Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

Coronavirus Vaccine Hopes Tempered by Caveats – The RoundTable is Evanston’s newspaper – Evanston RoundTable

News that a coronavirusvaccine might be available to our most vulnerable residents by the end ofDecember came amid a nationwide surge in cases, driven by rising numbers in theMidwest.

The drug company Pfizerannounced a vaccine candidate that is more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19,according to an early analysis of results from a phase III trial. Pfizer C.E.O.Albert Bourla appeared on major broadcast networks on Nov. 9.

Ninety-percent is a gamechanger. Now you are hoping to have a tool in your war against this pandemicthat could be significantly effective. How long this protection will last issomething we dont know right now, but its part of the objective of the study.We will follow up with the 44,000 people that are part of this study for twoyears. And during this follow-up, we will be looking at the durability of theimmune responses, Mr. Bourla said during an appearance on CNN.

The New York Times reportedon Nov. 9, If results hold up, that level of protection would put it on parwith highly effective childhood vaccines for diseases such as measles.

The promising results forthe Pfizer vaccine, now in late-stage clinical trials, were tempered by healthexperts who expressed cautious optimism. To date, no one, including Mr. Bourla hasseen the actual data, other than an independent data safety monitoring boardthat unblinded the data and informed Mr. Bourla of the results.

Science writer ClaireMaldarelli reported that Pfizers Phase III clinical trial enrolled 44,000people in July 2020, with about half of the cohort receiving the vaccine (intwo doses, given over the course of a month) and the rest getting a placeboToevaluate the vaccines effectiveness, the researchers had to wait for enoughpeople in the trial (in both the vaccine group and the placebo group) to catchCOVID-19. The first analysis is based on 94 participants who contracted thenovel viral illness.

But its worth noting thatPfizer hasnt been following participants for very long, so it remains to beseen how many people in the trail will contract the coronavirus in the long run,wrote Ms. Maldarelli in a Nov. 9 article titled Pfizer claims its COVID-19vaccine is 90 percent effective. Heres what that actually means, published onPopular Science Magazine.

Pfizer senior vice presidentKathrin Jansen told The New York Times that a 90% effectiveness rate means thatat most, nine people in the vaccine group of the trial have gotten COVID-19 sofar.

The vaccine trial is ongoingand results have not been peer reviewed. Pfizer has not reported any seriousside effects associated with the vaccine. The company says it will requestemergency use authorization from the FDA, possibly as early as the end ofNovember.

In addition to concernsabout durability, or long term effectiveness of the vaccine, scientists havevoiced concerns about distribution of a drug that needs to be stored at anextremely cold temperature of - 94 F and requires a second dose three weeksafter the first.

I believe, with theimpressive nature of the data, if that should go through smoothly, by the timewe get into December, well be able to have doses available for people who arejudged to be at the highest priority, said Dr. Anthony Fauci said in a reportto CNN on Nov. 10.

Health care workers andfirst responders could start receiving the vaccine by the end of January, andwidespread vaccination could begin in a number of months, possibly as early asApril, 2021.

Pfizer developed the vaccinein partnership with the German drug company, BioNTech, which uses a moleculethat has never before been license for ruse in a vaccine. It relies on geneticmaterial call messenger RNA (mRNA), which occurs naturally in the human body.

It works like aninstruction manual for our cells. It essentially is introduced to a cell andinstructs it how to act, reported Willem Marx, NBC News and GlobalCorrespondent.

The technology allows forinjection of mRNA into muscle cells, making it an instruction manual for thecells, telling them to create a specific protein, which is found on the surfaceof the coronavirus. It encourages the cells to create spike protein, which inturn provoke an immune response in our bodies. Antibodies are created that canattack the virus if it shows up in the human body.

The New York Times hasreported that eleven vaccines are in late-stage trials, including four in theUnited States. The drug company Moderna uses similar technology.

Johnson and JohnsonsCOVID-19 vaccine has also entered Phase III in clinical trials. The Johnson& Johnson vaccine is called a viral-vector vaccine, which is the onlysingle-dose vaccine to enter late-stage studies, according to the MarketWatchwebsite.

More than 1.25 millionpeople throughout the world have died from COID-19, and there are more than50.5 million confirmed cases, according to data published by Johns Hopkins University.The novel coronavirus continues to surge throughout the U.S., with particularlyhigh numbers in the Midwestern states.

Experts have attributed thealarming surge in cases to human behavior, primarily pandemic fatigue and anunwillingness take precautions that have been proven to slow the spread of thecoronavirus. Research has shown that people throughout the world can fight thebattle against the novel coronavirus by following the three Ws: Wear a mask;Wash Hands; Watch distance.

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Coronavirus Vaccine Hopes Tempered by Caveats - The RoundTable is Evanston's newspaper - Evanston RoundTable

Human Behavior

Kamala Harris and the evolution of the birds: worldwide lessons – Salon

The United States has elected a woman and a woman of color to boot to the second highest office in the most powerful country in the world.

What's the big deal? You wonder, in having Kamala Harris as Vice President-Elect? After all, other democracies have long put women into the top political post in their country.

A big deal

We women know it is a big deal because for some reason men have always, the world over, predominated in such positions of power. And in earlier times, other women both in the U.S. and abroad have failed to attain that power.

Why is that so? Is there any biological, neurological and sociological reason that would explain that unequal development?

Let's take a truly intelligent look at this phenomenon by looking into it through the eyes of stay with me birds!

Our guide in this journey is an ornithology professor at Yale. In his 2017book,"The Evolution of Beauty, How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World" part of my summer reading he tells us that "being able to figure out what's going on when it's not obvious is perhaps the most fundamental advantage of intelligence." (p.69)

Richard O. Prum, whose full title is William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology at Yale University and the head curator of Vertebrate Zoology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, employs this "fundamental advantage of intelligence" to cast light on the behavior of birds and of human beings.

Where the males are prettier than the female

You see, among the birds, the male is usually brighter in color and prettier than the female. Of course, that fact usually assumed some kind of male superiority.

As it turns out, that's just another failure of thought. Having to rely on being colorfulness means you are essentially the beggar, not the one in the power position.

A feminist book, written by a feminist man

When I started reading this book, little did I know that the election of Kamala Harris, a woman of color, to the second-highest office in the United States was just months away. (It was long before Joe Biden announced his VP candidate).

And even more poignantly, I did not know that this is in some ways a feminist book, clearly written by a feminist man.

It is probably significant that Professor Prum grew up with a twin sister and dedicated his book to his wife, also an ornithologist.

There are big ideas in this book, presented against a complicated scientific background. Its reader, however, is in the hands of someone who knows the science so thoroughly that he can explain it clearly.

For now, it's best to start with a concrete example from the world of the birds which, lest you forget, are ex-dinosaurs.

The beautiful yardman

The Great Argus, which lives in the Far East, is "one of the most aesthetically extreme animals on the planet." (p. 54) Though living a largely bachelor existence, the male goes full throttle during courtship. The male Argus elaborately preps his court:

Assiduously picking up all the leaves, roots, and sticks in the space he's chosenhe carries them to the periphery of his court. Like a modern yardman, he employs his huge wing feathers as a leaf blower by beating them rhythmically, sending all the remaining debris flying from his court until it is completely clearOnce his court is ready for the business of mating, all he needs is a female visitor. (p. 56)

The female arrives

A female arrives in response to his carefully orchestrated calls and the male begins his amazing courtship ritual:

he rushes around her in wide circles with his wings hunched up at an angle that exposes their upper surfaces. Then, without warning, when he is just a foot or two away from the female, the male transforms himself instantly into an entirely different shape, revealing unimaginably intricate color patterns on his four-foot-long wing feathersthe male bows down to the femaleIn this extraordinary posture, the male tucks his head under one of his wings and peeks out at the female from behind the gap in his feathersto gauge her reaction to his display. (pp.58-59)

The even more amazing fact concerns the reaction of the female Argus. To this elegant, beautiful and precise display, the female's response is "completely underwhelming, or even undetectable." (p. 85)

Take it from the birds: The female as the decider

Yes, unlike the humans watching this wonder, the female fulfills her role as the decider, the discerning, responsible and privileged holder of selection aesthetic and sexual selection.

In fact, the male's display is so colorful and elaborate precisely because most males are not selected in this courtship process.

The experienced, well-educated connoisseur

The female is "more like an experienced, well-educated connoisseur evaluating one of the many extraordinary works available to her scrutiny."

Further, she is "rigid with highly focused attention as she casts her discerning eye over the displaying maleit's her cool-headed mating decisions over the course of millions of years that have provided the co-evolutionary engine that has culminated in the male Argus's display" (pp.63-64).

Proving Darwin right once again

What is at play here is proof of a theory of mate choice that Darwin himself actually put forth but which he couldn't really champion in his times and which other scientists since then have not wanted to embrace.

Proof has come through the work of Prum and his like.

As Darwin had intimated and scientists like Prum have now proved, aesthetic selection is critical to the progress of evolution and the choice lies with the female.

Goethe and Darwin

Prum goes on to show more about male behavior and female response in other species of birds, never over-simplifying but helping us see in nature what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called "das ewig Weibliche," or the "eternal feminine" that leads us onwards:

Darwin observed that in many of the most highly ornamented species the evolutionary force of sexual selection acted predominantly through female mate choiceit is female sexual autonomy that is responsible for the evolution of natural beauty. (p.27)

One must not fail to point out another part of Prum's account, namely, "the dynamic evolutionary history of penis morphology" (p. 244) and how female mate choice has contributed to the evolution of the human penis.

It is interesting to note that the anatomical part so important to males' identity and actions has evolved through choices made by the female of the species. If that story doesn't cause you to read this book, nothing will.

The dark side of bird sex

The story of bird sex is not an entirely pretty picture. Some avian species, particularly ducks, commit rape, even gang rape, such that females and evolution have had to work together to discourage such behavior and to stand on the side of female choice:

"sexual violence is a selfish male evolutionary strategy that is at odds with the evolutionary interests of its female victims and possibly with the evolutionary interests of the entire species." (p.159)Indeed.

The story of Lysistrata

Prum recounts Aristophanes's story "Lysistrata" in this context. This play of 411 BCE has it that women in the enemy states of Athens and Sparta withheld sex in order to restore peace to Greece. Prum muses:

"So, in answer to the question 'Under what conditions will males give up their weapons?' "Lysistrata" teaches us that the most efficient way to fight back against male violence is to hit men where they are most vulnerable below the belt." (p.292)

How to lower male aggression?

Prum concludes that desirable social behaviors like lower male aggression, cooperative social temperament and social intelligence are the result of females making their choice of mates through aesthetic sexual selection. (p. 292)

Given that, one is led to conclude in general that the more female choice that "cool-headed approach" the more acceptable behavior among males.

Women's task: Keeping cool

Any woman who has attempted to occupy any place of influence knows that this process can be a rocky road. Keeping a cool head does not guarantee that there won't be hot heads among one's male counterparts.

Hillary Clinton, for instance, ultimately kept a cool head and graciously conceded the election of 2016 to that ultimate hothead Donald Trump, who now refuses to concede the election of 2020, even to another man!

The defenders of patriarchy have it wrong

Timely for our current human conundrums, Prum explains that all those people who defend patriarchy "mischaracterize feminism as an ideology of power." That misses the point entirely: "feminism is not an ideology of power or control over others; rather, it is an ideology of freedom of choice." (p. 555)

In recent times we have witnessed, even in the supposedly advanced democracies, the age-old treatment of women as an underclass, as a threat, as a criminal, as a "monster."

Women and global crisis management

Women throughout the world bear the larger brunt of an international crisis like the pandemic.And whether they are "important" people or ordinary people, they endure inappropriate treatment.

U.S. vilifiers of women

In the United States, we have seen Hilary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren and many others, all unquestionably intelligent and competent, unjustly belittled and vilified.

We witnessed sickening schadenfreude by powerful men about the death of one of the country's great women and great jurists, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It goes on and on.

Kamala Harris and a smile as evolutionary choice

Even so, like the sovereign female Argus and like the black women in the novels of William Faulkner, they endure. U.S. Vice President Mike Pence tried to verbally run over Kamala Harris in their debate, and President Trump called her a "monster" afterwards, but she won the debate.

And she won in part with a method that was culturally derived, one may even say a product of evolution. As Michele L. Norris wrote in The Washington Post, "she smiled as she held her ground and of course they called it a smirkBut it was more than that. Harris gave Pence 'The Look.'"

Strong black women

Speaking of strong black women:

Black women have elevated the 'Mama don't take no mess' expression to a form of high art a narrowing of the eye, a lift of the eyebrow, a tilt of the head. Sometimes there is a sideways arch of the neck, a molasses-slow movement of the jaw that says, without speaking, 'You've got exactly 10 seconds to pick up your feet and run for the hills.'

Women's sovereignty matters

The teachings of this fascinating book on the evolution of birds have parallels in human behavior. The sovereign female Argus dispassionately makes her evaluation of the most suitable mate for the sake of her children's future, just as a sovereign American female politician skillfully employs a smile and "the Look" for the good of the United States.

This is what most women want: Fairness for their children and others' children, as for themselves. They want to be loving but also sovereign. They want to make their choices. They will insist on that.

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Kamala Harris and the evolution of the birds: worldwide lessons - Salon

Human Behavior

Election Pollsters Got It Wrong Again. – wgbh.org

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

And theres plenty of shame to go around in this post-election postmortem especially for those who thought the polls predicted either a red mirage or a blue wave of victory.

Easy to get fooled when several polls said Texas was a dead heat, and even a possible flip to blue for former Vice President Joe Biden. Others claimed hed possibly win traditionally red Iowa, and many cited stats showing President Donald Trump was significantly behind in Florida. All of those were wrong, and some like the Florida surveys were way off. On election night, Trump had an early wide lead in his adopted home state.

Ive always been suspicious of political polls. That distrust was underscored after the 2016 presidential race, when the vote essentially turned predictions upside down. Now the pollsters will tell you that the final tally from four years ago did, in fact, prove them right; Secretary Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, as they said, topping Trump by 3 million ballots.

But I would argue if you are like the average news consumer, you heard the constant polling drumbeat of her potential for victory as confirmation of victory.

To be fair, there was frequent commentary about Clintons need to win the crucial Electoral College map. But expert pollsters told a twin tale, urging caution while at the same time pointing to past scenarios that seemed to indicate a win information that the ubiquitous pundits amplified ad nauseum.

I believe in data, but its clear that the science of gathering an accurate sense of Americans voting patterns is outdated, or at the very least critically flawed. Maybe the sample sizes are too small or too city-centered, or perhaps its still hard to surface voters through cell phone outreach. Bottom line: the survey sampling is not broad or deep enough.

In 2016, I bought the idea of large, hidden groups of so-called shy Trump voters who didnt want to publicly state their support for the brash candidate. But in 2020, there was no shortage of eager and enthusiastic supporters of the president who were loud and proud about voting for him again. Why werent more of their huge ranks reflected in the surveys? Im convinced it all comes down to human behavior, which psychologists and behaviorists will tell you is often unpredictable. Theres simply no amount of number crunching, algorithm juggling, and the best technology money can buy that can produce absolute results.

Like the human behavior I questioned David Plouffe about during the 2016 campaign. Plouffe was campaign manager for Sen. Barack Obamas successful 2008 campaign, and later a senior advisor to the president. He was an executive at Uber when I interviewed him. It was August, and then candidate Donald Trump was barnstorming the country as the Republican nominee. Enthusiastic voters were driving hours to his rallies, standing outside when the inside venues filled up. The polls all said Secretary Hillary Clinton had a strong lead.

'But what about those rally attendees?' I asked him. 'Couldnt they indicate a huge voter turnout for Trump?'

'Nope,' he said. 'They dont vote.'

I pushed back. 'Who drives hours to attend a candidates rally, if they dont intend to vote?'

He explained it was more complicated than that, and Id see.

Well, I did see. And the results then and now prove what the veteran politicos always say: The only poll that counts is the one on Election Day.

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Election Pollsters Got It Wrong Again. - wgbh.org

Human Behavior

Oddsmakers are pretty sure Joe Rogan won’t be the next host of Jeopardy! – Yahoo Lifestyle

There are few things on this planet that human beings wont place a bet on, given a volatile situation, a degree of uncertainty, and sufficient cash to burn. Game Of Thrones, national elections, the Puppy Bowl: All are beholden to the oddsmakers art, as these wizards of prediction try to figure out exactly how much money you should get if you bet that, say, Jon Stewart was going to give up his life of movie making and cattle rescuing to go host Jeopardy!, and then this improbable turn of events did, in fact, come to pass. (33-1, as it happens.)

Which is all to say: Washington Post entertainment writer Steven Zeitchik got our brains pumping with all the vigor of a Daily Double adrenaline rush today when he posted a list of sportsbook odds (provenance not entirely clear) on who the new Jeopardy! host will be, with names ranging from the obvious (long-time champion Ken Jennings, at 1-1), to That actually sounds delightful, like LaVar Burton (20-1), to Dear god, why would you even put the thought out into the world (Piers Morgan, at 40-1). The most outside shot that someone actually bothered to venture a number for was Joe Rogan, whose chances of a double reign as Fear Factor/Joepardy! host lands at a slim 66-1.

Other actual frontrunners for the position include sportscaster Alex Faust (18-1) and CNN legal analyst Lauren Coates (same), both of whom received a personal vote of confidence from the late Alex Trebek in recent years. Theres also the usual glut of current game show hosts like Drew Carey (33-1), Pat Sajak (16-1), Tom Bergeron (18-1), and our favorite, Steve Harvey (40-1)and also apparently George Stephanopoulos (7-2), whos reportedly been lobbying for the role.

All of which is, in its own weird way, a sort of tribute to Trebek, a man who made a very difficult job look easy, and who carried himself in a way that was funny but rarely mocking, dignified without ever seeming stiff. Finding someone to fill his shoes is a daunting, nigh-impossible taskto the point that not even the people whose job it is to predict human behavior for money might be up to spitting out a decent answer at the moment.

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Oddsmakers are pretty sure Joe Rogan won't be the next host of Jeopardy! - Yahoo Lifestyle

Human Behavior

SNF Brain Insight Lecture on ‘Making the Right Moves in a Pandemic’ – The National Herald

NEW YORK The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Brain Insight Lecture series, hosted by Columbia University's Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, continued with Making the Right Moves in a Pandemic on November 10. The virtual event, via Zoom featured the speakers Dara Kass, MD, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and Andrs Bendesky, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology at Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute. The discussion was moderated by Natalie Steinemann, PhD, Columbia's Zuckerman Institute.

Rui Costa, director and chief executive officer of Columbia's Zuckerman Institute and a professor of neuroscience and neurology at Columbia's Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, gave the welcoming remarks to open the virtual event, thanking SNF in particular for its continuing support of this important lecture series.

According to the event's description, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect our lives at multiple levels: our health, our daily lives and our communities. Dealing with the pandemic requires us to make effective decisions, communicate rapidly and harness all our resources.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus has challenged the world with unprecedented public health and economic crises. We need effective strategies to slow the spread of the virus.

We must be able to rapidly and affordably diagnose the virus because a major reason for the extreme societal and economic disruptions is the lack of appropriate testing technology to easily identify infectious people, especially those who do not have symptoms. We also need effective decision making and communication at both the clinical and community level to mitigate SARS-CoV-2 transmission in schools, at work and in the community at large.

The National Herald

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Brain Insight Lecture, titled Making the Right Moves in a Pandemic, hosted by Columbia University's Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, featured Dr. Dara Kass and Dr. Andres Bendesky with moderator Natalie Steinemann.

In the virtual SNF Brain Insight Lecture Series event, the discussion featured two experts from Columbia University who are involved in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in very different ways. Dr. Dara Kass reflected on decision making, both clinical and community, from the perspective of an emergency medicine doctor who, herself, was infected with the virus. She also discussed how to communicate rapidly evolving information in an effective manner. Dr. Andrs Bendesky discussed his lab's work to develop a simple, affordable test that can be performed at home.

The informative presentation was followed by a Q&A session which offered even more insights into the pandemic and the significant advances that have been made so quickly in the study of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Both speakers were hopeful for the future, and as Dr. Kass noted concerning the response to the pandemic by New York in particular, We had our nationally renowned health centers, clear and consistent messaging from our leadership, and we had a citizenry that felt united around a collective identity, so to me that reaction was very helpful. It made me realize that New Yorkers can do anything and I'd never been more proud to be a New Yorker and I've been one my entire life.

This talk was part of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Brain Insight Lecture series, offered free to the public to enhance understanding of the biology of the mind and the complexity of human behavior. The lectures are hosted by Columbia's Zuckerman Institute and supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

The lecture was also streamed live online and is available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/zF_219Mv1_0.

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SNF Brain Insight Lecture on 'Making the Right Moves in a Pandemic' - The National Herald

Human Behavior

A Covid-19 surge of depression and anxiety is being treated by robots – CNBC

Hundreds of millions of people around the world were suffering from common mental health issues including anxiety and depression before Covid-19, and the scale of the health-care crisis has escalated as a result of the pandemic. But demand for mental health services is far outstripping the available supply of trained professionals. Machines are rising to the challenge as a first point of contact for struggling individuals, but just how far can the robot brain go in treating the mind of the human individual?

The research is still in the early days, but as artificial intelligence technology including natural language processing experiences a period of rapid advances, experts confront the delicate issue of how to properly use technology for mental health treatment. One factor is becoming undeniable, though: many people prefer to reveal their mental health struggle to a non-human confidante: a robot.

A recent survey from Workplace Intelligence and Oracle found that across more than 12,000 workers around the globe only 18% prefer humans over robots to support their mental health. Sixty-eight percent prefer to talk to a robot over their manager about stress and anxiety at work, and 80% indicated they were open to having a robot as a therapist or counselor.

As mental health issues around the world increase and resources are limited, experts are devising technological approaches to patient treatment, though some experts say an AI-based approach can never offer one critical human skill: empathy.

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"Unbiased information is what people want," said Dan Schawbel, founder and managing partner of Workplace Intelligence.

There are a few primary reasons people are turning to technology for this sensitive conversation: accessibility of getting help 24-7, and getting that help without having to admit to a struggle.

"There really is a stigma behind mental health globally. Talking about stress, or anxiety and depression with managers, employees will hold back. People don't seek help from humans because they don't want to be judged," Schawbel said.

Technology does have the potential to provide mental health support at scale, as well as unbiased information, non-judgmental responses, and a blindness to rank in the workplace context a machine doesn't discern if the employee seeking help is a CEO or lower down the company hierarchy.

"We're not going to have a billion therapists in the world so we need technology," Schawbel said. "But there is no AI replacement for one of the greatest values that therapists provide: human empathy. Robots can't do that yet."

The use of chatbots in mental health is backed, at least in a general sense, by research already decades-old: people were more likely to be honest using telephone voice-response systems than when talking to a live human.

"Chatbot are OK for basic things," said Bruce Rollman, director of the Center for Behavioral Health and Smart Technology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, who has researched online treatments for mood and anxiety disorders. "But when we start getting into mental health, it's a game of chess and we're not always playing with Deep Blue," he said, referencing the IBM AI that beat world champions.

"I'd be skeptical if was just computer algorithm, but it might be fine before you talk to a therapist, and AI that does a questionnaire," Rollman said.

Employers expect a wave of mental health challenges for the labor force in the prolonged remote work period, and they realize a chatbot might be preferable for reasons that go beyond the basic stigmatization of mental health, but because employees worry about risking promotions or raises, and job safety. Managers are not always adept at providing the right answers, either.

"Humans are not adequately trained on mental health issues. When people tell you they are stressed or depressed, we often give the wrong answers, and technology is a great way to scale some sequence of questions and best practices," said Emily He, senior vice president of the human capital management in Oracle's cloud business group.

Technology can help guide an employee through a mental health journey in a manner similar to it already does for the onboarding process as a new hire. Conversational AIs, or chatbots, can interface on a daily basis and track answers to questions, in some cases monitoring voice tone as well, and identify and predict someone who needs more advanced treatment.

"The end goal is to enable humans to do what they are best at, which is managing relationships, but there are some baseline questions and great ways to leverage technology," He said.

Record levels of venture capital money are flowing into the sector. According to digital healthcare-focused venture fund Rock Health's proprietary database, $9.4 billion was invested in overall digital health this year, and $4 billion of that was in Q3 alone.Investment in U.S.-based, AI-powered digital health start-ups it has tracked since 2011 are above $10 billion, with investment in mental/behavioral health AI reaching over $230 million across close to 20 deals. And the numbers are getting bigger: in 2020, there was $72 million invested across two sizable mental health AI transactions.The sums recently invested into mental health start-ups, including those not focused specifically on AI, are far higher.

"As an investor in a handful of mental and behavioral health start-ups, we know first hand that our portfolio companies have experienced strong and rising demand throughout the pandemic," said Rock Health CEO Bill Evans. "Like never before, automation and thoughtful use of technologies like AI is absolutely critical to delivering a human touch to those of us in greatest need."

"Eighty percent of the U.S. population owns a phone, and phones can tell you if there's been a change in your behavior," Pitt's Rollman said. He added that while it may sound creepy, predictive analytics are the future across many aspects of our lives, from Spotify knowing what music we prefer to listen to, to maybe mental health. The big gap right now in mental health is an AI that can make the right suggestion at the right time, especially if it is a high-risk person, a person with substance abuse or suicidal tendencies.

Woebot offers therapy options for people suffering from anxiety, depression, and mental health issues, in a stigma-free environment. "A robot can see me on my worst day and it's just a robot, it's not judging me," says founder Alison Darcy.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Among the AI pioneers pushing the boundaries of what the technology can do is Alison Darcy, founder and president of Woebot Health, a start-up that has engineered a conversational agent (chatbot) to provide digital mental health counseling. Darcy, a research psychologist and former software engineer, worked earlier in her career with Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng at his Stanford University Health Innovation Lab in Computer Science (Ng is the chairman of Woebot).

Darcy said the technology has come a long way in a short number of years and it can help to push people past the primary reason they don't reach out for help: the stigma and fear of being judged.

"Therapists have to spend so much time building rapport. A robot can see me on my worst day and it's just a robot, it's not judging me. They have no judgment," Darcy said. "It's just software."

Woebot refers to itself as a robot in communication with users, and the company chose to not create a human avatar for the interface, though these design decisions also point to the challenge. "There is no human connection, no deep relationship, and that is the limit of the technology," Darcy said.

The limitations, combined with the recent increased investment, worry some mental health experts.

"There is a gold rush in the space and we believe in it, but also believe in science," said Catherine Serio, a clinical psychologist and associate vice president of digital behavior solutions at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. "There is lots of money to be made out there."

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center recently launched a behavioral health app called RxWell which aims for a middle ground between reliance on technology and the need to offer increased access to individuals enabling them to take the first step in seeking help for depression and anxiety.

Serio, who has treated patients with depression and anxiety for years, acknowledged the issue with stigma and scaling in behavioral health, but believes a hybrid model is the only responsible route. "We believe the AI needs to mature more. A chatbot is basically a series of business rules to respond to people and we have not seen a completely coded response that is going to work for people with depression and anxiety," she said.

Building a relationship, a therapeutic bond, has been cited as the reason digital therapy cannot be effective. But Woebot has shown in a trial of young adults the ability to reduce mental health symptoms and deliver cognitive behavioral therapy. "That is not to say it's replacing therapy. It's really not, but it is allowing for full potency of therapy to be unlocked," Darcy said. "Our data shows it can be a useful first step. It is incredibly easy and destigmatizing."

Woebot can also detect crisis language and in those cases it is programmed to tell the user they require a human therapist. Or in other words, the robot's programming is designed to identify its own limitations. "The robot would rather ask you about your mood than detect it. The best person to tell us how you are doing is you," Darcy said.

She said research shows users are also turning to the robot further along in recovery as follow up care. "We see people talking to robots over a long period, maybe for three months when it is a difficult time, and then checking in again nine months later when in another difficult patch. And that is a longer-term perspective than what we normally think about," the Woebot founder said. "Humans respond well to the needs of a patient in the moment. A chatbot can do it too. It is responsive to where a person is at."

The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in a boom in technology-based health care, and in psychiatry departments, a rare financial feat: an area of care that usually loses money for health institutions becoming a source of profits, according to Soo Jeong Youn, a research psychologist at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital. She says technology should be used more to combat stigma in mental health, and to provide greater access to care across more cultures and populations, but she added that the research is still preliminary.

"We're not there yet. We're not close to what we see in Sci-Fi movies and responses catered to each person, but the AI has gotten really good," she said.

For example, if a person says they are feeling anxious, the AI can provide resources tailored to anxiety. "Even just searching on 'I'm anxious. What do I do?' There is something to having more information through an app," she said.

The need for help is great, and getting greater, as more Americans have face issues including job loss and food insecurity. Among the client base that UPMC works with to provide health care, the population saying their mental health was negatively impacted jumped from 32% in March to 58% in August. "That one statistic alone is a massive amount of individuals," said Jim Kinville, senior director of the LifeSolutions group at UPMC.

Can AI and chatbots be helpful? Absolutely and partially.

Bill Duane

former Google wellness and performance guru

Wellness and prevention apps offering access to skills, and cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, to help people manage stress and anxiety are now widespread. Some apps like Talkspace provide a way to connect with a human therapist online, or combine digital tools with live support, like UMPC's RxWell.

"There is lots of unmet need out there and people we call the 'walking wounded' ... functioning OK, but could benefit more from digital tools," Kinville said. "These tech tools can start the process and get people engaged."

The recent VC deals in the space show that the bets on mental health business models using AI are not limited to the creation of compelling chatbots. Ginger raised $50 million August, including funds from major insurer VC arms at Cigna and Kaiser Permanente, for its on-demand behavioral health platform offering access to coaching, video therapyand self-guided activities. In early 2020, Spring Health raised $22 million for what it describes as "precision mental health care" which uses a proprietary machine learning approach to diagnose conditions and identify the best therapy options for individuals.

While core AI technology including natural language processing underlying chatbots has advanced in the past few years, research shows algorithms continue to analyze the same data sets and come to different results, predicting different outcomes.

That makes Harvard's Youn cautious beyond what she is comfortable saying a chatbot can do today: the equivalent of a first session with a therapist, in which the goal is an understanding of what an individual is going through.

"Hopefully with the push of the pandemic we will get there much faster, and there is huge room and space and need for these chat-based apps to deliver help and relieve distress through the power of AI," the Harvard psychologist said.

For some experts working at the intersection of technology and human performance, choosing a side in the battle between human mental-health professionals and machines risks missing how serious the battle has become and the fact that we need to throw all we have at our disposal at it.

The recent increases in serious mental health struggles, especially among younger adults who say they have felt suicidal, speak to the importance and poignancy of improving access to mental health care, especially for people of color and lower incomes.

"The demands on mental health are massively increasing," said Bill Duane, former Google wellness and performance executive who now runs his own consulting firm. "Existential fear, financial insecurity, nebulous boundaries between work and home ... fear of job security causing people to try and push through and work harder, which only works for the short term. I'm heartbroken at everything going on. But I am extraordinarily optimistic about ways AI can be involved."

Woebot is experiencing increased usage during the pandemic, "huge increases," Darcy said, and it has tracked more need for support among younger users, which the recent research shows to be at elevated levels of risk. At the time of its August deal, Ginger noted "skyrocketing demand" for anxiety and depression care among U.S. workers.

More employees are willing to ask for help because there is a greater shared sense of going through a difficult experience as a community, Oracle's He said, and tech-based support for mental health is a logical extension of how people already interact with machines fitness apps support better physical health and have edged into other areas of wellness like sleep patterns.

But UPMC's Serio said that once an initial assessment has been done, there is no AI replacement for the "nuance and cues, and all those things human beings do. ... What people need is empathy. Anyone who says that will be fully automated one day, I don't know what reality they are grounded in."

Duane thinks people should not understate the value of how far the technology already has come not needing to make an appointment or deal with a doctor as a first step, eliminating feelings of shame or discomfort. It is a stigma workaround, a Band-aid on the larger problem of getting more individuals to seek help, but he said it also speaks to the fact that chatbots already are part of the solution.

"To everyone feeling the weight of 2020, it's a reasonable response to what's going on and the massive increase in demand. Access and timeliness are really important when we look at the quantity of people who need mental health care. .... Can AI and chatbots be helpful? Absolutely and partially."

Read more here:
A Covid-19 surge of depression and anxiety is being treated by robots - CNBC

Human Behavior

Utah failed to flatten the curve: these two numbers show why – Deseret News

The novel coronavirus has infected more than 10 million people in the United States nearly the entire population of Sweden.

As of Sunday afternoon, more than 237,000 Americans have died 659 in Utah.

As striking as those numbers are, experts have long worried that a second wave of COVID-19 cases in the fall and winter would be even worse than the first, said Dr. Steven Woolf, a social epidemiologist and director emeritus and senior adviser at the VCU Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University.

As states loosened restrictions, the spring surge was never fully controlled and instead of an epidemiological curve we got a staircase. That means the impending second wave is more like a very dangerous third surge, Woolf said. Growing case counts are being fueled by pandemic fatigue, decreasing vigilance and colder weather pushing gatherings indoors.

Utahs figures are especially concerning:

The states current seven-day average for new confirmed cases is 2,290, which in a state of 3.21 million translates to 71 cases per 100,000 per day.

In New York, at the peak of its crisis in April, the Empire State was averaging nearly 10,000 confirmed cases a day. In a state of 19.45 million that translates to 51 cases per 100,000 per day.

In terms of cumulative cases, there are more in New York, said David Dowdy, an associate professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, but in terms of when we would have said New York was on fire thats where Utah is right now.

As the country marches toward Thanksgiving, per capita cases is just one of two figures that epidemiologists and statisticians say offer a more nuanced and well-rounded view of the pandemic and its impacts. The second is excess deaths, a number that captures just how far-reaching those impacts are.

Most years, there are zero excess deaths in the U.S. deaths above and beyond the number officials were expecting but this year, theres been nearly 300,000 so far, with two-thirds attributed to COVID-19.

This story explores the true human cost of COVID-19 and the forecast for winter. Because if changes arent made, even more people will die.

The spread is happening in our homes and it is killing people and overwhelming our hospitals, Spencer Cox, Utahs governor-elect said Thursday. This is crunch time. ... The next two months are absolutely critical. We are in a dire situation and we cannot emphasize that enough.

Despite pleas from the governor and from Cox since summer that Utahns wear masks and socially distance, not all are willing to wear face coverings (some remain adamantly opposed) and many continue to gather, closely. Case numbers continue to climb.

And its not just in Utah.

The New York Times tracker shows a positive cumulative case rate for North Dakota of 7,127 per 100,000 residents one of the highest rates in the country right now.

Thanks to advances in treating the disease, the number of people dying of COVID-19 isnt increasing at the same speed as the number of cases, said Dowdy, but at some point, the number of cases goes up so dramatically that deaths cant help but follow.

The mostly rural North Dakota is currently at 8 deaths per million the only state besides Montana glowing red on the daily COVID-19 death rate projections from the University of Washingtons Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Utah is at 1 to 1.9 per million.

The fact that the virus has seemingly moved from politically left-leaning blue states to more right-leaning red states, and states like North Dakota and Utah are now topping charts for all the wrong reasons isnt entirely surprising, said Dr. Ali Mokdad, a professor of Health Metrics Sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and chief strategy officer for Population Health at the University of Washington. Rather, it reflects the reality of how diseases spread.

The novel coronavirus first hit large urban hubs with international airports, wreaking havoc in big cities while giving folks in smaller cities a false sense of security (that) this is not us, he said. Hes seen the same thing happen with tobacco and HIV, where big cities were hit first, then rural communities which are still struggling.

By definition of epidemic, its going to hit everybody, Mokdad said. COVID-19 doesnt know age, it doesnt know geography, doesnt know race. (Its a) stubborn virus, opportunistic virus. Make a mistake, let down your guard, this virus is going to get you.

Utah, which staved off a major spike in the spring, is now dealing with the virus running rampant.

Masks are now required in 22 (of 29) counties where transmission levels are high and hospital officials are teetering on the edge of entering crisis levels of care, which means care rationing and even more exhausted providers the very things flattening the curve was supposed to prevent.

But Utahs numbers no longer portent a curve just a line headed north.

In the latest Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation projection, 2,121 Utahns will die from COVID-19 by Feb. 1, 2021.

In the United States, deaths are projected to total 399,163 by Feb. 1, with nearly 2,250 COVID-19 deaths a day by mid-January three times higher than current daily deaths. (The institute usually issues new projections weekly.)

Those numbers are based on states locking back down when they hit 8 deaths per million people what 90% of states did in the spring when they reached those same levels.

Under that timeline, Utah would be locking down again sometime in December along with Kansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Louisiana, Alabama, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

If states choose not to, or even loosen restrictions, numbers just climb higher: Utah potentially loses 2,932 people to COVID-19, the nation nearly 513,657.

IHME predictions about hospital beds considered facilities under extreme stress if more than 20% of regular beds or 60% of intensive care units are filled by COVID-19 patients. Utah is projected to hit extreme stress for both bed types by the end of December.

However, the projections also calculated that if 95% of people wear masks the rate seen in Singapore closures could be delayed and nearly 62,000 lives could be saved nationwide by Feb. 1.

The best strategy to delay reimposition of mandates and the associated economic hardship is to expand mask use, the IHME Oct. 22 finding brief explained.

In Utah, masking at 95% would mean a total of 1,381 deaths by Feb. 1 about 740 fewer COVID-19 deaths than the current prediction.

For Mokdad, whos been in public health for more than 30 years, these upward trends are painful and discouraging. He would love to see people wear masks, limit mobility and stay distanced, and have his teams numbers prove to be drastic overestimates.

We hope that people will change their behaviors, he said. I pray that I am wrong, that people will make me wrong.

And its possible.

Projections and models are good at predicting what will happen under certain circumstances, said Fred Brauer, a professor emeritus of the University of Wisconsin and currently an honorary professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia who studies epidemiological modeling. However, they have a harder time capturing human behavior, which can change rapidly when faced with a serious disease.

Brauer notes that during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa, the models predicted millions of deaths, but by the end of the crisis, the death figure was around 11,300 still tragic, but significantly less than feared.

The best explanation Ive heard so far is people really changed their behavior and avoided the very dangerous funeral practices, said Brauer, even before there was any government move to encourage this behavior.

Peoples behavior changed because they took Ebola seriously, he said, which he hopes will finally happen with COVID-19.

You dont know what influences them, he said, whether its the number of cases, or the number of new cases or the number of deaths, we just dont know.

One new alarming number is 299,028.

Thats the number of people who died in the United States from late January to Oct. 3 above and beyond the number of deaths officials were expecting, according to a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.

Excess death is calculated by comparing all the deaths during a certain time period against the average number of deaths during that same time period in previous years, considering both population dynamics and seasonal fluctuations. Anything above the expected number for a specific time and place is considered excess.

Last year, like most years, there were zero excess deaths in the U.S., said Dowdy, but this year, theres been nearly 300,000 so far, with two-thirds attributed to COVID-19.

We have had a higher mortality rate on the U.S. level than in any recent year in history, Dowdy said. We know that this is a deadly disease.

Excess deaths is an important metric because it adjust for flaws or gaps in record keeping thats been disrupted by a crisis, said Nancy Krieger, a professor of social epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

It also cuts out worries about politicization or manipulation of data.

Perhaps a state isnt testing enough. Not a problem.

Faulty tests? Doesnt matter.

What if a death is labeled a stroke instead of COVID-19 or vice versa? No impact.

None of these record-keeping problems affect the excess death figure, because its a measure of mortality stripped of all other factors. A death is a death.

During most Januarys in the United States, statisticians and epidemiologists project an average of 60,000 weekly deaths both from natural causes like old age, influenza and other health conditions, plus nonnatural causes like car accidents, homicides and even skiing accidents.

They also calculate a worst-case scenario number, shown in the CDC excess death graphs as a red-orange line, meaning the highest number of deaths they would expect in any given week in a year.

The last time U.S. deaths broke through the orange line was late December 2017 likely due to a particularly virulent flu season. But the peak subsided after January 2018 and deaths dropped below the orange line for the next two years.

Then COVID-19 hit.

By March 28, roughly two months after the first U.S. case, the observed number of weekly deaths was already punching through the orange line, peaking on the week ending April 11 at nearly 79,000 deaths 36% higher than even the worst-case scenario of 58,266 deaths.

For more than six months, weekly U.S deaths remained abnormally high.

The week ending October 24, 2020 was the first time since late March that deaths fell below the worst-case scenario level though deaths still remain above average.

From March to Aug. 1, Utah saw 953 excess deaths, with 311 or 33% due to COVID-19, according to Woolfs research recently published in JAMA. His findings echoed the CDCs: U.S. deaths have increased 20% during 2020.

In 13 of the last 17 weeks in Utah, CDC week-by-week death data show the state has surpassed the worst-case-scenario number of deaths ranging from 13% to 26% increases this year over years past.

But if only two-thirds of the U.S.s excess deaths and one-third of Utahs deaths (as of Aug. 1) were caused by COVID-19, what else is causing so many people to die?

Utahs Chief Medical Examiner Erik Christensen is busier now than hes ever been during his 12 years in this position.

Thus far in 2020, hes seen 300 to 400 more non-COVID-19 deaths (not every death is reviewed by his office) than last year. While he doesnt know all the reasons why numbers are so high, he has a few theories.

First, some of the gap deaths may be unclassified COVID-19 deaths.

Doctors are continually learning about COVID-19s effects on the body, leading to more accurate labeling of such deaths now compared to what happened during the first months of the pandemic.

Christensen said hes both diagnosing COVID-19 in previously undiagnosed deaths, (around a quarter of the 300 to 400 deaths) and removing any COVID-19 designation if its unwarranted (around a dozen times).

However, he along with many other public health officials believes the bulk of excess deaths are collateral COVID-19 damage: people dying as a result of disruptions from the pandemic.

Woolf further divides this group into three categories.

The first is people experiencing acute emergencies someone with chest pain whos afraid to call 911 because of COVID-19 and dies of a heart attack. Or the reverse, someone who actually calls 911, but medical personnel are too busy with COVID-19 patients to respond.

The second group is anyone with a chronic disease diabetes, cancer, HIV who, because of the pandemic, cant stay in control of their illness, develops complications and dies.

The third group includes those with behavioral health concerns like depression or substance abuse disorders who, under stressors produced by the pandemic develop fatal complications, said Woolf, noting that the opioid epidemic didnt stop when the virus arrived.

Woolf said their research also found a spike in deaths from Alzheimers and dementia within states hit first by the pandemic. He noted nursing home residents are more likely to be dealing with those two diseases, and many nursing homes have been hit hard by the novel coronavirus.

These deaths may not carry a COVID-19 tag, but they will show up in excess death numbers the collateral damage of a crisis and a view into how this pandemic is shaping peoples risk of dying, said Krieger at Harvard.

Other potential causes for the gap between the number of excess deaths and counted COVID-19 deaths are those who died as a result of domestic violence or homicides results of being locked down with abusers or stuck in volatile situations during pandemic restrictions.

While theres some validity to the concern that our reaction to the virus and our steps to protect public health have these immediate harms, its a mistake to back off on trying to nip this in the bud and control community spread, Woolf said, because in the end, (failure to do so) will even cost even more lives.

Having any mortality data at this point in the pandemic is helpful, considering mortality stats arent normally finalized until up to 18 months after the year in question, said Michael Staley, suicide prevention research coordinator with the Utah Department of Health. (Hes still waiting for official 2019 mortality data.)

Nearly every expert the Deseret News spoke with mentioned how time will prove a great clarifier for death data. Even the CDC notes on their graphics that data in recent weeks are incomplete, and that it can take up to eight weeks for mortality data to be at least 75% complete.

In the meantime, heres a look at what Utah officials know about deaths in the state this year:

There was a 30% decrease in the number of people seeking medical attention for suicide ideation during the first few months of the pandemic, but returned to normal levels around mid-June, said Staley. However, the number of suicide deaths hasnt changed significantly in 2020 compared to 2019 or 2018.

The drug overdose death rate has been going down since its peak in 2015, but did start to increase in April, said Staley. However, drug overdose counts are still within the average range.

In 2020, there have been 29 domestic-violence related deaths. Last year at this time, thered been 32. However, calls to the Utah Domestic Violence LINKLine (1-800-897-LINK) have increased 25% to 50% since March, with an increased need for shelter and longer shelter stays, said Liz Sollis, spokesperson for the Utah Domestic Violence Coalition.

By late October, 233 people had died on Utah roads. Last year at this time, it was 191, and in 2018 at the same time there were 234 traffic deaths, said Jason Mettmann, communications manager for the Utah Highway Safety Office.

Officials will continue to gather and sort death data for months, looking for ways to show the pandemics full impact on the state. Yet, even if the data arent perfectly clear yet, Christensens message is.

Just wear a mask, he said. It doesnt reduce things to zero, but every one we dont have to deal with is somebody thats still going home.

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Utah failed to flatten the curve: these two numbers show why - Deseret News

Human Behavior

New global archive logs changes in behavior of Arctic animals – UW News

Environment | News releases | Research | Science

November 5, 2020

A moose in Denali National Park.Laura Prugh/University of Washington

The Arctics dramatic changes warmer winters, earlier springs, shrinking ice and more human development are impacting native animals. Researchers have long been observing the movements and behavior of animals in this region, but its been difficult to discover and access these data for meaningful collaborations.

Now scientists from around the world have established the Arctic Animal Movement Archive, an online repository for data documenting the movements of animals in the Arctic and Subarctic. With this archive, scientists can share their knowledge and collaborate to ask questions about how animals are responding to a changing climate.

So far, researchers from more than 100 universities, government agencies and conservation groups, including the University of Washington, are involved in the archive. The project currently contains over 200 projects with the movement data of more than 8,000 marine and terrestrial animals from 1991 to the present.

The global archive and several case studies on wildlife movement and behavior are described in a paper published Nov. 5 in Science. The archive project is led by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany and the Ohio State University.

In terms of recent calls for more open science, platforms likethis are a major leap forward in making valuable data discoverable anduseful for researchers to address far more science questions than wouldotherwise be possible, said project collaborator and co-author Laura Prugh, associate professor in the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.

One of the case studies, led by Prughs lab at the UW, looked at the movement speeds of bears, caribou, moose and wolves from 1998 to 2019 and found that all species changed their movement rates in response to climate conditions but with no consistent pattern. This inconsistency shows that responses of large mammals to climate change in the Arctic may not be straightforward to predict.

This work has highlighted strong changes in movement rates in responseto climate, but the reasons why animals are moving more or less arestill not understood, Prugh said. I hope the work spurs future research tounderstand the why behind our findings, and whether these changes areindicative of positive or negative climate change impacts.

Movement rates are important to track because they can influence how effective animals are at finding food and other resources, when animals encounter predators, and how much energy they expend during different seasons. Additionally, large mammals in the Arctic are adapted to cold conditions and may experience heat stress due to warming temperatures, the authors explained.

How animals respond to variable weather conditions through movement will have interesting implications for species competition and predator-prey dynamics, said co-author Peter Mahoney, who conducted this research as a UW postdoctoral researcher and is now a wildlife biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

To create the case study of two decades of movements of bears, caribou, moose and wolves that is included in the new archive, Prugh and Mahoney relied on data from nine national and international institutions. The case study was funded by a grant from NASAs Arctic and Boreal Vulnerability Experiment program.

In related work, Prugh currently is leadinga new NASA-funded project to understand how changing snow conditions areaffecting ungulates such as deer, moose and elk, and carnivores like wolves, cougars and coyotes in northern Washington and Alaskas Denali National Park. The UW team will examine how changes in snow affect movement and predator-prey interactions.

While hundreds of studies are already included in the animal-movement archive, the resource is continually growing as data are transmitted from animals in the field and as more researchers join. This should help to detect changes in the behavior of animals and ultimately in the entire Arctic ecosystem.

We are also providing a much-needed baseline of past behaviors and movements, said Sarah Davidson, project co-lead and data curator at Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. This can be used to improve wildlife management, address critical research questions and document changes in the Arctic for future generations.

See a related press release from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior.

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New global archive logs changes in behavior of Arctic animals - UW News

Human Behavior

Funding the Quiet Good: Gifts that Support the Humanities and Social Sciences – BU Today

Of the $42 billion the federal government spends on research and development each year, less than 5 percent ($1.9 billion) goes to social and behavioral science research. Photos courtesy of iStock, Unsplash, and Wikimedia

HumanitiesTheyre often small, but they change the world in big ways

When Jack Dorsey, the cofounder and CEO of Twitter and Square, donated $10 million to Boston Universitys Center for Antiracist Research in mid-August, the gift was remarkable in the world of philanthropy for two reasons: the speed with which it arrivedonly six weeks after the BU center openedand the choice of the beneficiaryan academic center dedicated to research in the humanities.

Put simply, research gifts of that magnitude typically go to cure cancer. They dont go to improve human behavior.

When it comes to funding for academic research, the humanities and social sciences have long been the poor cousins to traditional sciences like engineering, computer science, and mathematics, and even to nonsciences like business management and law.

In fiscal 2019, the social sciences accounted for approximately one percent of all research expenditures at Boston University, and the humanities accounted for another one percent. The nonsciences, which include business management, communications, and law, among other areas of study, accounted for 4 percent. Meanwhile, the traditional sciencescomputer science, life sciences, and engineering, to name a fewaccounted for the remaining 94 percent.

When money is given to academic centers that focus on research in the humanities and social sciences, like the antiracist center that Ibram X. Kendi, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and a College of Arts & Sciences professor of history, launched at BU on July 1, it has the potential to improve the lives of millions of people, and even to change society as we know it. But that work, unlike, say, the study of Alzheimers disease or breast cancer or robotics or business management practices, frequently happens with little fanfare. And because societal change might take decades, or even generations, to achieve, its difficult for the public to grasp the importance of the work because they might never reap the benefits of it.

But examples of social and behavioral sciences touching lives abound. It was social science research that revealed how the walkability of neighborhoods influences obesity rates, which in turn impacts the incidence of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other health outcomes. Psychology and economics research concluded that people are too passive about saving for retirement, a finding that led the federal government to enact the Pension Protection Act of 2006, which encourages employers to adopt automatic enrollment, employer contribution, contribution escalation, and qualified default investment alternative practices. And political science research has mined foreign language data to yield a better understanding of international strife and inform decisions on conflict resolution.

Anthony Petro, a CAS associate professor of religion, a Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program faculty member, and a National Endowment of the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professor, says humanities research is especially crucial in times like these. Scientific research helps us save lives, says Petro. Research in the humanities asks why we save some lives and not others, shows us how to bring meaning to our lives and to the overwhelming number of lives lost. It teaches us how to imagine better futures.

Despite those virtues, social science funding can seem like an afterthought when compared to overall spending by the federal government. Of the $42 billion the federal government spends on research and development each year, less than 5 percent ($1.9 billion) goes to social and behavioral science research. One note on the bright side: Boston University generally garners a fair amount of that money. In FY 2018, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics Higher Education Research and Development Survey, BU ranked 9th out of 530 colleges and universities ranked by the Consortium of Social Science Associations in terms of social science funding, which includes combined federal research and development expenditures for social sciences, psychology, law, communications, and social work.

James Uden, a CAS associate professor of classical studies and a 2019 winner of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship, says the humanities help us understand the how and why of our own culture.

Its never been more important for us to learn how the actions and ideas of the past have shaped the present, and how to communicate with each other, says Uden. We have to train ourselves to do it. Thats where the humanities come in.

Karl Kirchwey, a CAS professor of English and associate dean of the faculty, humanities, says foundation grant and fellowship support is crucial in a moment when the work of the humanitiesexploring the moral, spiritual, historical, and creative dimensions of living a fully human lifebecomes only more relevant to the challenges now confronting us.

Research in the humanities asks why we save some lives and not others, shows us how to bring meaning to our lives and to the overwhelming number of lives lost. It teaches us how to imagine better futures.

Gifts to centers for social science are particularly important because of their potential to use research to make positive, long-lasting changes to the world says Anna Pruitt, managing editor of Giving USA, an annual report on philanthropic giving in the United State. Pruitt knows that potential well. She is also a researcher at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana UniversityPurdue University Indianapolis, which was established in 2012 with help from an $8 million bequest from Ruth Lilly, whose great-grandfather founded Eli Lilly and Company.

Previously known as the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, the academic center helped Indiana University establish the field of philanthropic studies, which included starting the nations first bachelors, masters, and PhD degrees in the field. In 2015, the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy established the Mays Family Institute on Diverse Philanthropy, which seeks to understand the perceptions, practices, and needs of underrepresented communities.

When BU Today looked for other examples of private gifts that support social science and humanitarian research with the potential to make our society safer, healthier, and more equitable, we didnt have to look far or too deep in the past. On August 13, the City University of New York (CUNY) received $10 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to expand several COVID-19related initiatives and advance social and racial justice. Of that gift, $3 million will support the development of programs in Black, race, and ethnic studies; $2.5 million is earmarked for the Chancellors Emergency Relief Fund and will help students who have experienced job losses and other financial setbacks during the pandemic, putting the completion of their degrees in jeopardy; and another $2 million will help expand the CUNY Cultural Corps, which was created in 2016 as a pipeline to careers in New York City arts and arts administration for students from underrepresented communities. Other monies will fund a program called Transformative Learning in the Humanities, which will train humanities faculty in ways to make their classes more participatory, and will bolster the number of humanities course offerings.

Another $10 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a perennial funder of the humanities and social sciences, awarded to the University of California in January 2018, marked the first stage of a $30 million permanent endowment to sustain the core activities of the UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) and the UC Humanities Network, which is intended to advance collaborative, interdisciplinary humanities research and education throughout the UC system. The UCHRI is a nationally known and highly regarded humanities institute that hosts residential fellows and projects and sponsors a system-wide consortium of interconnected campus humanities centers and multicampus research groups that foster interdisciplinary and collaborative research.

UCHRIs Horizons of the Humanities initiative explores ways that changes in technology and society shape humanistic inquiry and knowledge. It seeks answers to questions such as how advances in digital technology are shaping our thoughts about what makes us human, and how people adopt disparate identities across public, private, and digital interfaces. The initiative also explores the challenges and opportunities of supercharged cultural, religious, and political differences and the consequences of those differences for democracy.

In January 2017, MITs Media Lab and Harvards Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society jointly received $5.9 million from the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund, which was created with initial support of $27 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Omidyar Network, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and others. The grant designated the two centers as the founding academic institutions of the fund, whose purpose is to help bridge the gap between the humanities, the social sciences, and computing by addressing the global challenges of artificial intelligence (AI) from a multidisciplinary perspective. The funds projects address such things as the global governance of AI, and the ways the use of AI may reinforce existing biases, particularly against underserved and underrepresented populations.

Since then the Miami Foundation, fiscal sponsor of the fund, has issued dozens of grants for projects aimed at ensuring that AI is used in the public interest. In July 2017, it gave $7.6 million to nine projects that aim to bolster the voice of civil society in shaping the development of AI in the public interest.One project is investigating questions regarding the safe and ethical use of AI to promote social good in Asia; another is looking at how AI is being developed in Brazil and Latin America. A New Yorkbased project is studying the integration of AI into critical infrastructures, looking specifically at bias, data collection, and healthcare. Others will work with data protection authorities to develop practical guidelines that protect user rights, educate public and private authorities about rights, and conduct case studies on data protection issues relating to algorithms and AI in France and Hungary.In 2019, it funded seven projects, including an initiative to help newsrooms and researchers analyze documents through crowdsourcing and machine learning, an effort to train journalists to produce articles about the impact of technology on low-income communities, and a project aimed at combating misinformation on WhatsApp and other chat apps in India.

Sometimes a gift to the humanities is just that: a gift to the humanities. Thats the case with a $10 million gift that the University of Wisconsin received from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2010. The gift to the Universitys Strengthening the Core Humanitiesprogram, which was matched by the state, has enabled the university to hire new faculty and support postdoctoral and graduate students in the humanities. The university used $2.5 million to create an endowed chair in ancient Greek philosophy, and aimed other monies at two-year fellowships for graduate students who were writing their dissertations.

At BUs Center for Antiracist Research, $9 million of Start Smalls $10 million gift goes to the centers endowment, and $1 million is available for immediate use, allowing the center to hire staff and fund its first research and policy teams on COVID-19 racial disparities. Start Smalls gift is the second of three significant contributions to the center. In June, it received $1.5 million from the Vertex Foundation, a long-term source of charitable giving and part of the corporate giving commitment of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Inc. And in October, the Rockefeller Foundation, a global science-driven philanthropy founded more than a century ago, committed $1.5 million to the center over the next two years.

Kendi envisions the center as a place where researchers from many fields, including law, social work, the humanities, computer science, communication, medicine, and public health will collaborate with researchers from other universities, as well as data analysts, journalists, and policy experts. His goal, he says, is to help create racial change, change that is about creating equity and justice for all, and a human community that values equity and justice for all.

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Funding the Quiet Good: Gifts that Support the Humanities and Social Sciences - BU Today

Human Behavior

Hot or Cold, Weather Alone Has No Significant Effect on COVID-19 Spread – UT News | The University of Texas at Austin

AUSTIN, Texas The link between weather and COVID-19 is complicated. Weather influences the environment in which the coronavirus must survive before infecting a new host. But it also influences human behavior, which moves the virus from one host to another.

Research led by The University of Texas at Austin is adding some clarity on weathers role in COVID-19 infection, with a new study finding that temperature and humidity do not play a significant role in coronavirus spread.

That means whether its hot or cold outside, the transmission of COVID-19 from one person to the next depends almost entirely on human behavior.

The effect of weather is low and other features such as mobility have more impact than weather, said Dev Niyogi, a professor at UT Austins Jackson School of Geosciences and Cockrell School of Engineering who led the research. In terms of relative importance, weather is one of the last parameters.

The research was published Oct. 26 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

Co-authors are Sajad Jamshidi, a research assistant at Purdue University, and Maryam Baniasad, a doctoral candidate at Ohio State University.

The study defined weather as equivalent air temperature, which combines temperature and humidity into a single value. The scientists than analyzed how this value tracked with coronavirus spread in different areas from March to July 2020, with their scale ranging from U.S. states and counties, to countries, regions and the world at large.

At the county and state scale, the researchers also investigated the relationship between coronavirus infection and human behavior, using cellphone data to study travel habits.

The study examined human behavior in a general sense and did not attempt to connect it to how the weather may have influenced it. At each scale, the researchers adjusted their analyses so that population differences did not skew results.

Across scales, the scientists found that the weather had nearly no influence. When it was compared with other factors using a statistical metric that breaks down the relative contribution of each factor toward a particular outcome, the weathers relative importance at the county scale was less than 3%, with no indication that a specific type of weather promoted spread over another.

In contrast, the data showed the clear influence of human behavior and the outsized influence of individual behaviors. Taking trips and spending time away from home were the top two contributing factors to COVID-19 growth, with a relative importance of about 34% and 26% respectively. The next two important factors were population and urban density, with a relative importance of about 23% and 13% respectively.

We shouldnt think of the problem as something driven by weather and climate, Jamshidi said. We should take personal precautions, be aware of the factors in urban exposure.

Baniasad, a biochemist and pharmacist, said that assumptions about how coronavirus would respond with weather are largely informed by studies conducted in laboratory settings on related viruses. She said that this study illustrates the importance of studies that analyze how the coronavirus spreads through human communities.

When you study something in lab, its a supervised environment. Its hard to scale up to society, she said. This was our first motivation to do a more broad study.

Marshall Shepherd, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Georgia who was not part of the study, said that the research offers important insights about weather and coronavirus across scales.

This important work clarifies some of the innuendo about weather-COVID-19 connections and highlights the need to address science challenges at the appropriate scales, Shepherd said.

UT Austin, NASA and the National Science Foundation provided funding for the research.

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Hot or Cold, Weather Alone Has No Significant Effect on COVID-19 Spread - UT News | The University of Texas at Austin