parkinsons disease and malfunctioning neurons before major symptoms develop could assist researchers in potentially finding ways to slow or stop the diseases progression, Maidment added.

If we are to halt the progression of the disease it will be necessary to identify such changes early, Maidment said.

Many of the genetic causes of Parkinsons disease are still unknown. Laperle added that if any cases are genetic, it is likely that many genes interact to cause Parkinsons disease. The illness has no cure, but different treatment options can help individuals manage the symptoms.

Approximately 15% of Parkinsons disease patients have a family history of the illness, Shu said. It is still unclear how genetic causes contribute to the risk of developing the disease, he added.

Shu said the iPSC research at Cedars-Sinai will give researchers new models for drug development. He said he hopes to expand research territories beyond preclinical animal models.

Using human iPSCs instead of animal cells has the potential to make the search for treatment more effective, he added.

Thats the whole purpose of the paper, to find a platform for people to test (drugs), Shu said.

Many treatments that work in animal models cannot be translated to people, Laperle said. Part of this reason is because animals dont have neurodegenerative diseases the way humans do, he said.

If I give a drug to a mouse, I can have a positive impact on that animals symptoms, but its not a great predictor of when you give that drug to a person, he said.

Many of the drugs currently on the market only address the symptoms, Laperle said. For example, the drug levodopa helps replace missing dopamine in the central nervous system. However, patients can develop a tolerance to the drug and its efficacy eventually decreases.

Laperle said he hopes this research may allow for the development of more effective drugs that slow or stop the progression of this disease.

There arent any good approaches yet to slow this (progression) down or restore function, he said.

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Study looks into how neurons function in adults with young-onset Parkinson's - Daily Bruin

Human Behavior

Sticking to Your New Year’s Resolutions: Brown Alpert Medical School Expert LIVE at 4 PM – GoLocalProv

February 12, 2020 medical

Wednesday, February 12, 2020

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Dr. Dale Bond PHOTO: Warren Alpert Medical School

Studies show that only 8% of Americans who make a New Year's resolution actually keep them all year and 80% have failed by the start of February Bond, a Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at The Miriam Hospital and Brown Alpert Medical School, will talk about setting a workout habit, and when the best time to workout is.

About Bond

Bond received M.S. andPh.D. degrees in Health Promotion and Education at Purdue University and the University of Utah, respectively, and completed postdoctoral training in behavioral medicine at Brown Alpert Medical School.

His research involves twoprincipal areas: (1) assessing and intervening on energy balance behaviors and related mechanisms in the context of bariatric surgery and obesity; and (2) assessment and treatment of behavioral risk factors and comorbidities among individuals who have a migraine.

Dr. Bond has been awarded grants from NIH and other organizations to conduct prospective studies and randomized trials pursuant to advancement of these areas. He also sits on the editorial boards for multipleobesity-relatedjournals, is a member of severalAmerican Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery (ASMBS)and Obesity Society (TOS) committees, was a recent member ofthe NIH Behavioral Interventions and Outcomes study section, and is a research mentor within the NHLBI T32 Postdoctoral Training in Cardiovascular Behavioral Medicine Program at The Miriam Hospital and Brown University.

Warren Alpert Medical School

Since granting its first Doctor of Medicine degrees in 1975, the Warren Alpert Medical School has become a national leader in medical education and biomedical research. By attracting first-class physicians and researchers to Rhode Island over the past four decades, the Medical School and its seven affiliated teaching hospitals have radically improved the state's health care environment, from health care policy to patient care.

"Smart Health" is a GoLocalProv.com segment featuring experts from The Warren Alpert Medical School GoLocal LIVE.

Link:
Sticking to Your New Year's Resolutions: Brown Alpert Medical School Expert LIVE at 4 PM - GoLocalProv

Human Behavior

Work In Progress: Finding A Job In The Matrix – Worldcrunch

February 12, 2020 medical

In early civilizations, landing a job amounted to interning until your employer died. Fast-forward a few thousand years and fortunately, internships have gotten shorter ... and life expectancy has gotten longer! Still, job hunting has become a journey marked by alternating pulls of hope and hysteria. The swift ascension of global connectedness, Artificial Intelligence, the shifting nature of social norms are uprooting the way we're evaluated by recruiters.

This edition of Work In Progress dives into how these transformations affect us today and what expectations we should have for recruitment in the future. In many countries, the classic curriculum vitae is becoming obsolete as recruiters use AI and virtual-reality simulations to evaluate candidates; in Russia, employers are shifting their focus from looks to merit; while in the U.S., "likability" might soon be more important than your masters' degree.

WHAT IF AI DOESN'T LIKE ME? In Amsterdam, ketchup manufacturer Kraft Heinz relies on Artificial Intelligence to recruit, assess, hire, and manage their staff. Defenders of AI-based recruitment claim it removes human bias and promotes diversity, but others say it might just as well enhance existing biases or actively create new ones since the algorithms must be designed by human (usually male) developers. It's still probably too early to decide whether machines should be welcomed as gatekeepers to our dream jobs. Frida Polli, CEO of the AI-driven recruitment platform used by Heinz, puts it this way: "AI is like teenage sex, everyone says they're doing it, and nobody really knows what it is."

STAT DU JOUR

Big Brother is watching, and we are starting to like it: In 2015, only 30% of companies were using monitoring techniques to collect data on how employees spend their time at work, reports Workplace Intelligence. That number is expected to grow to 80% in 2020. Today, 30% of people say they are comfortable with having their email monitored by employers, up from 10% in 2015.

BIG OR THICK, OR BOTH? Perhaps the way to a bias-free recruitment process is to merge artificial and human intelligence. Big data can provide real-time information on consumer and social trends, but a deeper social analysis would require adding "thick data" or information derived from human behavior. Diego Fuentes dives into these two data types in Santiago-based America Economia, and Worldcrunch has the full article here in English.

NO RESUMES NEEDED! In addition to the new challenge of outfoxing algorithms, your future career might ultimately depend on a much more basic standard: whether people like you. Psychologist Dawn Graham writes in Forbes on the topic of "likability," which many believe is an innate quality. Yet Graham gives some practical advice on how to raise your likability quotient during a job interview:

1: Be Human! A big part of the interview is evaluating if you're a good fit for the team. That isn't something you can fake ... Prepare the best you can, and then be yourself.

2: Know Your Audience. In order to sell the product (which is you), it's critical to know what's important to the buyer.

RUSSIAN BEAUTY A study found that the number of employers in Russia who saw appearance as an important recruitment factor has fallen from 82% to 66% over the last decade, reports Rossiyskaya Gazeta. While many in the looks-conscious country may still airbrush their LinkedIn photo, the study found that employees now perceive looks as less important in career advancement, down from 84% to 60% over the same period.

ODD JOB

GREEN-COLLAR JOBS IN ARGENTINA A more sustainable economy has created a new workforce in advanced fields like electricity generation, transportation and energy storage. However, not all green-collar jobs require a master's degree. In Argentina, more than 150,000 people work with recovering recyclable materials in urban centers or at garbage dumps, reports La Nacion. Under the banner of "inclusive recycling," many of the workers are organizing in cooperatives to promote social security. On average, every worker recovers about 100 kilos of waste per day the equivalent of what is generated by 100 people.

FUTURE OF WORK, FLASHBACK How far is it from New York to Buffalo? Why is cast iron called pig iron? What country produce the finest china?

You don't know?! Well, then we regret to inform you that Thomas Edison wouldn't have hired you. A century ago, Edison pioneered the employment form, with his 146-question quiz for prospective employees at his power plant. In 1921, the New York Times revealed the quiz, which became a national topic of controversy. Reporters even took the test to Albert Einstein who flunked for not knowing the exact speed of sound Duh. Trivia masochists can take the test, republished here on Gizmodo. And we'll leave it to the AI developers to feed Edison's data into their next algorithm!

See more from Work In Progress here

Human Behavior

AI and Predictive Analytics: Myth, Math, or Magic? – TDWI

February 12, 2020 medical

AI and Predictive Analytics: Myth, Math, or Magic?

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that math-based analytics can predict human behavior with certainty.

We are a species invested in predicting the future -- as if our lives depended on it. Indeed, good predictions of where wolves might lurk were once a matter of survival. Even as civilization made us physically safer, prediction has remained a mainstay of culture, from the haruspices of ancient Rome inspecting animal entrails to business analysts dissecting a wealth of transactions to foretell future sales.

Such predictions generally disappoint. We humans are predisposed to assuming that the future is a largely linear extrapolation of the most recent (and familiar) past. This is one -- or a combination -- of the nearly 200 cognitive biases that allegedly afflict us.

A Prediction for the Coming Decade

With these caveats in mind, I predict that in 2020 (and the decade ahead) we will struggle if we unquestioningly adopt artificial intelligence (AI) in predictive analytics, founded on an unjustified overconfidence in the almost mythical power of AI's mathematical foundations. This is another form of the disease of technochauvinism I discussed in a previous article.

Science fiction author and journalist Cory Doctorow's article, "Our Neophobic, Conservative AI Overlords Want Everything to Stay the Same," in the Los Angeles Review of Books, offers a succinct and superb summary of technochauvinism as it operates in AI. "Machine learning," he asserts, "is about finding things that are similar to things the machine learning system can already model." These models are, of course, built from past data with all its errors, gaps, and biases.

The premise that AI makes better (e.g., less biased) predictions than humans is already demonstrably false. Employment screening apps, for example, are often riddled with a bias toward hiring white males because the historical hiring data used to train its algorithms consisted largely of information about hiring such workers.

The widespread belief that AI can predict novel aspects of the future is simply a case of magical thinking. Machine learning is fundamentally conservative, based as it is on correlations in existing data; its predictions are essentially extensions of the past. AI lacks the creative thinking ability of humans. Says Tabitha Goldstaub, a tech entrepreneur and commentator, about the use of AI by Hollywood studios to decide which movies to make: "Already we're seeing that we're getting more and more remakes and sequels because that's safe, rather than something that's out of the box."

A Predictive Puzzle

AI, together with the explosion of data available from the internet, have raised the profile of what used to be called operational BI, now known as predictive analytics and its more recent extension into prescriptive analytics. Attempting to predict the future behavior of prospects and customers and, further, to influence their behavior is central to digital transformation efforts. Predictions based on AI, especially in real-time decision making with minimal human involvement, require careful and ongoing examination lest they fall foul of the myth of an all-knowing AI.

As Doctorow notes, AI conservatism arises from detecting correlations within and across existing large data sets. Causation -- a much more interesting feature -- is more opaque, usually relying on human intuition to separate the causal wheat from the correlational chaff, as I discussed in a previous Upside article.

Nonetheless, causation can be separated algorithmically from correlation in specific cases, as described by Mollie Davies and coauthors. I cannot claim to follow the full mathematical formulae they present, but the logic makes sense. As the authors conclude, "Instead of being naively data driven, we should seek to be causal information driven. Causal inference provides a set of powerful tools for understanding the extent to which causal relationships can be learned from the data we have." They present math that data scientists should learn and apply more widely.

However, there is a myth here, too: that predictive (and prescriptive) analytics can divine human intention, which is the true basis for understanding and influencing behavior. As Doctorow notes, in trying to distinguish a wink from a twitch, "machine learning [is not] likely to produce a reliable method of inferring intention: it's a bedrock of anthropology that intention is unknowable without dialogue." Dialogue -- human-to-human interaction -- attracts little attention in digital business implementation.

The Dilemma of (Real) Prediction

Once accused of looking too intently in the rearview mirror, business intelligence has today embraced prediction and prescription as among its most important goals. Despite advances in data availability and math-based technology, truly envisaging future human intentions and actions remains a strictly human gift.

The myth that math-based analytics can predict human behavior with certainty is probably the most dangerous magical thinking we data professionals can indulge in.

About the Author

Dr. Barry Devlin defined the first data warehouse architecture in 1985 and is among the worlds foremost authorities on BI, big data, and beyond. His 2013 book, Business unIntelligence, offers a new architecture for modern information use and management.