People are taking actions to combat behaviors they see as harmful to the environment.As the climate changes and natural resources deplete, its necessary for people to take responsibility for,and action against, harmful human behaviors.James Farmer is one of those people.

Farmer,a professor in the School of Public Health, is one of five recipients of IUs Outstanding Junior Faculty for 2016-2017 award. The award is given to tenure track faculty members,who are working on nationally recognized research.

Farmerresearches sustainable behavior and decision-making at the Human Dimensions Lab. The lab researchers concentrate on food and farming systems as well as natural resource sustainability.

Farmer said the research is a collaborative effort between undergraduate, graduateand post-doctoralstudents as well as many colleagues.

This isnt just James Farmer, he said. This is a total group effort by really dedicated, brilliant people.

He and other researchersat the lab work to understand human behavior and how it affects the environment, he said,as this understanding is necessary to develop management and policy tactics to protect the environment.

The researchers are also interested in understanding the perceptions of municipal park professionals pertaining to climate change and how these perceptions affect the general population.

Municipal parks manage about 50 percent of the urban tree canopy, he said. We need to better understand their role in making cities habitable in the future with climate change issues.

Farmer said if parks arent implementing adaptation strategies, individual citizens will be less likely to change their behavior as well. However, if people adopt eco-friendly behavior to diminish the effects of climate change, it is typically a result of them experiencing climate change themselves, he said.

If one is experiencing what he or sheperceives to be acts of climate change, theymore apt to accept it on an individual level, he said.

Farmer received his bachelors, mastersand doctoral degrees from IU, but said his passion for nature developed much earlier in his life.

I grew up playing in the woods, he said. I lived in the same house in the woods with a creek in my front yard, until I moved into Willkie my freshman year.

Farmer said he played outdoors often, if not every day, as a child and was involved in Boy Scouts and Future Farmers of America, so studying natural resources has always made sense for him.

However, he said he had never thought about studying food systems until ten years ago when he listened to Omnivores Dilemma by Michael Pollan. Farmer said he had recently started considering what he and his family were eating and found the social factors behind food consumption interesting.

He and his wife began attending Community Supported Agriculture events, where people buy food from farmers. Here he met a graduate student who was studying food systems, which made him realize it was a possibility.

If she can study this, I can study this, he said. So, she and I collaborated on a grant to study famers markets and CSAs.

One aspect of food systems Farmer is studying is the barriers that exist for people to attain local food. He said there are two main barriers: cultural and economic.

Farmer said a common critique he and other researchers make of farmers markets is that the primary demographic is white, upper-middle class because they typically have more privilege, thus dont have the limitations lower class minorities have.

You can improve a system by critically reflecting on a system, he said. Thats what we try to do. Local foods not just panacea. Its part of a movement to improve food sovereignty, to improve ecological systems.

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Professor researches effects of human behavior - Indiana Daily Student

By Walter Williams / Creators News Service

Profiling is needlessly a misunderstood concept. What's called profiling is part of the optimal stock of human behavior and something we all do. Let's begin by describing behavior that might come under the heading of profiling.

Prior to making decisions, people seek to gain information. To obtain information is costly, requiring the expenditure of time and/or money. Therefore, people seek to find ways to economize on information costs. Let's try simple examples.

You are a manager of a furniture moving company and seek to hire 10 people to load and unload furniture onto and off trucks. Twenty people show up for the job, and they all appear to be equal except by sex. Ten are men, and 10 are women. Whom would you hire? You might give them all tests to determine how much weight they could carry under various conditions, such as inclines and declines, and the speed at which they could carry. To conduct such tests might be costly. Such costs could be avoided through profiling that is, using an easily observable physical attribute, such as a person's sex, as a proxy for unobserved attributes, such as endurance and strength. Though sex is not a perfect predictor of strength and endurance, it's pretty reliable.

Imagine that you're a chief of police. There has been a rash of auto break-ins by which electronic equipment has been stolen. You're trying to capture the culprits. Would you have your officers stake out and investigate residents of senior citizen homes? What about spending resources investigating men and women 50 years of age or older? I'm guessing there would be greater success capturing the culprits by focusing police resources on younger people and particularly young men. The reason is that breaking in to autos is mostly a young man's game. Should charges be brought against you because, as police chief, you used the physical attributes of age and sex as a crime tool? Would it be fair for people to accuse you of playing favorites by not using investigative resources on seniors and middle-aged adults of either sex even though there is a non-zero chance that they are among the culprits?

Physicians routinely screen women for breast cancer and do not routinely screen men. The American Cancer Society says that the lifetime risk of men getting breast cancer is about 0.1 percent. Should doctors and medical insurance companies be prosecuted for the discriminatory practice of prescribing routine breast cancer screening for women but not for men?

Some racial and ethnic groups have higher incidence and mortality from various diseases than the national average. The rates of death from cardiovascular diseases are about 30 percent higher among black adults than among white adults. Cervical cancer rates are five times greater among Vietnamese women in the U.S. than among white women. Pima Indians of Arizona have the world's highest known diabetes rates. Prostate cancer is nearly twice as common among black men as it is among white men. Using a cheap-to-observe attribute, such as race, as a proxy for a costly-to-observe attribute, such as the probability of some disease, can assist medical providers in the delivery of more effective medical services. For example, just knowing that a patient is a black man causes a physician to be alert to the prospect of prostate cancer. The unintelligent might call this racial profiling, but it's really prostate cancer profiling.

In the real world, there are many attributes correlated with race and sex. Jews are 3 percent of the U.S. population but 35 percent of our Nobel Prize winners. Blacks are 13 percent of our population but about 74 percent of professional basketball players and about 69 percent of professional football players. Male geniuses outnumber female geniuses 7-to-1. Women have wider peripheral vision than men. Men have better distance vision than women.

The bottom line is that people differ significantly by race and sex. Just knowing the race or sex of an individual may on occasion allow us to guess about something not readily observed.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Williams, see http://www.creators.com.

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Column: 'Profiling' is a normal part of human behavior - Burlington Times News

Any good wine snob knows that, despite the terms intended negative connotation, the label should really be worn like a badge of honor. Sure, some beer lovers or, even worse, casual wine drinkers might find that snobbery worthy of derision, but they clearly dont understand the difficulty, dexterity and dedication necessary to reach that level. Thankfully, however, a scientist has finally tossed us wine snobs a life preservera Yale neuroscientist nonetheless. In his recently published book, Neuroenology: How the Brain Creates the Taste of Wine, Gordon Shepherd argues that wine tasting actually stimulates your brain more than allegedly highfalutin activities like listening to music or even tackling a complicated math problem. Remember that time you did trigonometry while sipping wine with Beethoven playing the background? Thats basically the closest youve ever come to being Albert Einstein.

According to Shepherd, tasting wine engages more of our brain than any other human behavior. His book essentially an oenologic extension of his previous publication, Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters delves into this process with extreme detail, from the fluid dynamics of how wine is manipulated in our mouths; to the effect of its appearance, smell and mouthfeel; to the way our brains process and share all that information. He suggests that unlike something like math that utilizes a specific source of knowledge, wine tasting engages us more completely. Speaking to NPR, he explained how even basic steps of wine tasting can be more complicated than they seem. You don't just put wine in your mouth and leave it there, Shepherd said. You move it about and then swallow it, which is a very complex motor act.

However, possibly the most complex part of wine tastingone of Shepherds central points and the subtitle of his bookis his argument than when we drink wine, our brains are actually need to create the flavors for us to enjoy. The analogy one can use is color, he explained to NPR. The objects we see don't have color themselves, light hits them and bounces off. It's when light strikes our eyes that it activates systems in the brain that create color from those different wavelengths. Similarly, the molecules in wine don't have taste or flavor, but when they stimulate our brains, the brain creates flavor the same way it creates color.

Its a pretty intense philosophy to wrap your head around. However, I will tell you, one time I drank so much wine that all the sights, smells and flavors of wine completely disappeared. So maybe hes on to something.

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Wine Tasting Engages Your Brain More Than Any Other Behavior ... - Food & Wine

If you were to eat, say, another human being, how many calories would you be taking in? Thats a valid question not only for health-conscious people, but for anthropologists, too. You see, our human ancestors were cannibals but we dont really know why. Did they kill and eat each other like they would a mammoth or a wholly rhino for the meat? Or were they practicing some sort of religious ritual?

To answer that question, James Cole, a senior lecturer in archaeology at the University of Brighton, looked into the nutritional value of a human being and then compared it to that of other animals our ancestors dined on. He found that eating a man provides fewer calories than gobbling down a mammoth, bison, or red deer. And that suggests that our ancestors ate each other not for nutrition but for some other purpose maybe as a form of funerary or cultural ritual. The findings were published today in the journal Scientific Reports.

Was it some sort of religious ritual?

Today, cannibalism is a taboo (although its still practiced by some remote tribes). But we have evidence that our prehistoric ancestors including Neanderthals dined on human flesh. All over Europe, bones of early humans, collectively called hominins, show butchering marks similar to those found on animal remains. Some hominin bones are clearly chewed, or broken to extract the marrow; sometimes the base of the skull is missing, meaning someone was trying to get to the brain. Researchers mostly believe that early humans were eating the dead because they provided easy access to tasty steaks, Cole says. But there are still questions about how often we practiced cannibalism and why.

In modern humans, cannibalism happens for a variety of reasons: some people have resorted to eating human flesh after surviving plane crashes; in some cultures, the dead were eaten as part of ritualistic process; other times, dining on humans is a sign of sociopathic behavior (think Hannibal Lecter). So how do we know that cannibalism in early humans doesnt have some meaning other than pure nutrition? Cole wanted to know, and thought of answering the question by calculating the nutritional value of humans vs. animals.

Hes bringing a different perspective to the question, says Hlne Rougier, an associate professor of anthropology at California State University, Northridge, who did not work on the study. Its an interesting approach.

A man is 125,822 calories

To calculate the calories of a human being, Cole looked at several studies done in the 1940s and 50s that analyzed the protein and fat content of different parts of the human body. From that information, he could calculate how many calories you get from a one-pound heart (650), a four-pound liver (2,569), and three pounds of nerve tissue (2,001). After combining all organs together, you can basically slap a nutritional label on a human corpse that reads: 125,822 calories. At least, within the constraints of those 1940s and 50s studies. (They analyzed a total of four men, ranging from 35 to 60 years old, and weighing an average of 145 pounds, so Coles caloric count only applies to male Homo sapiens with those parameters.)

Cole then wanted to compare our nutritional value to that of other animals known to be eaten by early humans. Again, he pulled from the published literature, and calculated how many calories you could get from the muscle mass of 20 ancient animals. (No information for internal organs exists, Cole says.) He found that the muscles of a mammoth would provide 3,600,000 calories, woolly rhinos 1,260,000 calories, and red deer 163,680 calories. In comparison, a mans muscles can get you only 32,376 calories. We just arent that nutritionally viable, Cole says.

So if eating a man isnt that nutritious, why in the world would our ancestors spend time and resources to hunt other hominins that are just as smart just to get dinner? Cannibalism must have had another purpose, Cole says, possibly one connected to warfare or religion. Other researchers think those are valid conclusions. There can be a cultural explanation for all of these episodes of cannibalism, Rougier says. But thats not a completely new conclusion, she says. For years now, weve gotten more and more evidence that early humans like the Neanderthals were actually quite complex. So its totally plausible that they ate human flesh for more than just gobbling down some juicy meat.

The problem, however, is that we might never know and we certainly dont know now. Im not sure the evidence can really help to pick one or the other, says Silvia Bello of Londons Natural History Museum, who researches the evolution of human behavior. In fact, we cant even say whether some of the early humans that were eaten were hunted, or died of natural causes and were then turned into meals. And every instance of cannibalism would have happened under different circumstances, Cole says. But the new data should be taken into account when analyzing cases of prehistoric cannibalism, Rougier says.

After all, understanding why early humans sometimes ate one another will help us better understand their behavior, beliefs, and social interactions. Plus, theres something morbidly engrossing about Neanderthals butchering hominin bones in a cave thousands of years ago and that perverse fascination is what drew Cole into studying this in the first place. Its like a car crash, he says, you cant stop looking.

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How many calories is that human? A nutritional guide for prehistoric ... - The Verge

We'll give you a moment to pick your jaw up off the floor. Now brace yourself before reading further. Ready for this? Not one, but TWO studies linking violent video games to real-life violent tendencies have been retracted. Granted, that still leaves about a trillion more, but it's a start, right?

The first of those studies is titled "Boom, Headshot!" It was published in the Journal of Communication Research five years ago and it looked at the "effect of video game play and controller type on firing aim and accuracy." Not without controversy, the study concluded that first person shooters were essentially training gamers to become skilled gunmen in real life. Because you know, mashing a mouse or gamepad button while aiming with an analog stick is exactly like the real thing. Or not.

"He wants to discredit my research and ruin my reputation," Bushman said.

The Journal of Communication Research ultimately retracted the study this past January.

"A Committee of Initial Inquiry at Ohio State University recommended retracting this article after being alerted to irregularities in some variables of the data set by Drs. Markey and Elson in January 2015," the retraction notice read. "Unfortunately, the values of the questioned variables could not be confirmed because the original research records were unavailable."

While that might have been tough luck for Bushman, it wasn't the only controversial study of his to be scrutinized and eventually retracted. In another paper published in Gifted Child Quarterly in 2016, Bushman and three other researchers studied the "effects of violent media on verbal task performance in gifted and general cohort children." They noted a substantial (and temporary) drop in verbal skills in children after subjecting them to 12 minutes of a violent cartoon.

Joseph Hilgard, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, had doubts about the study. When looking into the matter, he noted that Bushman and his colleagues were forthcoming but couldn't provide details on the study's data collection process. The person who collected the data lived in Turkey and has been out of contact with the group. As a result, it too was retracted.

"As the integrity of the data could not be confirmed, the journal has determined, and the co-authors have agreed, to retract the study," the retraction notice said.

It's a tough break for Bushman, but a good day for gamers.

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Surprised? Studies Linking Violent Video Games To Real-World Human Behavior Have Been Retracted - Hot Hardware