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Neuroscience

Dell Children’s Medical Center to spend more than $300 million over next 3 years to expand Mueller campus – Community Impact Newspaper

The upcoming $113 million Dell Childrens Specialty Pavilion will open spring 2021 with cardiovascular, neuroscience and cancer programs, according to the pediatric hospital. (Rendering courtesy Dell Childrens Specialty Pavilion)

The Dell Childrens Medical Center campus in Mueller is set to break ground on an expansion plan following the announcement of significant investment over the next three years.

The pediatric hospital Feb. 10 announced a $300 million investment in capital, equipment and programming over the next three years, made possible due to a substantial investment by Ascension, as well as a $30 million matching grant from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, according to a company news release.

The time is now to continue expanding complex pediatric care in Central Texas, said Christopher Born, the president of Dell Childrens Medical Center, in the Feb. 10 news release.

Dell Children will use $113 million of the investment funds to construct its new pediatric outpatient facility, which will house cardiovascular, neuroscience and cancer programs, as previously reported by Community Impact Newspaper.

The four-story, 161,000-square-foot facility, named Dell Childrens Specialty Pavilion, is slated to break ground soon and open its doors to patients in spring 2021.

Investment dollars will also go to provide backing for a new partnership with Dell Medical School at The University of Texas to develop a maternal fetal medicine program that will add a delivery unit and neonatal intensive care unit expansion at Dell Childrens Medical Center, according to the news release.

Dell Childrens Medical Center announced it will additionally add more cardiac ICU beds at its main hospital, allowing for the expansion of its pediatric heart program to include heart transplant surgery.

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Dell Children's Medical Center to spend more than $300 million over next 3 years to expand Mueller campus - Community Impact Newspaper

Neuroscience

Your brain isn’t the same in virtual reality as it is in the real world – Massive Science

Virtual Reality (VR) is not just for video games. Researchers use it in studies of brains from all kinds of animals: bees, fish, rats and, of course, humans. Sadly, this does not mean that the bees have a tiny VR headset. Instead, the setup often consists of either normal computer screens surrounding the subject, or a special cylindrical screen. Thishas become a powerful tool in neuroscience, because it has many advantages for researchers that allow them to answer new questions about the brain.

For one, the subject does not have to physically move for the world around them to change. This makes it easier to study the brain. Techniques such as functionalmagnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can only be used on stationary subjects. With VR, researchers can ask people to navigate through a virtual world by pressing keys, while their head remains in the same place, which allows the researchers to image their brain.

VR has become a powerful tool in neuroscience.

FDA

The researchers can also control a virtual environment much more precisely than they can control the real world. They can put objects in the exact places they want, and they can even manipulate the environment during an experiment. For example, neuroscientists from HarvardUniversitywere able to change the effortthe zebrafish had to put in to swim to travel the same distance in VR, which causes zebrafish to change how strongly they move their tails. Using this experiment, researchers determined which parts of the zebrafish brain are responsible for controlling their swimming behavior. They could have never performed such a manipulation in the real world.

If you've ever experienced VR, you know that it is still quite far from the real world. And this has consequences for how your brain responds to it.

One of the issues with VR is the limited number of senses it works on. Often the environment is only projected on a screen, giving visual input, without the subject getting any other inputs, such as touch or smell. For example,mice rely heavily on their whiskers when exploring an environment. In VR, their whiskers won't give them any input, because they won't be able to feel when they approach a wall or an object.

VR cannot replicate how mice rely on their whiskers to navigate.

Adapted from Pixabay by Dori Grijseels

Another issue is the lack of proprioception, the feedback you get from your body about the position of your limbs. Pressing a button to walk forward is not the same as actually moving your legs and walking around. Similarly, subjects won't have any input from their vestibular system, which is responsible for balance and spatial orientation. This is also the reason some people get motion sickness when they are wearing VR headsets.

When VR is used for animal studies, the animals are often "headfixed," meaning they cannot turn their head. This is needed to be able to use a microscope to look at the cells in their brain.However, it poses a problem, specifically for navigation, as animals use a special type of cell, called a "head direction cell," in navigation tasks. These cells track the orientation of the head of an animal. And whenthe mouse can't move its head, the head direction cells can't do their job.

This is especially the case for the cells in the hippocampus. That is the part of your brain that is responsible for navigation, and so, relies heavily on inputs that give you information about your location and your direction.

Neurons talk to each other through electrical signals called action potentials, or spikes. The number of spikes per second, called the "firing frequency," is an important measure of how much information is being sent between neurons.A 2015 study found that, in VR, the firing frequency of neurons in a mouse is reduced by over two thirds, meaning thatthe cells don't send as much information.

The same study also showed that the cells are less reliable. They specifically looked at place cells, cells that respond to a particular location in the environment and are incredibly important for navigation. In the real world, these cells send spikes about 80% of the times thatthe animal is in a particular location. However, in VR, this is reduced to about 30%, so when an animal visits a location ten times, the cells will send spikes during only three of those visits. This means the animals are not as sure about their exact location.

Another important feature of brain activity are brainwaves, or neural oscillations. These represent the overall activity of all the neurons in your brain, which goes up and down at a regular interval. Theta oscillations, brainwaves at a frequency of 4-7 Hz, play an important part in navigation. Interestingly, scientists found that rats have a lower frequency of their theta oscillations in VR compared to the real world. This effect on oscillations is not limited to navigation tasks, but was also found for humans who played golf in the real world and in VR. It is most likely caused by the lack of vestibular input, but scientists are still unsure of the consequences of suchchanges in frequency.

We know that we should be critical when interpreting results from neuroscience studies that use VR. Although VR is a great tool, it is far from perfect, and it affects the way our brain acts. We should not readily accept conclusions from VR studies, without first considering how the use of VR in that study may have affected those conclusions. Hopefully, as our methods get more sophisticated, the differences in brain activity between VR and the real world will also become smaller.

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Your brain isn't the same in virtual reality as it is in the real world - Massive Science

Neuroscience

AAAI 2020 | Whats Next for Deep Learning? Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio Share Their Visions – Synced

This is an updated version.

The Godfathers of AI and 2018 ACM Turing Award winners Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio shared a stage in New York on Sunday night at an event organized by the Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2020). The trio of researchers have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing, and in individual talks and a panel discussion they discussed their views on current challenges facing deep learning and where it should be heading.

Introduced in the mid 1980s, deep learning gained traction in the AI community the early 2000s. The year 2012 saw the publication of the CVPR paper Multi-column Deep Neural Networks for Image Classification, which showed how max-pooling CNNs on GPUs could dramatically improve performance on many vision benchmarks; while a similar system introduced months later by Hinton and a University of Toronto team won the large-scale ImageNet competition by a significant margin over shallow machine learning methods. These events are regarded by many as the beginning of a deep learning revolution that has transformed AI.

Deep learning has been applied to speech recognition, image classification, content understanding, self-driving, and much more. And according to LeCun who is now Chief AI Scientist at Facebook the current services offered by Facebook, Instagram, Google, and YouTube are all built around deep learning.

Deep learning does however does have its detractors. Johns Hopkins University Professor and one of the pioneers of computer vision Alan Yuille warned last year that deep learnings potential in computer vision has hit a bottleneck.

We read a lot about the limitations of deep learning today, but most of those are actually limitations of supervised learning, LeCun explained in his talk. Supervised learning typically refers to learning with labelled data. LeCun told the New York audience that unsupervised learning without labels or self-supervised learning as he prefers to call it may be a game changer that ushers in AIs next revolution.

This is an argument that Geoff [Hinton] has been making for decades. I was skeptical for a long time but changed my mind, said LeCun.

There are two approaches to object recognition. Theres the good old-fashioned path based approach, with sensible modular representations, but this typically imposes a lot of hand engineering. And then there are convolutional neural nets (CNNs), which learn everything end to end. CNNs get a huge win by wiring in the fact that if a feature is good in one place, its good somewhere else. But their approach to object recognition is very different from human perception.

This informed the first part of Hintons talk, which he personally directed at LeCun: Its about the problems with CNNs and why theyre rubbish.

CNNs are designed to cope with translations, but theyre not so good at dealing with other effects of changing viewpoints such as rotation and scaling. One obvious approach is to use 4D or 6D maps instead of 2D maps but that is very expensive. And so CNN are typically trained on many different viewpoints in order for them to be able to generalize across viewpoints. Thats not very efficient, Hinton explained. Wed like neural nets to generalize to new viewpoints effortlessly. If it learned to recognize something, then you make it 10 times as big and you rotate it 60 degrees, it shouldnt cause them any problem at all. We know computer graphics is like that and wed like to make neural nets more like that.

Hinton believes the answer is capsules. A capsule is a group of neurons that learns to represent a familiar shape or part. Hinton says the idea is to build more structure into neural networks and hope that the extra structure helps them generalize better. Capsules are an attempt to correct the things that are wrong with CNNs.

The capsules Hinton introduced are Stacked Capsule Auto-encoders, which first appeared at NeurIPS 2019 and are very different in many ways from previous capsule versions from ICLR 2018 and NIPS 2017. These had used discriminative learning. Hinton said even at the time he knew this was a bad idea: I always knew unsupervised learning was the right thing to do so it was bad faith to do the previous models. The 2019 capsules use unsupervised learning.

LeCun noted that although supervised learning has proven successful in for example speech recognition and content understanding, it still requires a large amount of labelled samples. Reinforcement learning works great for games and in simulations, but since it requires too many trials its not really applicable in the real world.

The first challenge LeCun discussed was how models can be expected to learn more with fewer labels, fewer samples or fewer trials.

LeCun now supports the unsupervised learning (self-supervised learning) solution Hinton first proposed some 15 years ago. Basically its the idea of learning to represent the world before learning a task and this is what babies do, LeCun explained, suggesting really figuring out how humans learn so quickly and efficiently may be the key that unlocks self-supervised learnings full potential going forward.

Self-supervised learning is largely responsible for the success of natural language processing (NLP) over the last year and a half or so. The idea is to show a system a piece of text, image, or video input, and train a model to predict the piece thats missing for example to predict missing words in a text, which is what transformers and BERT-like language systems were built to do.

But success of Transformers and BERT et al has not transferred into the image domain because it turns out to be much more difficult to represent uncertainty in prediction on images or in video than it is in text because its not discrete. Its practical to produce distributions over all the words in a dictionary, but its hard to represent distributions over all possible video frames. And this is, in LeCuns view, the main technical problem we have to solve if we want to apply self-supervised learning to a wider variety of modalities like videos.

LeCun proposed one solution may be in latent variable energy-based models: An energy-based model is kind of like a probabilistic model except you dont normalize. And one way to train the energy-based model is to give low energy to samples that you observe and high energy to samples you do not observe.

In his talk, LeCun touched on two other challenges:

LeCun opined that nobody currently seems to have a good answer to either of these two challenges, and said he remains open to and looks forward to any possible ideas.

Yoshua Bengio, meanwhile, has shifted his focus to consciousness. After cognitive neuroscience, he believes the time is ripe for ML to explore consciousness, which he says could bring new priors to help systematic and good generalization. Ultimately, Bengio hopes such a research direction could allow DL to expand from System 1 to System 2 referring to a dichotomy introduced by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. System 1 represents what current deep learning is very good at intuitive, fast, automatic, anchored in sensory perception. System 2 meanwhile represents rational, sequential, slow, logical, conscious, and expressible with language.

Before he dived into the valuable lessons that can be learned from consciousness, Bengio briefed the audience on cognitive neuroscience. It used to be seen in the previous century that working on consciousness was kind of taboo in many sciences for all kinds of reasons. But fortunately, this has changed and particularly in cognitive neuroscience. In particular, the Global Workspace Theory by Baars and the recent work in this century based on DeHaene, which really established these theories to explain a lot of the objective neuroscience observations.

Bengio likened conscious processing to a bottleneck and asked Why would this (bottleneck) be meaningful? Why is it that the brain would have this kind of bottleneck where information has to go through this bottleneck, just a few elements to be broadcast to the rest of the brain? Why would we have a short term memory that only contains like six or seven elements? It doesnt make sense.

Bengio said the bottom line is get the magic out of consciousness and proposed the consciousness prior, a new prior for learning representations of high-level concepts of the kind human beings manipulate with language. The consciousness prior is inspired by cognitive neuroscience theories of consciousness. This prior can be combined with other priors in order to help in disentangling abstract factors from each other. What this is saying is that at that level of representation, our knowledge is represented in this very sparse graph where each of the dependencies, these factors involve two, three, four or five entities and thats it.

Consciousness can also provide inspiration on how to build models. Bengio explained Agents are at the particular time at a particular place and they do something and they have an effect. And eventually that effect could have constant consequences all over the universe, but it takes time. And so if we can build models of the world where we have the right abstractions, where we can pin down those changes to just one or a few variables, then we will be able to adapt to those changes because we dont need as much data, as much observation in order to figure out what has changed.

So whats required if deep learning is going to reach human-level intelligence? Bengio referenced his previous suggestions, that missing pieces of the puzzle include:

In a panel discussion, Hinton, LeCun and Bengio were asked how they reconcile their research approaches with colleagues committed to more traditional methods. Hinton had been conspicuously absent from some AAAI conferences, and hinted at why in responding: The last time I submitted a paper to AAAI, I got the worst review I ever got. And it was mean. It said Hinton has been working on this idea for seven years [vector representations] and nobodys interested. Time to move on.

Hinton spoke of his efforts to find a common ground and move on: Right now were in a position where we should just say, lets forget the past and lets see if we can take the idea of doing gradient descent in great big system parameters. And lets see if we can take that idea, because thats really all weve discovered so far. That really works. The fact that that works is amazing. And lets see if we can learn to do reasoning like that.

Author: Fangyu Cai & Yuan Yuan | Editor: Michael Sarazen

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AAAI 2020 | Whats Next for Deep Learning? Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio Share Their Visions - Synced

Neuroscience

Unionized HealthPartners Workers OK Strike February 07, 2020 – Twin Cities Business Magazine

About 1,800 unionized HealthPartners workers are slated to strike later this month if theyre unable to reach an agreement with the health care system.

On Thursday, 95 percent of SEIU Healthcare Minnesota workers voted to authorize a seven-day strike, which would begin Feb. 19. The union filed a 10-day strike notice on Friday morning, said Kate Lynch, VP of SEIU Healthcare Minnesota.

It feels like its profits over patients and employees, Lynch said outside HealthPartners Neuroscience Center in St. Paul. She added that workers are willing to go back to the table at any time.

SEIU and HealthPartners last met to negotiate on Jan. 31. The marathon session spilled into early morning the following day. HealthPartners leaders have proposed increases to workers health insurance premiums and co-pays. SEIU which represents nurses, dental hygienists, physician assistants, and other frontline workers at more than 30 HealthPartners locations has rejected the health systems proposal.

The unions contract with HealthPartners expired Feb. 1.

Health insurance premiums and copays have remained the same for SEIU members for more than a decade, union officials said.

For their part, HealthPartners leaders maintain that their proposal is fair and reasonable. In a statement, they said the strike vote is disappointing.

We remain committed to reaching an agreement on a new contract that is fair to all, HealthPartners officials said in a statement.

A federal mediator will need to call both parties back to the table, according to HealthPartners.

The health system didn't say whether it had a contingency plan in place if the strike goes through.

"We can't really tell you what kind of care you're going to get when we're not there," Lynch said when asked how the union would address patients' concerns about the strike.

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Unionized HealthPartners Workers OK Strike February 07, 2020 - Twin Cities Business Magazine

Neuroscience

The science behind learning soft skills and hard skills on Brains Byte Back – The Sociable

On this podcast we learn the difference between soft skills and hard skills, why they are important, and how we can sharpen our skills.

Learning a new skill can be hard, especially if it is not something we are naturally good at. However, there is research that can help us understand what parts of the brain need to be activated in order to learn, and what we need to do to activate them.

Listen to this podcast below and onSpotify,Anchor,Apple Podcasts,Breaker,Google Podcasts,Overcast, andRadio Public.

Joining us on the show is Todd Maddox, an expertin the area of neuroscience, with more than 200 peer-reviewed research reports, and more than 12,000 citations under his belt. He is also the founder and CEO of Cognitive Design & Statistical Consulting and has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

And for our Neuron to something piece, we have results of a new survey which advocates that the public wouldnt trust companies to scan social media posts for signs of depression.

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The science behind learning soft skills and hard skills on Brains Byte Back - The Sociable

Human Behavior

Vectra Empowers Organizations to Detect and Stop Office 365 Breaches – Yahoo Finance

As Account Takeovers Continue for Office 365, controlling Risk Remains the Top Concern for Organizations Adopting Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) Models

SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 11, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --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 Microsoft's Q3 FY19 earnings call, there are more than 180 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.

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 can't 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 CEO Hitesh 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."

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 in network 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 don't operate in silos, a security solution shouldn't 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 doesn't 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."

For more information, visitvectra.ai.

About VectraVectrais the leader in network detection and response from cloud and data center workloads to user and IoT devices. Its Cognitoplatform accelerates threat detection and investigation using AI to enrich network metadata it collects and stores with the right context to detect, hunt and investigate known and unknown threats in real time. Vectra offers three applications on the Cognito platform to address high-priority use cases. Cognito Streamsends security-enriched metadata to data lakes and SIEMs. Cognito Recallis a cloud-based application to store and investigate threats in enriched metadata. And Cognito Detectuses AI to reveal and prioritize hidden and unknown attackers at speed. For more information, visitvectra.ai.

Media contactJohn KreuzerLumina Communications for Vectravectra@luminapr.com

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Vectra Empowers Organizations to Detect and Stop Office 365 Breaches - Yahoo Finance

Human Behavior

When the monster in the nightmare is you – Albany Times Union

Monsters are a staple of nightmares.

Recently I dreamed I surreptitiously listened in to a phone call between my wife and our dentist. The hushed conversation was frustratingly hard to make out. But I got the gist: he was commiserating about her husband being a monster. One with no clue. I did hear the phrases repulsive personality and pain in the ass.

Was it true? Should I confront my wife about what Id heard? How could I deal with this at all? My life was shattered!

I was jolted awake.

The trigger for this nightmare was immediately obvious. Id just been reading Robert Sapolskys bookBehave, a scientific examination of all the factors influencing human behavior. Specifically, the chapter discussing the famous Milgram and Zimbardo experiments.

In Milgrams, most subjects complied with orders to administer to others what they thought were increasingly severe electric shocks. Zimbardos was the Stanford Prison Experiment with students role-playing as prisoners and guards. Here too the behavior was appalling.

We know some people are monsters. But does everyone have a monster lurking just below the surface? Sapolsky quotes Solzhenitsyn that the line between good and evil runs through every heart.

The apparent lesson of both experiments is that human behavior is very much shaped by context and circumstances. Put us in extreme circumstances, and extreme behavior will often be forthcoming. Though not always; some people have the self-possession to rise above circumstances. But most of us are not saints or angels.

Naturally, reading such stuff causes soul-searching. Hence my nightmare. Maybe, contrary to that nightmare, Ive lived my life admirably. But if so, perhaps its thanks less to my character than my circumstances. Its easy being Mister Nice Guy when everything is going nicely. Ive never really been tested. Would I press the button to deliver severe pain in Milgrams experiment? Would I brutalize prisoners in Zimbardos? Id like to think not. But one cant feel sure.

We also know that people in groups can be influenced to do things they individually never would. Thus lynch mobs. But a much greater phenomenon is people in groups creating civilization.Its purpose is to make our lives better mainly by curtailing the kinds of circumstances that cause people to behave badly toward each other, and expand those like Ive experienced, increasing the likelihood that even a non-saintly person can go through life rarely behaving Zimbardoic or Milgramy.

This isnt just a matter of affluence (though it helps; poverty can confront people with rotten choices). I dont think the propensity to push Milgrams shocker button correlated with income. What civilized society does is to create the structures wherein people can trust each other, with a basic bargain that you dont harm others and they dont harm you. In contrast to the Hobbesian state of nature with its war of all against all.

Of course its not perfection. Civilization, in all its complexity, does create some individual roles conducive to bad behavior. Some people are in fact tasked as prison guards. More generally, any sort of power can be problematic. And sometimes an entire society can become Nazi Germany. But thats never been true of human civilization as a whole. It defeated the Nazis. And while the line between good and evil may go through every heart, theyre not equally partitioned. For most of us, the bad side of the line is dwarfed by the good.

And civilizations big picture is an upward climb, organized ever better to achieve that. A slow fitful climb through most of history, but accelerating in modern times, with ever more people enjoying the benign circumstances of life that enable us to expand the good sides of our hearts and confine the bad to ever smaller precincts. So the better angels of our nature prevail.

But the climb does not go in a straight line. There was Nazi Germany. And there is Trumps America where, for too many people, the better angels of their nature are succumbing to their demons. Whether our own downward spiral can be reversed remains to be seen.

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When the monster in the nightmare is you - Albany Times Union

Human Behavior

A Discussion with Mike Basevic On Challenging Yourself Everyday and Living Life to the Fullest – Thrive Global

Coach Mike Basevic, Owner and Founder of NoLimits Nations began his journey to study human behavior, after his life cameto a crossroads. He realized he was extremely passionate about helping peoplereach their full potential in life. That is where the No Limits Nationsdivision Anxiety Free Executive came into effect. This program is one of thetop programs around the world and is set to help eliminate the struggles thatcome with anxiety and depression.

These ideas were all constructed from Coach MikeBasevics past experiences of having to deal with trauma, conflict, anxiety anddepression. He realized that life did not have to revolve around the negativethings that could potentially be going on. It was hard for him to initiallygrasp how someone who was so committed in life to be the best and to work thehardest, was still able to spiral downwards. Coach Mike decided that he wastired of constantly having these train of thoughts, which ultimately fueled hisinitial interests when it came to the cognitive science of human behaviour.

Chicagos Mike Basevicbegan a two-year period of reading over 250 books about the behaviouralsciences. If there was a book written about mental health, self-help or humanbehavior in general, he would instantly want to read it. It is important foreveryone to feel as though they can live life to the fullest and most positivepotential.

What do you love most about the industry you are in?

The thing I love the most about the industry I am in, isthat my daily life involves helpingothers. My skills allow me to assist others through whatever issues theymight be dealing with, as well as the mental pain they could be exhibiting.With the issue of mental health being a more focal topic in todays climate, itmakes my job that much more exciting. Each day I amconstantly looking for ways to eliminate peoples pain, while also maximizingtheir daily levels of productivity. We want everyone to leave the programfeeling like their best self.

How do you motivate others?

Overall, I like to refer tomyself as a coach. And as a coach, it is my responsibility to motivate myclients; whether it comes to physicalactivities, personal hardships, or their work life. Itis a part of the job to help instill within them the hope that they can turntheir lives around for the better. Any great coach should have the ability tomotivate people. When you motivate people, you are giving them a better senseof direction, higher levels of clarity and an overall vision of how they wanttheir lives to look. One of the most important things would be taking thosesteps of action and change, which can in turn allow someone to feel betterabout themselves and their situation. When people find things that inspirethem, then in turn become more motivated to achieve their goals. For everyoneto be motivated, it is not always the same. Sometimes as a coach, you need toinstill a tough love mention. It is sometimes about the accountability piece ofthings that is the most important. When they realize that they must beaccountable to their coach and complete these exercises required, it pushesthem to do it. In general, its a proven process that by giving people thatextra push, you will witness results.

Who has been a role model to you and why?

Within my lifetime thus far, Ihave had several role models. From teachers, to professors, to bosses to fellowcolleagues; there has always been someone in my life to act as a role model anda mentor for me. I remember my first job in the hotel industry, my boss was agreat mentor and provided me with key tools that I continue to utilize in myeveryday life. I was a young entrepreneur starting and had a lot of drive andinspiration that helped me overcome many obstacles that were in my way. It isimportant whether I was coaching athletes, salespeople, or entrepreneurs, thatI was always looking for ways to learn and grow as an individual and a coach. Ibelieve if you want to grow in any profession, its important to remaincoachable. I would take what I learntfrom people and apply it to my everyday life, in order to keep achieving thepersonal and professional results I wanted.In my personal life, my rolemodel has always been my grandfather; he has been someone I always aspired tobe. He was always such a giving individual and led with his heart. He left abig mark on me and showed me what it means to be accepting of people and beingkind to everyone.

What suggestions do you have for someone starting in your industry?

A suggestion that I would recommend to anyonestarting out as a transformation coach of any type would be that the profession is a behavioral craft.That means that it is imperative for people to take the time to learnand study human behavior for self-improvement.I think the job is more than just people who read a book and become inspired todo more towards improving peoples lives. It is important to put in the timeand learn the practice. It is about ensuring that not only are you motivatingpeople with techniques and practices that work and get results, but that youare also practicing what you preach and putin the work it takes to help others achieve their higher purpose in life. People in the fieldneed to master the craft before passing their knowledge onto others. This fieldcan potentially continue to be littered with people who do not have thenecessary experience. It is about learning and spending time around those whoyou can learn from yourself and then you can move forward with teaching it toothers.

What is your biggest accomplishment?

My biggest professional accomplishment to date would be building my company from the groundup and being able to positively impact thousands of people in the process.I held onto the vision for many years, until I wasable to know exactly how to help people. It was about having the drive anddesire to purpose this, without quitting. Now, I can impact lives daily andthat feels amazing! I have found my purpose and am living it everyday.

For a personal accomplishment, that would have to be beingable to raise my children and seeing them prosper. Through my turmoil, I was able to gain the experiences to make me abetter coach today. Regardless of what wastranspiring in my life, I was always striving to be the best parent I could be.I wanted to ensure I could raise my kids to be good people with values andmorals. Now my children are in their college years and are thriving! I lookback at all my past experiences and am thankful for the consistency that myfamily always brought to me.

Outside of work, what defines you as a person?

I would say what defines me, is that I always try to accepteveryone for who they are. Everyone has a history, and alot of people are always battling with something internally.Therefore, it is important to be kind to asmany people as you can. Not knowing what someone else is going through,extending a higher level of kindness those are things that everyone should be doing. Its all about ensuring that your inner circle is filled with good people and have greatvalues. I think its important to be a glasshalf full kind of individual. Life conditions us to be miserable and afraid, soits necessary to feed your mind and soul withgood food and people. I strive to make myself a better person on a dayto day basis.

Where do you see you and your company in 5 years?

Our main objective is growing our outreach. We want to bemore than 10 times the size we are currently. It is important for us tocontinue to work towards these goals, because it will be a very excitingmountain that were going to have to climb. The program No Limits Nation isoffering clients the most impactful and beneficial services. It is the constantexpansion process and trying to really tap into a younger audience. Ideally,overall just to be 5x as big because that means we are impacting 5X more people.

Explain the proudest day of your professional life.

The proudest moments of my professional life are when Iput this program together, brought it to people that needed it the most andstarted to witness the dramatic change it was making on their lives. Thetestimonials that I get from clients daily are not only inspiring but are alsoextremely motivating. There is just a certain level of satisfaction I get frompositively impacting the lives of people were once lost at a point. Giving themthat reassurance that they can get back on track in their life with a littlehelp is always a phenomenal feeling. Just knowing we can make a difference isalways a plus.

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A Discussion with Mike Basevic On Challenging Yourself Everyday and Living Life to the Fullest - Thrive Global

Human Behavior

Former Secretary of the Navy Richard V. Spencer: Consider the Human Element in Decision Making – Yale School of Management

When Richard V. Spencer assumed the role of 76th secretary of the United States Navy in August 2017, he says, the ill effects of 16 years of optimizationstreamlining operations as resources shrankwere evidenced by both lives lost and a morale account that was overdrawn. During a talk at the Yale School of Management on February 6, Spencer likened his efforts to effect institutional change to that of a corporate turnaround. After 16 years of war and deploying our troops probably much faster on a rotational cycle than we should havethe fundamentals of the United States Navy had worn away and eroded, said Spencer. Wed been running the machine at 100%, low on oil, with bad fuel.

The technical solutions to the problem would include more and better training for surface warfare officers (SWOs)officers who serve on Navy shipsbut addressing the human side of the equation was equally important to ameliorating the situation, he said.

Spencer, who was fired from his position in November 2019 after clashing with President Donald Trump over the court martial of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, spoke as part of the Becton Fellowship program. The lecture series was established at the Yale School of Management in 1980 by Becton, Dickinson & Co., a leading global medical instruments supplier, in honor of Henry P. Becton 37 B.S., company chairman (1961-1987), to bring practitioners from private and public institutions to share their professional insights with faculty and students. The conversation was moderated by Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean for leadership studies and Lester Crown Professor in the Practice of Management.

In his talk, titled Optimization, Decision Making, and Ethics, Spencer said that the lessons he learned and the tools he honed as secretary of the Navyespecially those related to crisis and risk management and ethical leadershipcan be applied readily in the private sector. One such lesson came from Spencers efforts to restore the esteem of the Navy, both internally and externally, after years of management that prioritized optimization. After leading comprehensive and strategic readiness reviews to determine pain points within the institution, Spencer realized the problems were deeper and broader than first anticipatedand that they would require not only technical solutions, but also behavioral interventions.

One of the things we found in the reviews was that there was a lagging of pride in the SWO community, said Spencer. As simple as this sounds, we gave surface warfare officers a leather jacketand a log book to record how many dockings they do [to inculcate a sense of pride]. That was an meaningful step forward on a human basis.

Spencer urged the Yale SOM students in the audience, As you become managers, know that every single lever should be used. The obvious information will come out in the data and in strategy, but dont forget the human behavior elementits a huge lever.

Spencer also advised students to develop and adhere to a true north, which will serve them well in times of crisis. He credited his Christian upbringing teaching right and wrong, years of education, and a commitment to honing a personal ethics with helping him handle the Gallagher affair.

When it came time to make the decision [to not proceed as the president wished], it was the easiest decision Ive had to make, he said.

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Former Secretary of the Navy Richard V. Spencer: Consider the Human Element in Decision Making - Yale School of Management

Human Behavior

Kunal Shah on the jobs that will define India’s future – Quartz India

With half of its population under 25 and the unemployment rate at four-decade high, India faces an uncertain future. The question on young peoples minds: what kinds of jobs will we have? Quartz asked leaders across Indias biggest industries about that one job in their company or field that will be the most crucial in the coming decades.

From physical banking to providing contactless solutions such as digital wallets, the Indian financial services sector has undergone a sea change in recent times. The policy framework, too, has evolved to accommodate more payments banks, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), and small finance banks. The government-backed Unified Payments Interface (UPI) now fulfills more digital payments in India than cards and net banking. With growth in digital banking, roles that involve mitigating risk, managing cyber security, and ensuring privacy will gain prominence. Many banks have already started appointing chief risk officers.

Kunal Shah, the founder and CEO of credit card payment app CRED, told Quartz:

The most critical need for talent is not in one specific role, but traits that apply across functions. The people who can make an outsized difference bring a combination of what is conventionally known as left-brained and right-brained thinking. They understand human behavior and motivations, empathize with users, and imagine products and experiences that address challenges from the ground up. The same people also reason effectively, create logical workflows, and execute at scale. This combination of creativity and reason is the single most differentiated attribute for talent, and one by which we evaluate every individual. Using CRED is delightful because of this empathetic approach to design that our team members conceive of and deliver, from the head of design who is a full-time musician to a colleague who is a poet.

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Kunal Shah on the jobs that will define India's future - Quartz India