Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

Gravyty Launches Gravyty Guard the First Data Security Solution Built to Protect Donor Data at Nonprofit Organizations – AiThority

Gravyty Expands AI Platform to Address Human-Layer Data Security Risks

Gravyty, the market-defining leader of artificial intelligence (AI) for Social Good, announced Gravyty Guard, the first data security technology focused on the human layer of security and specifically designed to protect the most sensitive donor data at nonprofit organizations from intentional and unintentional data breaches. The announcement comes in direct response to the worst year for nonprofit data security, with thousands of nonprofit organizations announcing data breaches and millions of donor data records compromised. Gravyty Guard protects nonprofit organizations and their well-intentioned employees from unintentional and malicious data breaches and provides the first solution to secure organizations most sensitive data.

Recommended AI News: HyperChain CEO Stelian Balta About Companys Plan To Extend Investments In DeFi Projects

Over the past six months, remote work has redefined how workforces access and share donor data, creating new and alarming security vulnerabilities for nonprofit organizations, particularly through well-intentioned employees who have authorized access to their organizations data. In fact,85%of data breaches occur as a result of inadvertent actions. As data sets grow exponentially and organizations become more data-driven, these vulnerabilities are only projected to get worse. The most prominent risks now become well-intentioned employees who make mistakes with their organizations data.

Nonprofit organizations find themselves in the crosshairs of being data-driven and needing to protect their most sensitive donor data. In the past, weve relied on policy to provide security assurances, but 2020 has proven that we need more, and it has to start at the most vulnerable level the human layer, explainedAdam Martel, co-founder and CEO, Gravyty. With Gravytys deep understanding of the nonprofit sector and human behavior in advancement, we realized that we could expand our AI platform so nonprofits can address the security challenge that will define this decade, protecting against fraud and data breaches with world-class technology.

Recommended AI News: VirBELA Announces Collaboration With HTC VIVE To Introduce VIVE Campus, Redefining The Next Normal

By understanding human behaviors unique to the nonprofit fundraising space, Gravyty uses advanced technologies to train models, deploy proactive alerts, and provide detailed, flexible reporting to protect employees from being the source maliciously or accidentally of the next donor data security breach. Known ashuman-layer security, the technologies behind Gravyty Guard proactively alert fundraisers to potential data breaches and provide steps to remediate data risks. These protections include threats such as:

Phishing, spear phishing, and other email infiltration attacks attempt to trick humans into scenarios that allow hackers to extract sensitive donor data through ransomware, trojan malware, and other methods. An estimated 135 million of these attacks are attempted every day. Historically focused on the for-profit sector, the nonprofit sector has only recently become a target for bad actors. Gravyty Guard is flexible, configuring to the specific needs of any organization to alert and protect fundraisers from these attacks.

Exfiltration happens when employees use email, text messages, messaging apps, thumb drives, cloud apps, and other vehicles to transfer data to places it should never be, without authorization. The most common data exfiltration occurs when an employee forwards a work email to their personal account.75%of IT leaders say employeesintentionallyput an organizations data at risk through exfiltration methods. Gravyty Guard allows nonprofit organizations to select compliance frameworks that apply to their business GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, or otherwise and alerts managers when a fundraiser is about to create a vulnerability.

IT security is often highly effective at monitoring networks for abnormal traffic. However, we cant say the same about tracking abnormalities in human behavior. More than70%of people have mistakenly sent personally identifiable information (PII) or business-sensitive data to the wrong email recipient, creating a data breach. The source of these breaches could be as small as trusting auto-suggest to fill in an email address or a typo. Gravyty Guard uses AI to monitor security anomalies at the human-layer, alerting fundraisers when something doesnt line up about the data within their message and the recipients to whom its being sent.

The last 30 years in security have been defined by protecting networks and devices. Now, bad actors have turned their attention to new vulnerabilities an organizations employees, saidRich Palmer, co-founder and CTO, Gravyty. As the leader in AI technology for the nonprofit sector, addressing human-layer security is a natural progression for Gravyty because frontline fundraisers access sensitive donor data every day. Well empower nonprofit organizations to ensure their employees dont make mistakes that cause donor data breaches.

Recommended AI News: The Next Release Of SAS Viya Introduces A New Category Of Analytics For The Cloud

Follow this link:
Gravyty Launches Gravyty Guard the First Data Security Solution Built to Protect Donor Data at Nonprofit Organizations - AiThority

Human Behavior

Europe is building a ‘digital twin’ of Earth to revolutionize climate forecasts – Science Magazine

At 1-kilometer resolution, a European climate model (left) is nearly indistinguishable from reality (right).

By Paul VoosenOct. 1, 2020 , 10:40 AM

The European Union is finalizing plans for an ambitious digital twin of planet Earth that would simulate the atmosphere, ocean, ice, and land with unrivaled precision, providing forecasts of floods, droughts, and fires from days to years in advance. Destination Earth, as the effort is called, wont stop there: It will also attempt to capture human behavior, enabling leaders to see the impacts of weather events and climate change on society and gauge the effects of different climate policies.

"Its a really bold mission, I like it a lot, says Ruby Leung, a climate scientist at the U.S. Department of Energys (DOEs) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. By rendering the planets atmosphere in boxes only 1 kilometer across, a scale many times finer than existing climate models, Destination Earth can base its forecasts on far more detailed real-time data than ever before. The project, which will be described in detail in two workshops later this month, will start next year and run on one of the three supercomputers that Europe will deploy in Finland, Italy, and Spain.

Destination Earth rose out of the ashes of Extreme Earth, a proposal led by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) for a billion-euro flagship research program. The European Union ultimately canceled the flagship program, but retained interest in the idea. Fears that Europe was falling behind China, Japan, and the United States in supercomputing led to the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, an 8 billion investment to lay the groundwork for eventual exascale machines capable of 1 billion billion calculations per second. The dormant Extreme Earth proposal offered a perfect use for such capacity. This blows a soul into your digital infrastructure, says Peter Bauer, ECMWFs deputy director of research, who coordinated Extreme Earth and has been advising the European Union on the new program.

Typical climate models run at resolutions of 50 or 100 kilometers; even top ones like ECMWFs European model run at 9 kilometers. The new models 1-kilometer resolution will enable it to directly render convection, the vertical transport of heat critical to the formation of clouds and storms, rather than relying on an algorithmic approximation. I call it the third dimension of climate modeling, says Bjorn Stevens, a climate scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. The model will also simulate the ocean in fine enough detail to capture the behavior of swirling eddies that are important movers of heat and carbon.

In Japan, pioneering runs of a 1-kilometer global climate model have shown that directly simulating storms and eddies leads to better short-term rainfall predictions. But it should also improve climate forecasts over periods of months and years. Recent work has shown climate models are not capturing predictable changes in wind patterns that drive swings in regional temperature and rainfallprobably because the models fail to reproduce storms and eddies.

The high resolution will also enable Destination Earth to base its forecasts on more detailed data. Weather models suck in observations of temperature and pressure from satellites, weather stations, aircraft, and buoys to guide their simulations. But coarse grids mean the models cant assimilate measurements that dont average well or cover broad areas, such as fractures opening up in sea ice. Destination Earth will close this gap, says Sandrine Bony, a cloud scientist at the Pierre Simon Laplace Institute. The scales that are resolved are closer to the scales that are measured.

The model will also incorporate real-time data charting atmospheric pollution, crop growth, forest fires, and other phenomena known to affect weather and climate, says Francisco Doblas-Reyes, an earth system scientist at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. If a volcano goes off tomorrow, thats important for the risk of tropical precipitation failure in a few months. And it will fold in data about society, such as energy use, traffic patterns, and human movements (traced by mobile phones).

The goal is to allow policymakers to directly gauge how climate change will impact societyand how society could alter the trajectory of climate change. For example, the model could predict how climate change will affect agriculture and migration patterns in Braziland also how cuts in ethanol subsidies might limit deforestation in the Amazon. Currently, climate scientists extract regional results from global climate models and pass them to experts in agriculture or economics to understand effects on human behavior. Now, says Erin Coughlan de Perez, a climate hazard scientist at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, modelers are moving from just forecasting what weather will be, to what the weather will do.

Getting there wont be easy. Exascale supercomputers rely on both traditional computer chips as well as graphical processing units (GPUs), which are efficient at handling intensive calculations. GPUs are good for running model components in parallel and training artificial intelligence algorithmstwo techniques Destination Earth will lean on to enhance performance. But old climate modeling code will have to be reworked. ECMWF has a head start: It is adapting its forecast model to a GPU-based environment, and last year tested it at 1-kilometer resolution for 4 simulated months on Summit, the U.S. supercomputer that was the worlds fastest until a Japanese machine recently eclipsed it.

The massive amount of data generated by the model will be a problem of its own. When the Japanese team ran its 1-kilometer-scale experiment, it took half a year to extract something useful from a couple days of data, Doblas-Reyes says. Theres a bottleneck when we try to access the data and do something clever with it. A big part of Destination Earth will be solving this problem, designing ways to analyze model results in real time.

As an operational system, Destination Earth will likely run at several time scales, Bauer says. One will be near daily, perhaps targeting individual extreme weather events weeks or months in the future. Runs in the other modelong-term predictionswould be less frequent: perhaps a decadelong prediction of the climate made every half-year or so. If this works, it could be a template for other countries to follow, Bauer says.

The Europeans arent alone in planning for exascale climate models. Were heading in that direction as well, but weve yet to reach that level of effort, says Leung, who serves as chief scientist for DOEs earth system model.

Stevens says its thrilling to be involved in a truly planetary-scale information system that can reveal not just the proverbial butterfly effect in weather and climate, but also how local human actions manifest globally. Thats the story of globalization. Thats the story of the Anthropocene. And this is the scientific platform that will allow you to explore those.

Read the original here:
Europe is building a 'digital twin' of Earth to revolutionize climate forecasts - Science Magazine

Human Behavior

Journeys of Discovery: Grand Canyon murdera true story of redemption – KCBX

Correspondent Tom Wilmer visits withAnnette McGivney, author of "Pure Land: A True Story of Three Lives, Three Cultures, and the Search for Heaven on Earth." McGivney is Southwest Editor forBackpacker Magazineand former professor of journalism at Northern Arizona University.

McGivneys book tells the story of Tomomi Hanamure, a Japanese citizen who loved exploring the wilderness of the American Southwest. She was murdered on her birthdayMay 8, 2006. She was stabbed 29 times as she hiked to Havasu Falls on the Havasupai Indian Reservation at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Her killer was a distressed 18-year-old Havasupai youth.

This show was originally broadcast July 31, 2018 and is reposted as a best-of-the-best podcast in celebration of Journeys of Discoverys 30th anniversary producing on-air and digital media podcasts featured on KCBX and NPR One.

"Pure Land" is about this tragedy. But it is also the story of how McGivneys quest to understand Hanamures life and death wound up guiding the author through her own life-threatening crisis.

On this journeystretching from the southern tip of Japan to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and into the ugliest aspects of human behavior"Pure Land" offers proof of the healing powers of nature and the resiliency of the human spirit.

You are invited to subscribe to the Lowell Thomas Award-winning podcast travel show,Journeys of Discovery with Tom Wilmer,featured on theNPR Podcast Directory,Apple Podcast,theNPR One App&Stitcher.com.Twitter: TomCWilmer.Instagram: Thomas.Wilmer.Underwriting support provided byThe Society of St. Vincent de Paul,and Honolulu based, Hawaiian Legacy Reforestation Initiative.

Read the original here:
Journeys of Discovery: Grand Canyon murdera true story of redemption - KCBX

Human Behavior

Frederick Wiseman on the life of American institutions – Minneapolis Star Tribune

NEW YORK Frederick Wiseman has spent more than half a century documenting American institutions.

With a small crew, he has tirelessly made lengthy, sober, engrossing filmic portraits of life in Jackson Heights, Queens; a Texas boxing gym; a Maine fishing village; small-town Indiana; a Massachusetts hospital for the criminally insane; a Philadelphia high school; a Colorado meatpacking plant; the New York public library.

Wiseman, 90, records sound himself, holding the boom microphone. He doesn't research beforehand, instead letting what he sees dictate a film. No one lives more by the dictum of showing, not telling, than Wiseman. After assembling 100-250 hours of rushes, he toils over the footage, assembling sequences that capture life at a certain time and place, stitching together a narrative of expansive, long-take detail. Collectively, the films constitute a sprawling, clear-eyed mosaic of America.

Many consider Wiseman the greatest living documentary filmmaker. In 2016, he received an honorary Academy Award. "It's as important to document kindness, civility and generosity of spirit as it is cruelty, banality and indifference," he said.

In a time of unprecedented strain on federal institutions, Wiseman's latest is a profile of a more local, functioning realm of U.S. civic life. "City Hall," which played to typical acclaim at the Venice, Toronto and New York film festivals over the past few weeks, documents the daily hum and long-range aspirations of the Boston city government under Mayor Marty Walsh. It opens in virtual theaters Oct. 28.

Wiseman, who spoke in a recent interview from the apartment in Paris that's been his most regular home for the past 15 years, finished post-production on "City Hall" just as the pandemic was beginning. Aside from walks to relax, he's stayed mostly inside since March. Asked about his health, he replied, "Well, I'm still breathing." But sitting still is hard for someone who has averaged a movie a year for five decades. "For the first time in 55 years, I don't have a movie to work on," he said.

___

AP: The communal worlds of your films where groups of people are so often in rooms talking to one another feels very far away right now, doesn't it?

WISEMAN: At the moment I can't work. It's terrible. To make the kind of movies I make I can encounter a couple hundred people every day. I'm working on a script to a short fiction film that I can shoot in a modest way with a small crew in an isolated place. But not having any work to do is a serious problem. I'm bored out of my mind, actually.

AP: In "City Hall" we see such a wide scope of civic operations, from garbage collection to homeless outreach, from building inspections to mayoral staff meetings.

WISEMAN: City government touches more aspects of our lives than any other form of government. Among other things, it provides the necessary limits as to what we have to do to get along with each other and live together. Speeding limits. Places to park. Minimum health requirements for restaurants. The control of violence. The monopoly on the right to use force. Providing health services. It goes on and on and on. You sort of, or at least I did, take it for granted.

AP: Do you consider "City Hall" a response to Donald Trump?

WISEMAN: If I made "City Hall" when Obama was president, one would be measuring Walsh against Obama. But in the current context, we're measuring him against Trump, so he comes out so much better. Not that he's not good, but the contrast is extreme. The film doesn't in any way suggest the government of Boston is perfect. But it does suggest, I hope, that there's a mayor who cares and is trying to implement programs and raise money for services that will make a difference in people's lives.

AP: What draws you to institutions as subjects?

WISEMAN: The institution is also just an excuse to observe human behavior in somewhat defined conditions. The films are as much about that as they are about institutions. For most of the films, all the encounters take place within a relatively limited geographical framework. Sometimes it's just a building or in the case of "Boxing Gym," a couple of rooms. In the case of "National Gallery," it's a big building. In the case of "Public Housing," it was a housing project. Anything that takes place within the geographic boundaries of the institution is fair game to include in the film. Anything that takes place outside those boundaries is another film.

AP: Are you partly motivated to leave these films behind as time capsules to show the way people talked and dressed and moved?

WISEMAN: You're quite right. I'm very interested in that. I hope 50 years from now they'll be interested in the films because it's a body of films which represent the work of one person exploring contemporary American life. I hope they'll always be interested in them. I made "Law and Order" (about the Kansas City police department) in 1968 and the issues that film tries to deal with are very contemporary.

AP: There's a scene in that where a policeman chokes a black woman.

WISEMAN: That aroused almost no comment when the film was the shown in 1968. It was sort of by the by. It was more tisk-tisk. No protests. There was no political activity in Kansas, Missouri, as a consequence of that sequence, and it's pretty horrible.

AP: Those kinds of incidents of police brutality are more widely recorded now. Do you think them being better documented will change the behavior?

WISEMAN: Ah, that's the million-dollar question. I don't know what changes human behavior. I think human behavior has been set now for 10,000 or 15,000 years.

AP: You've said you watch fiction films more than documentaries. Which filmmakers have had an influence on you?

WISEMAN: I've probably been more influenced by the books I've read than the movies I've seen. I've never consciously drawn on the work of another filmmaker while I'm shooting or editing. When I read a novel or read a poem, I think about the same kind of things that I do when I'm editing. When I went to college a long time ago, it was called close reading. It probably has a fancier name now. But we were taught to pay close attention to the text and not incorporate in our analysis of the text anything outside of it. In other words, we weren't encouraged to read a biography of Ernest Hemingway to read "The Sun Also Rises." So I learned how to pay close attention. So when I'm shooting and in particular when I'm editing, in order to make a film out of 150 hours of rushes, I have to pay close attention to what people are saying and doing and how they're moving and how they're dressed and the language they're using. I have to explain the behavior that I'm seeing and hearing to myself in order to make a judgment. The making of these films involves an effort to be aware, in a sense to be awake.

AP: You have a good line about "verit" filmmaking in which you say you're "somewhat more conscious than a fly."

WISEMAN: The whole notion of a fly on the wall I find disgusting. It's demeaning, really.

AP: And you don't like the word "documentary," right?

WISEMAN: I'm happy with the word "movies." I make movies. Maybe it's because when I was growing up, "documentary" had an aura about it. You were supposed to see it because it was good for you, a bit like ex-lax. I think a movie should be entertaining, instructive, dramatic, funny. You should look for the same qualities in a documentary as in a fiction film. I hate didacticism in writing and I also hate it in movies. I don't like to be told what to think. I like to be asked to work and figure out what's going on, so I discover.

AP: Was "City Hall" enjoyable to make?

WISEMAN: They're all enjoyable to make. One of the reasons I like doing this is because it's fun. Each movie is a new subject. I like to think I learned something. I have an intense absorption in the film, in the shooting and the editing. It's physically and emotionally and intellectually demanding. That's a good combination of things for me.

The rest is here:
Frederick Wiseman on the life of American institutions - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Human Behavior

A Killing Eve-inspired fashion line is on its way – Dazed

Fans of Villanelle can now dress up like their favourite knife-wielding murderess because a Killing Eve-inspired line of clothing is on its way.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, AMC Network and Sid Gentle Films the companies that own the shows licensing rights have signed an agreement with IMG for the BBC America series to develop and manufacture consumer products, experiences, and collaborations. Simply put, it means that we can expect Killing Eve-branded clothes, beauty products, games, and more to appear in the near future.

Killing Eve hits on multiple notes and nuances of human behavior that naturally translate into licensing, said Sherikay Chaffee, VP of licensing at IMG, in a statement. Aside from being one of the most popular and loved shows on TV, its also one of the most clever and stylish. The dual aspect and opposing nature between its two lead characters can be used to tell a story about a product.

While theres no further information as to when we can expect to see these products, Killing Eve is known for serving some major fashion lewks, including frou-frou dresses courtesy of Molly Goddard and tongue-in-cheek Undercover baseball caps, a green, fluffy Charlotte Knowles coat and Gucci tailoring.Needless to say, were excited.

In the meantime, heres some inspo:

Read more from the original source:
A Killing Eve-inspired fashion line is on its way - Dazed

Human Behavior

‘Boys State’ Reflects Boyish Nature of American Politics – The Emory Wheel

What could go wrong when one thousand Texan high schoolers participate in a government stimulation? Boys State, the latest documentary produced by A24, chronicles the journey of Texan students as they participate in a week-long, mock political government program. In the documentary, filmmakers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine follow a diverse group of charismatic, hard-core and entertaining high school participants who lead the gubernatorial campaigns for the 2018 American Legion Boys State annual leadership program. Following these contestants over the course of nearly two hours is not only wildly entertaining but also a politically powerful experience.

The central objective of the Boys State program is to create a new political party with a corresponding political agenda, and then successfully run an election campaign for the coveted position of the governor of Boys State. The attendees are divided into two parties based on historical political parties Nationalists and Federalists and are tasked with voting for a party chair, creating their own agenda and nominating a candidate for the gubernatorial election.

The film finds its rhythm at the onset of the preliminary campaign speeches as the student candidates introduce their platform and themselves to the conference. Instances such as these speeches make it clear that despite their serious and mature proclamations, these are high schoolers. The distinction between serious ideology and comedic performance is sometimes difficult to distinguish.

One of the most thrilling characters to watch in Boys State is Steven Garza, the calm, quiet and collected son of an immigrant. Unlike many of the Boys State attendees, Garza is a self-proclaimed Bernie Sanders supporter and participant in Black Lives Matter protests. Despite these odds, Garza skillfully employs patriotic rhetoric to appeal to core American values shared by most Boys State attendees. Garza lauds hard work and respect for veterans as he queries in his first speech, I want to know what is on your mind. Will we show the world what patriots are made of?

Other key figures in the film include students Ben Feinstein and Rene Otero, who serve as the district chairs for their respective parties. Feinstein is a Ronald Reagan-loving philosophical conservative who exemplifies the realpolitik mindset. Otero, my favorite attendee, joins Garza as a shining beacon of diversity in thought and race: as a leftist and Black man in a sea of white conservative Texans, Otero stands out with his charismatic confidence and razor-sharp rhetoric. As one of the few Black men at Boys State, he tactfully handles racial discrimination and bigotry against him and his campaign.

Although the movie itself does not have a protagonist or antagonist, certain people like Feinstein and gubernatorial candidate Robert MacDougal are depicted as manipulative and even malicious in their political schemings. At one point in the film, Otero moderates a debate session and prevents his opponent from speaking out of turn. Feinstein, a true Machiavellian, pounces and accuses Garza and Otero of biased and unfair moderation; Feinstein continues to bring up this event throughout the rest of the campaign period, much to the chagrin of Garzas campaign.

Robert MacDougal and Steven Garza discuss campaign tactic before delivering a speech in Boys State./Courtesy of Apple

In a Zoom interview with college media outlets, Feinstein admitted he had expected the film to simply portray the fun times he had at Boys State and the success of his campaign. He was surprised by how stressed and controversial his peers appeared in the final cut, and upon reflection, he disapproved of some of his own decisions. Feinsteins reflection here adds an important layer to how this film reflects real political behavior he felt as if he was doing well for both himself and his party, and having fun. However, the documentary paints a more grim picture of self-interest, mudslinging and power dynamics.

Although the program is a mere political simulation, the high schoolers in the film were willing to go against their own morals and beliefs for the sake of attaining political power, and look back at unethical betrayals fondly and wistfully. Unadulterated absurdity and duplicity of American politics are on full display for the masses to witness and gawk at. The expectation that these students should be kinder, more compassionate and more understanding of each others positions because they are young is habitually subverted by their behavior, representing a grand reflection on human behavior as a whole.

MacDougal said he went into this with a cynical mindset, thinking that the whole room would be very red [Garza] showed that you could run on what you believe and have those important conversations with those around you.

MacDougal learned that, regardless of our political differences, coming together and having respectful, productive dialogues is still within reach. But Boys State also reveals the core political assumptions, insidious manipulation and racism that ground the United States more generally. With the election a month away, Boys State is a necessary and critical experience for everyone living in this country.

Most importantly, Boys State underscores the gravity of voting. Make sure to cast a ballot in the 2020 election lest we wish to allow the Machiavellian politics of Boys State to dominate America.

Grade: A

See the original post:
'Boys State' Reflects Boyish Nature of American Politics - The Emory Wheel

Human Behavior

Historian John Barry compares COVID-19 to the 1918 flu pandemic – University of Rochester

October 6, 2020

John Barry 69 (MA) says that the virulence of the 1918 flu made it a very different disease than COVID-19, but the lessons of that pandemic still resonate.

John Barry studied in the graduate program in history at the University of Rochester. He went on to work as a football coach and then as a journalist in Washington, DC, covering economics and national politics. Hes now adjunct faculty at Tulane Universitys School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and the author of books including The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, The Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, and Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty.

When the novel coronavirus went from epidemic to pandemic early this year, John Barry 69 (MA) found himself in rather familiar territory. Barry is the author of The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. When the book was first published, in 2004, the National Academy of Sciences named it the outstanding book of the year on science and medicine. In 2020, Barrys book has returned to bestseller status.

In The Great Influenza, he considers what became known as the Spanish fluso called because the press in Spain, which stayed neutral in World War I, had not clamped down on coverage in the name of moralefrom a broad range of angles: scientists quest to understand a new pathogen, officials efforts (or lack thereof) to contain the spread of infection, and communities and families horrifying experiences of a disease so contagious and lethal that it infected about a quarter of the US population and killed between 50 and 100 million people around the world, the equivalent of 220 to 440 million today.

Anchoring The Great Influenza is Barrys consideration of leadership, science, and society. Trust, he argues, is crucial, because without trust in information people have no reliable knowledge of what is happening. In 1918, when leaders gave wartime morale priority over public health communication, terror overran society, so much so that some flu victims starved to death because others were too frightened to bring them food.

The fundamental lesson of the 1918 pandemic, Barry writes, is this: Those in authority must retain the publics trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one.

Barrys expertise drew him into public policy. In the year The Great Influenza was published, he began to collaborate with federal government entities and the National Academies on influenza preparedness and response. He was part of the original group that developed plans for public health measures in a pandemic before a vaccine is developed, and he contributed to pandemic preparedness and response efforts during the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Theyre both animal viruses that jumped to humans. So, theyre novel for the given population. The mode of transmission is identical: primarily droplets, some airborne, maybe some fomite [transmission from contact with objects]nobody knows how much.

Number three, theyre both primarily respiratory viruses.

Number four is less well known, and that is that the 1918 virus infected practically every organ, much like COVID-19. There were notable neurological impacts and cardiovascular eventsthey were very common. Its been noted that even the testes can be affected. That was true in 1918 as well. Thats very unusual and certainly not the case for other influenza viruses.

Its hard to say whats most important, but I guess the most important one is a different target demographic. In 1918, 95 percent, roughly, of the mortality was among people younger than 65. Of course, thats the opposite with COVID.

And number two is duration. This virus moves much more slowly than influenza, whether its the incubation period, how long you shed virus, or how long youre sick.

It has put vastly more stress on the economy because of the duration. We tried to interrupt transmission and save peoples lives, which I think was the right thing to do. But it certainly caused an increase in economic stress.

The most obvious difference is virulencethe rapidity of the viruss spread and its severity. In 1918, it was many times more virulent.

As a general rule, public health is pretty easy compared to the hard science. In the present case, obviously, the reversal on mask usage caused a lot of confusion, though I think right now theres pretty widespread acceptance.

Normally, public health is not a frontier. You may refine your methodsand in this case, the main method has always been there. Social distancing is more important than anything else.

There was a lot more reason to be afraid in 1918. People saw death all around themand in many cases, horrible deaths. There is fear out here now, but its not, in most cases, the same intensity.

I think fear is pretty clearly a much more important and driving motivemuch more effective, lets sayin getting people to act than the idea that you ought to protect some stranger you cross paths with somewhere.

So in terms of getting people to comply with the [public health] advice, I think if people are deeply concerned that they themselves are vulnerable and could be killed, thats much more powerful than worrying, well, you know, maybe this person Im having a drink with might go home and infect their grandmothermaybe.

A lot of countries did the right thing. They were extremely transparent. In those early meetings about nonpharmaceutical interventions [in the advisory groups that Barry joined in 2004], my message was to always tell the truth. And I didnt get a lot of pushback. Every now and then somebody would say, Well, we dont really want to scare people. Yeah, you do, actually. You dont want to use fear as a tool, but you want them to be able to judge the risk themselves, truthfully. And to understand the risk. And be honest. And a lot of countries have done thatnot because they read my book, but because its pretty clearly the best thing to do, whether its South Korea or Singapore or Germany or Austria or New Zealand. A lot of countries were totally transparent and have been pretty effective in containing the virus.

And as you know, the US is pretty close to dead last in the developed world in containing the virus.

Ive never been able to come up with a good explanation as to why theres so little written about the 1918 pandemic. There was quite a bit of pulp fiction written in the 1920s. I didnt know that myself until somebody else who was interviewing me said they collected it. But not serious fiction. There were only a tiny handful [of writers who addressed it], such as William Maxwell and Katherine Anne Porter. John Dos Passos is one of my favorite writers. He got influenza on a troop ship, one of the worst places to get it, and he wrote about two lines in his entire body of work.

When I first started researching this book, which was quite a while ago now, I had an aunt who was then in her 90s. And when I mentioned it to her, she grabbed her chest and said, Oh! It was the only time I saw my father cry. It certainly was burned into her consciousness. And whenever I mentioned it to somebody old enough to have lived through it, I got a similar response. They certainly didnt forget it, but why it didnt register in our literature to a greater degree, I dont know. I mean, it was briefyoure talking about a period of weeks. It also occurred simultaneously with the war. But I have no good explanation.

As far as this pandemic, yes, I think theres a very good chance that this will be a defining event for a generation, depending upon the effectiveness and speed with which we get a vaccine.

In April, I said I didnt expect summer to provide relief. I said I expected something akin to ocean swells rather than waves, depending on how we came out of various phases. I also said that there is a danger of a storm surge. Its relatively easy at this point to predict the behavior of the virus, but you cannot predict human behavior. And you cant predict the weather. If we have a really mild fall and people tend to be outside a lot, deep into the fall, that will have some impact on transmission. If the weather is rotten and people are forced inside earlier, thats something else again.

The key is really behavior. And what worries me most is the real possibility of that storm surge.

And theres still so much we dont know about the virus, such as its long-term impact. We know a significant percentage of those who get sick show some kind of heart damage. Is that permanent? Does it heal? Even people who have no symptoms whatsoever on X-ray show whats referred to as ground glass opacity in the lung. What is that damage? What does that mean long term?

The virus certainly affects blood vessels. What does that mean in terms of stroke and other cardiovascular problems years from now? In 1918, there were complications that didnt surface at all until the 1920s. So, we just dont know.

Tags: Arts and Sciences, COVID-19, Department of History, John Barry

Category: Society & Culture

View post:
Historian John Barry compares COVID-19 to the 1918 flu pandemic - University of Rochester

Human Behavior

The 100 Series Finale Completely Misses the Point of the Show – tor.com

After seven years (give or take a century) of deciding whether or not to pull the lever on various threats for the sake of protecting those they loved, humanity as represented by The 100 finally faced its own test. Yet for all that the series finale purported to grapple with the shows themes, its outcome didnt actually satisfy the moral arguments posed by Clarke Griffin and her fellow juvenile-delinquents-turned-survivors. Nor did it even fulfill season 7s messy storytelling, opting instead for bringing back some fan favorite characters within the context of humanitys Last Test in a way that rang hollow.

Ultimately,The 1oos series finale felt like another television casualty, a series that lost sight of its original, dynamic premise and scrambled to throw together something adequate. It wasnt quite Game of Thrones-level fumbling, but the final product is just as narratively sloppy.

Spoilers forThe 100 716 The Last War

To be fair, season 7 should never have happened the way it did. Bringing back Bill Cadogan and retroactively introducing the Disciples was simply too much new worldbuilding when our heroes had barely finished reckoning with Sanctum and its god-like Primes. At least Russell Lightbourne and his technologically-immortal kin were an extension of established mythology around the Flame (storing the minds of past Grounder commanders) and engaged each of the core characters in ways that augmented their characters arcs. The 100 breaking its own rules about death last season was a fantastic example of how a long-running series could still look within itself and find something fresh to say.

Instead, all of the mishigas about the Last War reads like someone skimmed the CliffsNotes for this series and decided, Hey yeah, lets make it all aboutthem being the ones who are judged worthy of survival for once! By omnipotent, ascended, alien beings, no lessdespite the series never once engaging with the presence of extraterrestrials. While the characters fit naturally into season 6s plot, almost all of the arcs this season felt shoehorned in: the time dilation skewing everyones relative senses of time, Bellamy going full sheep and Clarke killing him to save Madi, last weeks ableist outcome in which Clarke almost killed a locked-in Madi without her consent. The only character who really benefited from this seasons wacky wormholes and time loops was Octavia (more on that later).

The reveal that Cadogan and his ilk had mistranslated Last War from Last Test wasnt even much of a twist, because (a) of course its a test, after years of Clarke and co. deciding who deserved to die so they could find a new home and (b) the violent, self-preserving tendencies that these humans have always demonstrated left very little doubt that there would be some sort of fight as part of the test.

That Clarke opens the episode by remorselessly gunning down nameless Disciples is a mockery of the consideration and anguish with which she has approached past genocides. That she murders Cadogan before he can answer the first question of the test should make it clear to the celestial judges how the exam is going to go. While Bill Cadogan has absolutely no business speaking on behalf of the human race, Clarke Griffin isnt a much better pick.

Photo: Diyah Pera/The CW

The problem with the Last Test, and with transcendence, is that the rules are never made clear until were in the moment. We know nothing about these ascended beings other than that they have the power to invite other civilizations to become infinite with them, or to annihilate them by way of reforming them into crystal statues as a testament to their failure. The beings seem to be so far beyond any human emotion or experienceyet they are supposed to possess the nuance to judge human behaviorso their solution is to appear as a crucial figure to the test-taker.

Thus, it is a brief joy to see the return of Lexa (Alycia Debnam-Carey), even though it is immediately apparent that this is Lexa in form only. On the one hand, going by the judges explanation, it reinforces that Lexa was both Clarkes greatest teacher and her greatest love. Yet that means very little if its just a comforting mask mouthing familiar Trigedasleng mantras without the personality or perspective to accompany her counsel.

In the early seasons, Clarke represented the best and worst of humanity: She was the one willing to make impossible decisions, to pull the literal lever that places humanity permanently on the other side of a devastating choice. More than once she sentenced herself to death or exile or isolation so that she could bear that pain while others could prosper. But this final season has warped her character into a shrill, single-minded maternal figure who is so short-sighted she cant consider anything beyond her adoptive teenage daughters safety, treating Madi like a helpless infant instead of someone the same age that she, as a juvenile delinquent, was sent to Earth to fend for herself.

The Last Test sees Clarke self-righteously describing her pain to an elevated creature who might be able to feel it but cannot actually fathom it; who responds by saying that Clarke has just passed on more suffering to others, that she is unable to follow a slogan other than the Grounders jus drein jus daun, or blood must have blood.

So of course, when judged through Clarke-as-proxy, humanity is found wanting. But she was never meant to represent humanity as a whole; she embodies its worst impulses and gravest decisions. Yet by the judges rules, humanity is deemed undeserving of transcendence.

The thing is, our heroes had no interest in transcending their existence before they came across the Disciples. Even though their every encounter with another civilization ended in competition and bloodshed, they never gave up on the hope that the next time they would be able to co-exist with another set of humans. Remember that Clarke chose to destroy the City of Light and its weird digital afterlife, knowing that Praimfaya was on its way, because that sterile approximation of existence was not the way humanity was meant to continue on.

So for them to suddenly be faced with this ultimatumtranscend or become extinctputs them in an impossible position. Thank goodness, then, for Raven Reyes, who never met an impossibility she couldnt take apart.

Photo: Shane Harvey/The CW

In this case, its treating the Last Test as a relay race. Raven demands the chance to retake it, prompting the judgeas Abby!to teleport them to Bardo in real time to see that the Last War is indeed happening, between the surviving Grounders and the indoctrinated Disciples. Both sides entire cultures are built around fighting as the immediate and reflexive choice; whether theyre shouting jus drein, jus daun or for all mankind, its the same self-preserving violence. So even if the judge were willing to consider the whole of humanity (which at this point is a couple hundred people, tops), theyre modeling the same behavior as Clarke.

The only thing they can do, then, is decide that their fight is overnot because they die, but because they stop fighting.

Raven, as some weird ghostly observer, cant interfere with the action. So its especially heartening to see Octavia and Indra come to the realization on their own that this isnt the Last War in the sense of a final, winner-take-all fight, but the Last War meaning that they have to break the cycle of violence. Indra finally gets rid of Sheidheda (several episodes too late!), while Octavia gives everyone a pep talk about being Wonkru. (Hmm, maybe they should have tried for that at the start??)

This is what good character growth looks like: Octavia Blake, the girl in the floor, Blodreina, had to put all of her anger aside, had to grapple with her bloodthirst, in order to break her own ingrained cycle of killing-as-control. Yet even her big speech has shades of Tyrion Lannisters whats most important is a good story spiel in the Game of Thrones series finale; it all feels too on-the-nose.

We can change, Raven tells the Abby-judge, we just need more time. Apparently those few minutes are all thats required, because the judges reverse their decision and allow humanity to transcend: some combination of the Doctors golden regeneration and The Good Places final visual, with all of the humans inexplicably joyful at this mass exodus from their corporeal forms.

All except Clarke, who once again is cast as the martyr and pariah, intended to live out the rest of her mortal existence alone. To be honest, the Lexa-judge makes a good point that Clarke was the only test subject to commit murderduring the test, so it makes sense that there would be a consequenceyet its not as if the Last Test had any clear rules.

Photo: Diyah Pera/The CW

And then the final scene undoes everything in this episode and in the series as a whole, all due to another twist of new information not previously available: Transcendence is achoice, and all of Clarkes friends have chosen to reject it in favor of joining her back on Earth.

That means Murphy, Emori, Niylah, Jackson, Miller, Octavia, Levitt, Hope, and Jordan all chose mortality over some City of Light-esque infinite existence, just so Clarke wouldnt spend the rest of her days talking into a radio with no one to listen on the other end. (No Madi, because she knew Clarke wouldnt want a future with no peers or love interests for her, and thats fair, give the poor girl a break already.) Frankly, this makes sense; as I said above, these characters never even wanted transcendence; they just didnt want to be annihilated. So they came back to try again

Its all very heartwarming, yet the whole time I felt more emotionally manipulated than anything else. It also raisesso many questions:

Is Earth just fine? Was Monty completely wrong about Earth recovering from theEligius IV nuke, and they could have just stayed in cryosleep a bit longer? If the Disciples knew that Earth was fine, why not just send our heroes through it at the start and let them live out the rest of their brief lives in ignorance, rather than risk them messing up the Disciples plan? Yes, that would have led to humanity going extinct, but thats a hell of a convoluted way of getting back to Earth.

But the most disturbing fallout of this narrative choice is thatThe 100, a series about humanitys constant struggles to co-exist, ends on the message that everything is fine when theres no one you have to put aside differences with. Paradise for Clarke and co. is being with each other and not having to worry about invading anyones land, or assimilating with anyone elses culture, or being tempted to wipe out any supposed enemies for their own survival. Its one thing for them to have realized its possible not to fight when faced with an opposing army, but to reward them with a lifetime in which they will never have to fight with another conflicting force doesnt feel like they actually learned anything valuable.

Thematically, the final visual of them setting up shelter on the shore does swing back around to the Arks prayer of may we meet again: In peace, may you leave the shore. In love, may you find the next. Safe passage on your travels until our final journey to the ground. May we meet again.They always spoke it over their dying, which is ironic considering that transcendence did not allow for the dead to join. Instead, the mantra describes Clarke and her friends.

So,The 100 managed to weave in new meanings for bothyour fight is over andmay we meet again. That, at least, is poetically done, though I wish that everything leading up to it had been so different.

Final Thoughts

Well, that was certainly an episode of television. What did you think of The 100s series finale?

Natalie Zutter will someday rewatchThe 100, but will probably stop at cryosleep and call it a day. Share your thoughts on the series with her on Twitter!

Continue reading here:
The 100 Series Finale Completely Misses the Point of the Show - tor.com

Human Behavior

Archaeologists determined the step-by-step path taken by the first people to settle the Caribbean islands – The Conversation US

For the millions of people around the world who live on islands today, a plane or boat can easily enough carry them to the mainland or other islands.

But how did people in the ancient past first make it to distant islands they couldnt even see from home? Many islands around the world can be reached only by traveling hundreds or even thousands of miles across open water, yet nearly all islands that people live on were settled by between 800 to 1,000 years ago.

Archaeologists like us want to understand why people would risk their lives to reach these far-off places, what kinds of boat and navigational methods they used, and what other technologies they invented to make it. Islands are important places to study because they hold clues about human endurance and survival in different kinds of environments.

One of the most interesting places to study these processes is the Caribbean, the only region of the Americas where people settled an archipelago with some islands not visible from surrounding areas. Despite more than a century of research, there are still many questions about the origins of the first Caribbean people, when they migrated and what routes they took. My colleagues and I recently reanalyzed archaeological data collected over 60 years to answer these fundamental questions.

Based on the discovery of unique stone tools and food remains such as shells and bones, archaeologists have a general understanding that people first spread throughout the Caribbean in a series of migrations that probably began at least 7,000 years ago and likely originated from northern South America.

Amerindians paddled between islands in dugout canoes and were remarkably adept at open-water travel. Archaeologists dont know what inspired people to first colonize the Caribbean islands, but we do know they brought plants and animals from the mainland, like manioc and oppossum, to help ensure their survival.

There are two main ideas about what happened. For decades, the prevailing notion was that people migrated from South America into the Antilles in a south-to-north stepping-stone pattern. Because the islands stretch in a gentle arc from Grenada all the way up to Cuba in the northwest with many largely visible from one to the next this would seem to provide a convenient path for early settlers.

This hypothesis, however, has been challenged by evidence that some of the earliest sites are in the northern islands. Analyses of wind and ocean currents suggest that it was actually easier to travel directly between South America and the northern Caribbean before moving in a southerly direction. Researchers call this proposal of a north-to-south migration the southward route hypothesis.

Figuring out which model for settling the Caribbean best fits the evidence depends on being able to assign accurate dates to human activity preserved in the archaeological record. To do this, researchers need a lot of reliable dates from many different sites throughout the islands to establish how, when and from where people landed.

Archaeologists typically use a technique called radiocarbon dating to figure out how old an artifact is. When an organism dies, it stops producing carbon and its remaining carbon decays at a fixed rate of time archaeologists say death starts the clock. By measuring the amount of carbon left in the organism and then performing a few additional calculations, scientists are left with a probable age range for when that organism died.

Archaeologists often date things like food remains, charcoal from cooking hearths or wood in the building where they are found. If archaeologists date shells found in a trash heap, they can tell, usually within a range of 25 to 50 years or so, when that shellfish was harvested for a meal.

We recently reevaluated about 2,500 radiocarbon dates from hundreds of archaeological sites on more than 50 Caribbean islands.

Archaeologists have been radiocarbon dating findings in the Caribbean since the 1950s when the radiocarbon technique was first discovered. But dating methods and the standards scientists follow have improved dramatically since then. Part of our job was to see if each of the 2,500 radiocarbon dates available would meet todays standards. Dates that did not meet those standards were thrown out, leaving us with a smaller database of only the most reliable times for human activity.

By statistically analyzing these remaining dates, we confirmed that Trinidad was the first Caribbean island settled by humans, at least 7,000 years ago. However, Trinidad is so close to South America that only simple or even no boats were needed to get there.

After Trinidad, the oldest settlements occurred between 6,000 and 5,000 years ago in the northern Caribbean on the large islands of the Greater Antilles: Cuba, Puerto Rico and Hispaniola. Reaching them would have required crossing passages of water where no islands were visible to the naked eye, although navigators rely on other wayfinding techniques like current, cloud patterns, seeing birds fly in a certain direction to know if land is out there. By around 2,500 years ago, people had spread out to settle other islands in the northern Lesser Antilles, including Antigua and Barbuda.

Based on these data, the patterns of initial settlement of the Caribbean are most consistent with the southward route hypothesis.

Around 1,800 years ago, a new wave of people also moved from South America into the Lesser Antilles, colonizing many of the remaining uninhabited islands. About 1,000 years later, their descendants moved into the smaller islands of the Greater Antilles and Bahamian archipelago. This is when Jamaica and the Bahamas were settled for the first time.

Our research findings also support the widely held view that environment played a significant role in how and when islands were settled.

Archaeologists know that once people settled islands, they frequently moved between them. Not all islands are the same, and some offered more or better resources than others. For example, in the Bahamas and the Grenadines, the primary way to access freshwater is by digging wells; there are no streams or springs. Some islands lacked clay for making pottery, which was important for cooking and storing food. People may have also traveled to different islands to access preferred fishing or hunting spots or seek out marriage partners.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversations newsletter.]

Strong seasonal winds and currents facilitated travel between islands. Thats also probably one of the reasons why Caribbean people never developed the sail or other seafaring technologies that were used in the Pacific, Mediterranean and North Atlantic around the same time. Dugout canoes crossed between South America and the islands just fine.

Interpretations of past human behavior at archaeological sites are anchored by radiocarbon dates to study change over time. For archaeologists, its important to periodically take another look at the data to make sure that the narratives built on those data are reliable. Our review of the radiocarbon record for the Caribbean allowed us to show with increased accuracy the ways in which the region was first colonized by people, how they interacted and moved between islands, and how their societies developed following initial colonization.

Go here to read the rest:
Archaeologists determined the step-by-step path taken by the first people to settle the Caribbean islands - The Conversation US

Human Behavior

Beyond the bench: A conversation with Tony Zador – Spectrum

Anthony Zador

Professor, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

When Tony Zador is thinking about the brain, hes often exercising his body. A professor of neurosciences at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, Zador has run five miles a day, seven days a week since he was 18. Thats when the ideas sort of click into place, he says.

His bagel-fueled afternoon jaunts have continued unabated during the coronavirus pandemic, helping to drive forward his research on how the brains disparate parts give rise to the complexity of human behavior and experience. Zadors lab created a brain-mapping technique known as BARseq an update to the earlier MAPseq that can trace connections and gene expression in individual neurons. The tool may help researchers understand how brains are connected differently in autistic people.

Spectrum spoke to Zador about the enigma of the human brain, the aha moments of running and why a ski resort is a good place for a scientific conference.

Spectrum: What question drives your research?

Tony Zador: Ultimately, its: How do you go from three pounds of brain to thought? We know an awful lot about the parts that make up brains the neurons, the synapses, the molecules and in spite of all that, we dont know how to put the pieces together to form a simple, coherent model of how that gives rise to thought and emotions and actions and memories. Its really frustrating, because its like youve got a bunch of Tinkertoys and you know that you have all the right pieces, and you dont know how to put them together quite right.

Theres a great cartoon of a bunch of Scrabble tiles, and the caption is something like, I just bought a book from Ikea. Thats kind of how I feel. We understand so much about the pieces, and yet we dont know how to put them together in quite the right way.

S: Is there a person youd like to work with whom you havent worked with yet?

TZ: Im really lucky that I have super smart people in my lab, but I also collaborate all the time with all sorts of people who later become friends or who were already friends. Just now Im really excited because Im just starting a grant with Ed Boyden. Weve been friends for years and talking about doing something together, and so now it looks like we can maybe do something that brings our technologies together and will allow us to do things that we wouldnt otherwise be able to do.

S: What does your daily routine look like?

TZ: My days arent that different now during COVID-19, except that the meetings, instead of being face to face in my office, are over Zoom. I have kids, so my daily routine used to start with being woken up earlier than I would like, to get my kids off to school, but now I get to sleep in a bit more. Usually I try to put off my meetings so I dont have them first thing, and I answer emails or maybe even think a little, but thats rare. Mostly I dont have time for that.

I occasionally have some time to work on reviewing papers, writing papers, writing grants, all those things. I dont have great study habits, so Im not very efficient, and an awful lot of my time when Im supposed to be doing something in particular is spent procrastinating and not doing it. Sometimes I go down scientific rabbit holes, and in some sense thats inefficient but probably good in the long run, because those are when I get excited about new ideas.

I run pretty much every day. I use that time to relax but also often to think through scientific things. Especially if Im doing something math-related, which is a lot of what I do, thats when those ideas sort of click into place. If Im stuck on something I go for a run, and when I get back I at least have an idea of what I should do next.

S: When and where are you most productive?

TZ: It depends. There are different stages of any project. For me, the creative time is at night Im a night owl. I get so little sleep because I wait until everyone is asleep, including the kids, and then I work until 2 or 3 a.m. Thats when I get most excited about tracking down ideas. Thats not necessarily when Im most productive in terms of writing sentences for a paper or something. That is more like a couple of hours after Ive woken up. But that assumes that Im productive, which Im really not these days.

Different people have different styles. Ive basically come to realize the trick is to embrace what you might think are your weaknesses as your strengths and find collaborators who complement your weaknesses. My strength is that I get excited early on in a project when the project is just being conceived. I love the excitement of doing something new. Once I come remotely close to mastering anything, I kind of start losing interest in it.

S: Do you have a favorite conference?

TZ: Ive actually started a bunch of conferences, so theyre among my favorites. When I was a postdoctoral researcher I started a conference called NIC, which was Neural Information and Coding. It was a small, invitation-only conference that was always at a ski resort. We would have meetings in the morning, then ski throughout the day, and then meet again in the evening. That eventually grew into a much larger conference called Cosyne Computational and Systems Neuroscience which has ballooned up to almost 1,000 people.

The most fun meetings are the smallest meetings. Its exactly the meeting I wish had been around when I was a graduate student or a postdoc.

I just started a new meeting for neuroscience and artificial intelligence, NAISys. It was going to be held at the end of March, and it was postponed until mid-November. It will bring together people interested in what real brains can tell us about how to build better artificial neural networks.

S: What are you reading right now?

TZ: You mean other than countless papers on immunology because of COVID? Im reading several books. One is called Other Minds, by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Its all about how smart octopuses are, and how theyre like this weird alien intelligence. Even though Im a neuroscientist, I knew almost nothing about octopuses. Theyre really smart, and the way their nervous system is organized is really different. Related to that, I just finished a book called, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal. Its just spectacular.

I was an M.D.-Ph.D., and even though I didnt go on to do a residency, the book all medical students had to read was a novel by a guy named Samuel Shem called The House of God. It captured deep truths about what its like to be a medical intern. Its basically a somewhat fictionalized year in the life of a medical intern at MGH, which stood for Mans Greatest Hospital. Fairly recently, he came out with a sequel called Mans Fourth Best Hospital, and I just started reading that, so Im excited.

S: What do you eat or drink while youre working?

TZ: I drink endless cups of coffee, and because I cant run on a full stomach, and it takes a very long time after eating for me to not have a full stomach, I basically eat bagels until I go for a run. So the answer is coffee and bagels.

Continued here:
Beyond the bench: A conversation with Tony Zador - Spectrum