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Human Behavior

Ethereum Capitulation Imminent As ETH Follows 2018 Market Structure: Crypto Analyst Kevin Svenson – The Daily Hodl

A closely tracked crypto analyst is predicting the imminent collapse of Ethereum as he says ETH appears to be closely mirroring its 2018 market structure.

Kevin Svenson tells his 107,800 Twitter followers that Ethereum recently breached its long-term diagonal support that has kept the market bullish for about a year.

According to Svenson, the bearish move is reminiscent of Ethereums price action in 2018 when it also took out its upward trendline and lost nearly 80% of its value in just a few months.

This ETH fractal is playing out.

At time of writing, Ethereum is changing hands for $1,358, down nearly 10% in the past day.

With Ethereum now trading below its previous cycle high of $1,420, Svenson believes that ETH, Bitcoin (BTC) and the rest of the crypto markets could witness an extended bear market.

ETH, BTC and crypto, in general, could easily see another 140 days +/- of sideways bear market action.

This is standard in these conditions.

Using the 128-week simple moving average and [the] 50-week exponential moving average as a comparison from the previous cycle for a rough estimate.

Human behavior doesnt repeat but it rhymes Look how much time we spent below the (orange)128-week simple moving average in the last cycle. Even if we just did half of that means we got at least a year to spend in consolidation.

As for Bitcoin, Svenson says BTC is still in a long-term uptrend despite the bearish price action over the last few months.

Bitcoins macro trend situation still looks good. If you are looking at this from a trend/growth perspective we are making progress.

Looking at Svensons chart, BTC appears to be trading within a descending channel with a long-term support line at around $20,000.

At time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at $25,813, down over 8% in the past day.

Featured Image: Shutterstock/jovan vitanovski

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Ethereum Capitulation Imminent As ETH Follows 2018 Market Structure: Crypto Analyst Kevin Svenson - The Daily Hodl

Human Behavior

How Humanlike Do We Really Want Robots to Be? – Smithsonian Magazine

A robotic finger coated with living human skin heals itself after researchers covered it with a collagen bandage. Shoji Takeuchi

From the Six Million Dollar Man to RoboCop to the Terminator, Hollywood has produced a pantheon of memorable cyborgs. These hybrids tried to destroy society, or save it, according to their own goals. But they fascinate for the same reason; they blurred the lines between humans and robots in ways that have never happened in our historybut just might be part of our future.

Fully functional cyborgs are still quite aways off, but scientists are pioneering a new way to commingle human and machine. A Japanese team has designed a robotic finger thats covered with living skin grown from actual human skin cells. The process gives the robotic appendage an extremely lifelike look, not least because the skin can move and flex naturally as the three-joint digit does. To the touch, the skin also feels far more like human skin than silicone robot skins, and can even heal when cut or split. Covering a single finger is a far cry from cloaking an entire humanoid robot in artificially produced human skin. But the groundbreaking proof of concept, detailed in a study published today in Matter, raises some incredible possibilities.

Shoji Takeuchi, an engineer specializing in biohybrid systems at the University of Tokyo, Japan, says that while some silicone-skinned robots look very human at some distance, close inspection reveals them to be artificial. Thats why his team turned to biohybrid robotics. Our goal is to develop robots that are truly human-like, he says. We think that the only way to achieve an appearance that can be mistaken for a human being is to cover it with the same material as a human beingliving skin cells.

To create the lifelike appendage, Takeuchi and colleagues crafted a kind of skin-tissue cocktail, and then molded the material around the artificial finger to produce seamless and natural looking coverage.

Application of the skin was a two-part process. The team first mixed collagen and human dermal fibroblasts, the two main ingredients in our skins connective tissues. The finger was submerged in this solution, and while culturing in an incubator for three days, this artificial dermis adhered to the digit as the tissues naturally shrank to produce a solid, close-fitting coating over the finger. This coating served as a foundation for the molding and application of a second coat, an epidermis, made up of the same human skin cells that comprise some 90 percent of our own skins outer layer. The second solution was poured on the finger multiple times, from different angles, and left to culture for two weeks to produce the finished product.

The resulting skin has a human-like texture, and when split or cut it can be healed by the application of a collagen bandage which gradually became part of the skin itselfa technique inspired by the use of hydrogel grafts to treat severe burns.

The robot skin was created with commercially available experimental human skin cells. Research on mass production is being actively conducted in other fields such as regenerative medicine and cultured meat research, Takeuchi says, adding that ongoing skin production research in those areas will help his own work on clothing robots in human skin.

Other advances in the production of skin that might be applied to robots have involved creating sheets of living human skin, which then have to be cut and tailored to the various shapes of a body. Researchers at Caltech recently unveiled a printable artificial skin, made of soft hydrogel, embedded with sensors that can detect pressure, temperature or even dangerous chemicals. But it may be difficult to conform printed skin to the unique shapes of human anatomy, like a finger or a hand. Takeuchis method creates a form fit without the need for such efforts.

The product is also still a lot weaker than our own skin, Takeuchi notes, and so far it must be constantly tended to in order to survive. To maintain it for a long period of time, it needs a system that has a vascular-like structure inside that provides a constant supply of nutrients, he explains. To solve the problem the team is mulling over how to mimic blood vessels and the equivalent of sweat glands to help deliver water to the skin.

Of course, appearance isnt everything. Humans dont just see one anothers skin, they touch it, and the living skin provides a much more natural feel than silicone.

Maria Paola Paladino, who has studied human attitudes towards robots at the University of Trento, Italy, points out that a lot of scientific literature exists on touch and its impact in building relationships and well-being. There is research suggesting for example that if someone touches you, in a way youre receptive to, you become kinder towards this person, she says. If you touch this robot skin, will you be able to feel a human touch? In terms of human experience that could be really interesting.

The robots own sense of touch is another key feature that must be developed if robots are to interact more naturally, and safely, as they become a more common part of our everyday human environment. Scientists have tried various electronic sensors and other methods to create the sense of touch in robots. For his own finger experiment, Takeuchi plans to explore reproducing a natural nerve system to instill a sense of touch in the skin.

Robots have sparked a lot of debate about the future of artificial intelligence. Just how smart do we want robots to become, some ask, and what are the implications? Similar questions are raised when it comes to the appearances of intelligent machinesjust how human do we want robots to look?

Human reactions to robots vary. A study from the Georgia Institute of Technology found that most college-aged adults preferred their robots to look like robots, while older adults preferred those with more human faces. A given robots role is also a factor. Most individuals in the study preferred housecleaning robots to look more like machines, for example, while those communicating with us and performing smart tasks like giving information, were preferred to look more like us.

Increasingly, well be interacting meaningfully with social robots in our daily lives. (Robots can already check you into a hotel, lead you through a workout, or conduct your funeral.) And some very humanlike robots are already among us, including Hanson Robotics Sofia, which boasts its own social media accounts. Founder David Hanson expounds on the benefits of making machines much like ourselves. In designing human-inspired robotics, we hold our machines to the highest standards we knowhumanlike robots being the apex of bio-inspired engineering, writes in IEEE Spectrum, a technology publication.

Neuroscience studies have delved into human feelings for robots, and found our empathy for them when they are treated harshly isnt yet on the same level as what we feel for other humans. We view robots as less than human, so making them more humanlike may strengthen our relationships. That might be useful as robots are increasingly socially tasked with things like caregiving or dispensing important information and advice.

On the other hand, there are some very good examples of humanoids, like NAO, where its clearly a machine but its cute and people really like it, says Paladino. Hollywood robots like R2-D2 and WALL-E have also engendered legions of fans without looking all that much like humans. (The Smithsonian museums are home to their own group of humanoid robots, four-foot-tall guides known as the Pepper robots, which engage visitors by dishing out information and answering questions.)

Part of the debate about robot appearance revolves around the concept of the uncanny valley, an idea floated by roboticist Masahiro Mori back in 1970 that also applies to creepy dolls. Mori suggests that as robots become more lifelike humans respond favorablyup until a point when the exact opposite becomes true. When they become too lifelike, the theory goes, the subtle but noticeable inhuman attributes become especially eerie and disturbing to humans who notice that something isnt quite right. Disagreement on how to quantify the uncanny valley, or to the extent it even exists, continues in earnest.

Paladino has studied human reactions and attitudes to social robots that look increasingly like ourselves. She describes our evolving relationship to such robots as a paradox. On one hand, humans want social robots to be human enough in appearance and behavior to fulfill our relationship needs. On the other hand, robots that are too human can threaten our sense of human identity and uniquenessa fear that might be fueled by cognitive systems that arent accustomed to confusing blurred boundaries between human and machine.

If you have machines that are too similar to us, you start to have this blurring of human identity and people can be threatened by that, she says. If they are as human as I am, then what does it mean to be human?

Another question may lie near the core of such doubts, 'can we ever really trust robots?' Right now, perhaps in part because of Hollywood creations like the Terminator and Number Six, some individuals remain very wary. Paladino believes that our relationship and attitudes towards robots will continue to evolve, for better or worse, as humans have more and more experiences with intelligent machines. In that way, the robots we produce will really shape our attitudes towards them. What social psychology teaches us, she says, is that humans can change their minds.

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How Humanlike Do We Really Want Robots to Be? - Smithsonian Magazine

Human Behavior

Hidden Games: The Surprising Power of Game Theory to Explain Irrational Human Behavior – Next Big Idea Club Magazine

Moshe Hoffman is a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology and a research fellow at MITs Sloan School of Management. Erez Yoeli is a research scientist at MITs Sloan School of Management, the director of MITs Applied Cooperation Team. They both lecture in Harvards department of economics.

Below, Moshe and Erez share 5 key insights from their new book, Hidden Games: The Surprising Power of Game Theory to Explain Irrational Human Behavior. Listen to the audio versionread by Moshe and Erez themselvesin the Next Big Idea App.

Just take our sense of aesthetics. In some places in the world, its common for men to grow long fingernails, especially long pinky nails. Now, to most of us, men with long fingernails arent so attractive, yet when we asked the men why they grow long fingernails, they said it was because they find them beautiful.

Heres another example of our strange sense of aesthetics: The complex rhyme schemes of rapper MF Doom. His intricate verses pose two puzzles. First, theres something kind of funny about the fact that an entire art form grows up around an artificial constraint like rhyming that, in fact, makes it pretty hard to communicate. Think about how much harder it would be to tell a family member or a friend how your day went if you had to rhyme almost every word with another word. Second, MF Dooms rhymes are so subtle that the average listener is likely to miss them. This begs the question: Why is art so often subtle, and prized for that subtlety?

Another thing that makes people weird is our sense of altruism. You might know that Americans are very generous, donating roughly 3 percent of GDP to charity each year. Thats as much as we devote to R&D. Yet when we give, we tend to do it in odd ways. In surveys, most people admit that they dont even check how good a charity is before giving to it. So why do we giveand why do we give so ineffectively?

Proximate explanations are explanations that rely on what we think or feel. If you ask an MF Doom fan why they like the rappers complex rhyming schemes, the fan will probably tell you, I like that beat, or I like how that sounded, or I like the way that rhyme flowed over the bar. That doesnt explain why they like those beats or rhyming schemes.

If you ask a volunteer at a charity why they wanted to support that particular organization, they may tell you, It helps me feel connected or It helps to build a global community. But again, that doesnt explain why it makes them feel connected, or why they care so much about building a global community.

To understand why people are so weird, we have to go beyond the proximateand game theory helps us do just that.

At its core, a game just has three parts. There are players who choose from some actions and they get payoffs. It really is that simple. To make this game theory, though, we have to add two more things. First, those payoffs are going to depend not just on the players choice, but also on what others are doing. Second, there needs to be some sense that the players make their choice optimally. Thats it. Thats game theory in a nutshell.

Traditionally, game theory has been used to try to understand the behavior of companies (like, say, when theyre merging, what might happen to prices), the behavior of bidders in an auction (how changing the rules might change their bids and the amount of revenue that the auctioneer receives), or for statecraft (a famous application of game theory is to nuclear brinkmanship).

Game theory can help us make sense of some counterintuitive stuff. For instance, you might have heard of the Dutch tulip mania of the 1600s. During this time, a single tulip bulb could cost as much as hundreds of pounds of cheese. Yet in some auctions, if nobody bid high enough for the bulb, then the auctioneer would just crush it. Thats nuts! Why not simply let the price drop further, or try selling it again later? Game theory teaches us that at least in certain circumstances, destroying the bulb can increase the expected revenue from the auction.

Game theory often yields weird results like this, which is what gives it its power to explain all sorts of otherwise puzzling behaviors. Thats what makes game theory so powerful.

You may have read books like Richard Dawkinss The Selfish Gene, which use game theory to explain a variety of puzzling animal behaviors and traits. Game theory has been used to address why in some species the ratio between males and females at birth is 5050. Then theres the hawk-dove model, which people use to talk about animal territoriality. Or consider the costly signaling model to talk about peacocks tailswhy would any creature evolve such an absurd tail? That was a question that Darwin said made him feel sick because he couldnt understand it.

Of course, these kinds of answers have nothing to do with rationality. All we need is for there to be some kind of optimization going on. And in these cases, biological evolution is doing that optimization.

Another way we optimize is cultural evolutionthe idea that our tastes and beliefs are shaped by learning through experience or socially from others. This kind of argument has been used to explain why people in some cultures develop a taste for spicy foods, or why Native Americans develop a taste for corn thats cooked with a bit of ash or lime, or why people start to believe in certain food taboos that keep them from ingesting dangerous toxins during pregnancy.

Game theory doesnt require rationality, just some optimization process.

Remember those men who grow long fingernails because they think long nails are beautiful? When we dug a bit deeper, we found that those with the long fingernails were secretaries, teachers, and mayorspeople with indoor jobs. These were jobs that would both allow you to grow your nails long, but also carried a bit more prestige within the community. So one explanation here for the long fingernails is that they signal something about peoples occupation. But that game was hidden.

What is the hidden game when it comes to altruism? Here, the game might have more to do with reputations. Were not saying Habitat for Humanity volunteers sign up just so they can put some photos up on Instagram. They genuinely want to do the right thing and genuinely feel good swinging those hammers. But below the surface, theres a hidden game going on that helps to shape those righteous beliefs and good feelings. And this hidden game, if we take the time to understand it, can help us understand why folks who want to do the right thing are the same folks who do it in such ineffective ways.

To listen to the audio version read by co-authors Moshe Hoffman and Erez Yoeli, download the Next Big Idea App today:

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Hidden Games: The Surprising Power of Game Theory to Explain Irrational Human Behavior - Next Big Idea Club Magazine

Human Behavior

Daughters of divorced fathers start reproduction earlier than daughters of dead fathers – PsyPost

New research published in Evolution and Human Behavior has found that girls whose fathers were divorced started reproduction about 9.2 months earlier than girls whose fathers were no longer living.

Researchers have been interested in investigating why and how stressful experiences in childhood affect sexual maturation, behaviors, and reproductive outcomes. Girls who grow up without a father may start reproduction earlier because the absence is a cue of environmental harshness and uncertainty in which a fast life history strategy is favored. Alternatively, the trend might be the result of genetic factors.

Researchers Markus Valge and colleagues were interested in investigating whether the absence of the father, the mother, or both was most associated with the early onset of puberty among girls. The researchers used a large dataset to study girls who were born between 1936 and 1962 in Estonia. Valge and colleagues had access to information about the girls rate of puberty (via breast development stages), when they had their first child, and their overall reproductive success (how many children they had in their lifetime). The girls either grew up in orphanages, without a mother, or without a father due to either divorce or death.

After analyzing the data, the researchers found that girls whose fathers divorced started reproduction about 9.2 months earlier than girls who grew up with only their father or both parents present, and about 7.4 months earlier than girls whose fathers died. However, the difference in reproductive starting age was not significant once education was controlled for.

Girls whose mothers died had .25 less children in their lifetime on average than girls who grew up with just a mother or a father. There was no difference in the number of children girls had when their fathers died compared to girls who grew up in an orphanage.

This study indicates that stressful childhood environments do not predict faster sexual maturation for girls when controlling for education. Valge and colleagues argue this may be due to low test power and confounding variables. However, there was an association between how old the girls were when they had their first child and whether their parents were divorced. Valge and colleagues argue this could be explained by Flinns hypothesis that suggests fathers guard their daughters from predatory men, so girls with fathers in their life reproduce later in life.

However, this hypothesis is only partially supported because girls whose fathers were dead did not have children significantly earlier than girls whose fathers were present. Valge and colleagues argue that the Grandmother Hypothesis (in which mothers help promote the survival of their grandchildren) is supported, considering girls whose mothers died had .25 less children on average.

A limitation of this study is that there was no information regarding whether a step-parent was involved in the families in which mothers and fathers were absent. There was also a lack of information about the girls age when a parent died or divorced.

The study, Pubertal maturation is independent of family structure but daughters of divorced (but not dead) fathers start reproduction earlier, was authored by Markus Valge, Richard Meitern, and Peeter Hrak.

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Daughters of divorced fathers start reproduction earlier than daughters of dead fathers - PsyPost

Human Behavior

What is air quality? How can the weather and human behavior impact it? – WQAD Moline

Youll often hear the term air quality mentioned in weather forecasts, but what does that mean? Meteorologist Effrage Davis explains.

MOLINE, Ill. June 1 is the first day of meteorological summer, and throughout the upcoming summer months, youll often hear the term air quality mentioned in weather forecasts. But what does that mean?

Air is primarily made up of nitrogen, oxygen and other gases. When air contains small amounts of chemical pollutants, it is considered good air quality. When air is hazy and contains high amounts of solid particles and chemical pollutants, it is considered poor air quality.

Air quality is measured using the air quality index. The index measures the changes in the amount of pollution on a scale from 0 to 500 degrees, according to the UCAR Center for Science Education. The lower the degree, the cleaner and safer the air is to breathe. The bigger the degree, the more pullulated and dangerous it is.

Thefive pollutants measured by the AQI are ground-level ozone, particle pollution, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide. Our air quality depends on the amount of pollution in the air.

The Clean Air Act, enacted in 1970, enforces national standards for each of these pollutants to help protect public health. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, decades of research have proven poor air quality can cause detrimental effects on human health and increase disease, especially among vulnerable populations, including children, the elderly and those living in areas with high levels of pollution.

Several things can affect air quality. Manmade pollutants from vehicle emissions, coal power plants and more can play a direct role in air quality, but there are also natural causes.

Weather can affect air quality as well, according to the UCAR Center. If there is a volcanic eruption or a fire that emits pollutants into the air, wind can then carry these pollutants hundreds of miles away to another location. Storms can wash pollutants out of the atmosphere or move them to another location, but high-pressure systems and heatwaves create stagnant air that can cause high concentrations of pollutants to sit over an area. Droughts can increase the chances of fires, which also add more carbon monoxide and particle pollution to the atmosphere.

But weather can also increase air quality. Humidity can help decrease ozone pollution, and afternoon thunderstorms block sunlight, therefore slowing down ozone production while moisture destroys the ozone that has formed.

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What is air quality? How can the weather and human behavior impact it? - WQAD Moline

Human Behavior

When Yellowstone Wildlife Injures Humans, We Need To Keep Own Behavior In Check – Mountain Journal

Its been one of the damndest kinds of human behavior towitnessand witness it I have for nearly five full yearsas Mountain Journalbuilt its large and engaged audience on Facebook.

Eyebrow raising, too, is how the tenor of discourse in thedigital town squarethe modern version of spectators shouting from cheap seatsin the Roman Coliseum changes abruptly if the injured person dies.

It's happened with a number of fatal grizzly bear maulings.

Rest assured the same kind of vile fulmination flows frompeople who wish ill things to happen to environmentalistsespecially todefenders of grizzlies and wolvesas it does with animal rights activists saying all hunters ought to be hunted. To share almost any story on social media is to affirm that it's often mighty hard to foster a civil discussion.

On the morning of Memorial Day 2022, a young woman from Ohio,25 years old, in the early prime of her life, was gored by a bison as shestrolled along a boardwalk in Black Sand Basin in Yellowstone National Park. Accordingto the press release offered by Yellowstone officials, she was tossed 10 feetin the air. She was evacuated and her condition remains unknown.

Initially, when news first broke of the encounter, she was roundly ridiculed for venturing too close to thelarge post-Pleistocene icon of Americas oldest national park. If you want toget a taste of the flavor of comments, go to Mountain Journals Facebookpage now and read them for yourself.

Before one judges, consider that the impetuous reactions frommost were not likelyif we are giving them the benefit of the doubtintended tobe cruel. Often it is instead a cathartic acknowledgment that the space of wildanimals needs to be respected. Rallying on behalf of wildliferecognizing animalsentience and not treating species other than ourselves merely as harvestable natural resources or propcuriositiesis actually only a fairly recent advancement in the thinking of Homo sapiens.

In its press release,Yellowstone emphasized a fact that is included in the pamphlets and fliersgiven to visitors as they pass through the park gates. Wildlife in Yellowstoneare wild and can be dangerous when approached, the press release reminded, andit repeated the legal spatial mandates that exist in both Yellowstone and GrandTeton national parks: visitors are required to maintain at least a 25-yard(75-foot) distance between themselves and bison, elk, bighorn sheep, deer,moose and coyotes and at least 100 yards (300 feet) from bears and wolves.

Indeed, neither Yellowstone, nor Grand Teton nor the otherpublic wildlands in Greater Yellowstone are Disneyland. And this is precisely whyGreater Yellowstone and its unparalleled array of large mammal inhabitants stands apart.

But here, lets reflect on what that means. It means theanimals are not tame. It means they are self-willed and mostly uncontrolled. It means they are larger than people. Asa tenet of personal responsibility, it means that in order to minimize thepossibility of us getting injured or injuring them we are required to arm ourselves not with gunsbut solid information. It means that we increase our ecological literacy, whichis to say becoming aware of the natural history of other beings that are notrobots or creations of artificial intelligence or virtual reality.

This Yellowstone tourist, who moved too close to a mother grizzly and cubs, darts away after the adult bear made a bluff charge. The 25-year-old visitor from Carol Stream, Illinois, was banned from Yellowstone and required to pay more than $2,000 in fines. Photo courtesy Yellowstone Facebook page/Darcie Addington

Wild lives have the potential to wipe smugness from the faceof any arrogant, self-absorbed person who does not check their own ego at thedoor. Sometimes, even the reverent,respectful and unprepared are reminded of that with devastating consequences.

The point is not to mock others when it happens but rather morefully appreciate that such wildness still exists in the 21stcenturyeven after decades of litigious, opportunistic lawyers seeking toblame, sue and profit on misadventure, and frightened government agencies being forced to buffthe edges off of danger. In essence, thetendency has been to eviscerateor make antiseptic the very things that makewild places wild and which summon us closer with hearts in full palpitation.

Obviously, sincere sympathies are offered to the humans whoget hurt or killed. They are somebodys belovedsons and daughters, moms, dads and good personal friends. They did not come toYellowstone and Grand Teton with any notion of being mauled or gored. Enthusiastic, they made the trekbecause the allure of wild nature matters to them and, in today's world, the scarcity of such places in the Anthropocene mean most humans are out of their element.

Whats also essential to understand is that such negativeencounters are actually exceedingly rare; that maintaining awesome wildness isnot so much a matter of wildlife management but human management, and wehumans often create trouble for both wildlife and those in uniform whovirtuously look after them.

So, what about bisonhow dangerous are they? While most visitorworry is directed toward bears, bison are actually the most dangerous animal inYellowstone.

That number has risen since the analysis was made. But the researchers, when it was written, also cited the advent of a newphenomenon that, in some ways, has undermined the great educational outreachefforts made by the national parks. The popularity of smart phone photographywith its limited zoom capacity and social media sharing of selfies mightexplain why visitors disregard park regulations and approach wildlife moreclosely than when traditional camera technology was used.

Yes, revolutionaryhand-held technology that alters human behavior has actually resulted in morepeople abandoning common sense, turning their backs to wildlife which are closeby, and then posing for a selfie to get the animal in the frame.

Rangers in Yellowstone and Grand Teton have theirhands full trying to manage wildlife jams along the park highways. In JacksonHole, public excitement surrounding grizzlies, namely mother bear 399, has putthe Grand Teton Park wildlife brigade into a tough spot trying to prevent people from doingextraordinarily dumb things in their zeal to see bears and capture theexperience on camera.

However, the authors also note: Despite thesuccess of the 1970 bear management program in reducing the number ofbear-inflicted human injuries in the park, an average of 1 bear-inflicted humaninjury/year still occurs. These injuries most often involve surprise encountersbetween backcountry hikers and female grizzly bears with young. It will bedifficult to reduce the frequency of this type of injury, especially if bothbackcountry recreational activity and the grizzly bear population in YellowstoneNational Park continue to increase. Public education programs informing hikershow to avoid surprise encounters and how to react to encounters and attacksonce they occur may be the most useful tool in further decreasing the numberand severity of bear-inflicted human injuries in the park.

In 2021, a 25-year-old woman from Carol Stream, Illinois, unwittingly made national news after she was captured on video remaining too close to a Yellowstone grizzly mother with cubs and was bluff charged by the adult bear. Pleading guilty to a number of charges, Samantha Dehring spent four days in jail, was banned from Yellowstone for a year and ordered to pay a $1,000 fine and make a $1,000 community service contribution to the Yellowstone Forever Wildlife Protection Fund,

Wildlife in Yellowstone National Park are, indeed, wild. The park is not a zoo where animals can be viewed within the safety of a fenced enclosure. They roam freely in their natural habitat and when threatened will react accordingly, statedActing US Attorney Bob Murray in a news release issued by Yellowstone. Approaching a sow grizzly with cubs is absolutely foolish. Here, pure luck is why Dehring is a criminal defendant and not a mauled tourist.

But to show how rare such an encounter is, the park put it inperspective. Chances of being attacked by a grizzly in developed areas,roadsides, and boardwalks in Yellowstone: 1 in 59.5 million visits; chanceswhile in a roadside campground; 1 in 26.6 million overnight stays; chanceswhile camped in the backcountry: 1 in 1.7 million overnight stays; chances while hiking in the backcountry: 1 in232,613 person travel days. Put altogether, the chances of having a grizzlyencounter overall: 1 in 2.7 million visits.

The irony of potential peril is that it possesses the potential of making us feel more alive. Lucky are we to still have nature preserves we enter at our own risk. For those who come into harm's way, let us resist the temptation to debase ourselves by being unkind. Sometimes when things happen in Yellowstone, the could happen to any of us.

NOTE: Todd Wilkinson's longstanding column, "The New West," appears every Wednesday and Monday at Mountain Journal.

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When Yellowstone Wildlife Injures Humans, We Need To Keep Own Behavior In Check - Mountain Journal

Human Behavior

Researchers are trying to teach residents to respect Long Island beach spaces occupied by shore birds – CBS New York

LONG ISLAND -- Two Long Island beaches are part of a national study into how human behavior can help endangered shore birds.

As CBS2's Carolyn Gusoff reported Monday, our beaches are filled with threatened birds that thrive when given room to nest and rest.

Lido Beach may look somewhat empty, but it's actually filled with fragile bird life that is breeding.

Long Island ocean beaches are as much a people playground as they are a wildlife preserve.

"It's an entire ecosystem that we are protecting, but also how to balance that with recreation and to provide these spaces for people to come with their families to enjoy the beaches," said Tara Schneider-Moran, a Town of Hempstead biologist.

The Town of Hempstead and Jones Beach are part of a national study to find the best way to help humans understand our beaches belong to endangered birds like piping plovers, American oystercatchers, terns, and black skimmers, too.

"We do want to push for this idea of sharing the shore. It's not just their nesting area, that it's also our beach season where we are playing volleyball, going swimming," said Shelby Casas of Audubon NY.

The study on the East Coast's Atlantic Flyway, conducted by the Audubon Society and Virginia Tech, will determine how best to teach the public to co-exist, keeping dogs away, and walking around shore birds, not through a flock.

"I like to think of it as sort of a smiley face. If you think of the two birds right in front of you along the edge of the water or out in the sand, if you just do a half circle around them, then you're not walking straight at them," said Ashley Dayer, a professor of fish and wildlife at Virginia Tech.

The researchers are getting the message out with fencing, signage, in-person outreach, and asking the public to keep at least 100 feet from a nesting area.

"That's a little hard to visualize. We have a lot of ways. It's like six kayaks worth of space from the birds. Stay out of the fenced areas. They are clearly marked. They have signage," Casas said.

Getting too close makes birds fly off in fear leaving eggs and young vulnerable.

"We want to protect them so that generations to come can appreciate them and go to the beach and see them nesting for years and years to come," Casas said.

"They are beautiful birds. We love seeing them," said Gail Blumenthal of Oceanside.

"I love the beach, it's nature. The animals belong here," added Stacey Ortiz of Bellmore.

The study's results are due next spring. Researchers are hoping to determine how many more chicks were bred because humans learned how to share the shore.

There are 464 nesting pairs of piping plovers across Long Island.

Carolyn Gusoff has covered some of the most high profile news stories in the New York City area and is best known as a trusted, tenacious, consistent and caring voice of Long Island's concerns.

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Researchers are trying to teach residents to respect Long Island beach spaces occupied by shore birds - CBS New York

Human Behavior

Why the top baby names then get less popular – Futurity: Research News

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The more popular a baby name becomes, the less likely parents are to choose it, research finds.

Parents first chose the name Maverick after a television show called Maverick aired in the 1950s, but its popularity rose meteorically in 1986 with the release of the movie Top Gun. Today, it is even used for baby girls.

The name Emma peaked in popularity in the late 1800s, declined precipitously through the first half of the 1900s, then shot back up to be one of the most popular names of the early 2000s. Linda peaked somewhere in the late 1940s and Daniel in the mid-1980s. But each rise in popularity was followed by an equally steep decline.

Same goes for popular dog breeds: Dalmatians today are a tenth as popular as they were in the 1990s.

Mitchell Newberry, an assistant professor of complex systems, says examining trends in the popularity of baby names and dog breeds can be a proxy for understanding ecological and evolutionary change. The names and dog breed preferences themselves are like genes or organisms competing for scarce resources. In this case, the scarce resources are the minds of parents and dog owners. His results are published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

Newberry looks at frequency-dependent selection, a kind of natural selection in which the tendency to copy a certain variant depends on that variants current frequency or popularity, regardless of its content. If people tend to copy the most common variant, then everyone ends up doing roughly the same thing. But if people become less willing to copy a variant the more popular it becomes, it leads to a greater diversity of variants.

Think of how we use millions of different names to refer to people but we almost always use the same word to refer to baseball, Newberry says. For words, theres pressure to conform, but my work shows that the diversity of names results from pressures against conformity.

These trends are common in biology, but difficult to quantify. What researchers do have is a complete database of the names of babies over the last 87 years.

Newberry used the Social Security Administration baby name database, itself born in 1935, to examine frequency dependence in first names in the United States. He found that when a name is most rare1 in 10,000 birthsit tends to grow, on average, at a rate of 1.4% a year. But when a name is most commonmore than 1 in 100 birthsits popularity declines, on average, at 1.6%.

This is really a case study showing how boom-bust cycles by themselves can disfavor common types and promote diversity, Newberry says. If people are always thirsting after the newest thing, then its going to create a lot of new things. Every time a new thing is created, its promoted, and so more rare things rise to higher frequency and you have more diversity in the population.

Using the same techniques they applied to baby names, Newberry and colleagues examined dog breed preferences using a database of purebred dog registrations from the American Kennel Club. They found boom-bust cycles in the popularity of dog breeds similar to the boom-bust cycles in baby names.

The researchers found a Greyhound boom in the 1940s and a Rottweiler boom in the 1990s. This shows what researchers call a negative frequency dependent selection, or anti-conformity, meaning that as frequency increases, selection becomes more negative. That means that rare dog breeds at 1 in 10,000 tend to increase in popularity faster than dogs already at 1 in 10.

Biologists basically think these frequency-dependent pressures are fundamental in determining so many things, Newberry says. The long list includes genetic diversity, immune escape, host-pathogen dynamics, the fact that theres basically a one-to-one ratio of males and femalesand even what different populations think is sexy.

Why do birds like long tails? Why do bamboos take so long to flower? Why do populations split into different species? All of these relate at a fundamental level to either pressures of conformity or anti-conformity within populations.

Conformity is necessary within species, Newberry says. For example, scientists can alter the order of genes on a flys chromosomes, and it does not affect the fly at all. But that doesnt happen in the wild, because when that fly mates, its genes wont pair with its mates, and their offspring will not survive.

However, we also need anti-conformity, he says. If we all had the same immune system, we would all be susceptible to exactly the same diseases. Or, Newberry says, if the same species of animal all visited the same patch of land for food, they would quickly eat themselves out of existence.

Life is this dance of when do we have to cohere, and when do we have to separate? he says. Natural selection is incredibly hard to measure. Youre asking, for an entire population, who lived, who died, and why? And thats just a crazy thing to try to ask. By contrast, in names, we literally know every single name for the entire country for a hundred years.

Source: University of Michigan

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Why the top baby names then get less popular - Futurity: Research News

Human Behavior

Letter to the Mountaineer editor Fort Carson Mountaineer – fortcarsonmountaineer.com

Editors note: The following is a letter to the editor from a Colorado Springs community member who was assisted after being involved in a car accident.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. To whom it may concern,

On May 21, 2022, the weekend of the snowstorm, I found myself in a car accident involving another driver off of Southgate Road. A Soldier saw the accident and pulled over to check if both parties were OK.

After the Soldier deemed both parties were uninjured, he helped move the vehicles out of traffic and off the snowy road. He helped both parties make sure a claim was filed and tow trucks were called. He stayed with me and the other driver until a tow truck showed up.

Once the tow truck loaded the other drivers vehicle, the helpful Soldier offered a ride to that driver and took him back to his home. After he dropped off that driver he went back to the scene and waited for another tow truck to load my vehicle, followed by offering me and my service dog a ride back to my home.

He also made my service dog feel completely safe and allowed her in his vehicle for the ride home. I failed to the get name of the Soldier who went above and beyond, and he deserves to be commended for his outstanding human behavior. Fort Carson along with the Army should feel proud to have him among the ranks.

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Letter to the Mountaineer editor Fort Carson Mountaineer - fortcarsonmountaineer.com

Human Behavior

Its Pride month, and certain behavior is nothing to be proud of – Chicago Sun-Times

Welcome to LGBTQ+ Pride Month, sports fans. Tolerance is fun, isnt it?

Im speaking, specifically, to fans at the Mexico-Ecuador game at Soldier Field on Sunday night, the ones who chanted a homophobic slur at Ecuadorian goalkeeper Alexander Dominguez as he attempted a kick late in the game.

This wasnt about Dominguez being gay or anything like that. The 6-5, 35-year-old veteran is straight, for all we know. But thats not relevant anyway.

This was about Mexicos fans chanting a nasty, homophobic word in Spanish that they have been warned many times not to use. And its not just that one word, either.

Soccer fans around the world have been told by governing body FIFA to knock off all sexual, racial and ethnic chants aimed at foes. And the use of a three-step warning system with the third tier being cancellation of the game is the penalty for such behavior.

The Mexico-Ecuador game, a friendly, by the way, was paused in the 81st minute while a warning flashed on the scoreboard.

STEP #1, it read. ANY INDIVIDUAL PARTICIPATING IN THE DISCRIMINATORY CHANT WILL BE EJECTED FROM THE STADIUM.

Players from both teams gathered peacefully in the center circle, the crowd tamed, and shortly the game continued.

But we still have a gay thing going on in this world, and demeaning an opponent with a homophobic slur is the time-honored way of attacking not just a foes abilities but his or her status as a human being.

Even as we see rainbow colors throughout Chicago, and even as our city prepares for its annual Pride Parade on June 26, the forces against acceptance remain.

Clearly, these are troubling, confusing times for us all. It seems every minority or oppressed person or group has abruptly demanded equality as fast as possible.Sometimes, even faster than possible.

But this is how things change. This is how turbulence leads to equity, to fairness. And to hold out against such change is to fall behind history and, ultimately, to be humiliated.

That kind of reluctance was at the root of the nasty chant that rocked 61,000 fans at Soldier Field. Of course, we cant rule out the effect of alcohol here, either. Its probably no coincidence the slurs came after the crowd had hours of warm-weather drinking under its belt.

Yet there was no boozing among Rays players who refused to wear the rainbow cap and sleeve decals designed by their team for the clubs 16th Pride Night held Saturday at Tropicana Field.

The Rays played the White Sox, and fans watching probably barely noticed anything unusual about any of the uniforms because players wear camouflage, pink, retro and hybrid outfits almost as often as regular ones.

So why bother to consciously remove a little rainbow sleeve starburst or a barely altered cap?

Rays pitcher Jason Adam pointed to his religious objections, saying, Its just that maybe we dont want to encourage [gay behavior] if we believe in Jesus, whos encouraged us to live a lifestyle that would abstain from that behavior.

So theres that. Maybe Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his crackdown on sexual-orientation teachings in the first years of grade school were a subtle part of this, too.

But its Pride Month in the United States, no matter what, and attitudes toward the LGBTQ+ citizens of our country will keep changing, always for the better, we must hope.

Myself, I am not convinced that mature transgender women that is, females who went through puberty and have trained as males should be allowed to compete at the highest levels with cisgender females.

My mind could change. I dont know. Information is key. As is science. Lia Thomas 6-3, broad-shouldered and a male for 21 years winning a womens NCAA swimming championship made me dubious. But well see.

Remember this: According to a recent Gallup poll, 71% of Americans now support gay marriage. In 1996, only 27% did. Thats pretty fast change.

Theres also the weariness that comes from resisting something that is personal, inevitable, applies only to others and should not affect our private lives at all. I often chuckle at a poem by late British writer Dorothy Sayers, admiring its wisdom:

As I grow older and older

And totter towards the tomb

I find I care less and less

Who goes to bed with whom.

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Its Pride month, and certain behavior is nothing to be proud of - Chicago Sun-Times