Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

Fish Form Social Networksand They’re Actually Good – WIRED

Characterizing such subtle dynamics is a departure from how ecologists typically model ecosystems, tending to write off in-the-moment decision-making as inconsequential to long timescales. Under this convention, we tend to treat wild animals as kind of dumb, Gil says. We're really kind of bucking tradition. And we found that this convention could be way off.

Using the data theyve gathered from the reef, Gil and his colleagues have created mathematical simulationshighly accurate video games, reallyto show how these seemingly inconsequential interactions in fact have serious consequences for the health of the reef over long timescales. You can play with that ecosystem like you would a game, Gil says. You can impose different human-driven pressures on it, and you can see how it responds. These ecosystem models are incredibly valuable, because they allow us to understand how these gigantic, complex ecosystems grow and change over really long timescales, from decades to centuries, even millennia.

The results are at once troubling and promising. In their simulations, the researchers found that its not just the magnitude of a threat like overfishing that damages a reef ecosystem, but the rate. When people remove fish, theyre removing an invaluable controller of the algae that can get out of hand, blanketing corals and killing them. But we're also removing the social influence that those fish had on the other fish in their social network, Gil says. And so those fish are then left with less information about when it's safe to go out and eat and control these algae. And this feedback has these ecosystem-level consequences.

The researchers modeling finds that those consequences include ecological collapse if overfishing happens rapidly. On the other hand, you could approach that exact same target level, but slowerand in some cases even slightly slowerand you can actually preserve the entire system, says Gil. The whole system can be sustained for centuries, in the absence of other drivers like climate change. This whole phenomenon happens again because of simple individual decisionmaking by these fish.

Simply put, theres safety in numbers. If you lose those numbers quickly, you lose that safety quickly. For herbivores, the more individuals there are, the bolder they get, and the more they feed, says Luiz Rocha, curator of fish at the California Academy of Sciences, who studies reef ecosystems but wasnt involved in this research. So if you remove a bunch of individualsby fishing or anything elsethe fish that are left will be more shy and feed less, eventually leading the ecosystem to collapse quicker than if we considered only population numbers.

This new research, then, could help create more sustainable fisheries, which is good for everyone: If ecosystems are preserved, and so are the species that live there, you dont obliterate a critical source of protein for many people around the world. In fisheries, one challenge is that our models make long-term assumptions about fish populations that arent well matched with the shorter timescales of management actions, or the many timescales of fish ecology and biology, says Meredith Moore, director of fish conservation at the Ocean Conservancy, who wasnt involved in this new work. This study brings shorter-term fish social behavior into models, which is an encouraging step forward toward better understanding how fish populations and the ecosystem respond to pressures like fishing, and could ultimately improve decisions about how to keep fish populations healthy.

So Bruce the shark from Finding Nemo had it half right: Fish are friends, not food. Fish are by necessity friends with each otherbut only to form a social network that protects them from sharks like Bruce. Keep those social networks intact, and we might protect fish from humans as well.

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Fish Form Social Networksand They're Actually Good - WIRED

Human Behavior

Econ 3.0? What economists can contribute to (and learn from) the pandemic – MIT Technology Review

For evidence that mainstream economists are taking the challenge of covid-19 seriously, look no further than the comments of Gabriela Ramos, chief of staff at the OECD, at aconference in April: For many institutions, including the OECD, which has traditionally emphasized the need for efficiency, it is not easy to accept that we should build slack, buffers, and spare capacity into our systemsbut as we now see this is literally a question of life or death.

This is the first plank of the professions response to the pandemic: questioning whether national economies, individual companies, and markets should be optimized to maximize return on capital, or to ensure resilience in the face of a crisis.

The second clear trend concerns methodology and a willingness for economists to move away from strict mathematical models. The pandemic has, in many cases, decreased our reliance on traditional economic metrics such as GDP, says Chen Long, director of the Luohan Academy, an open research institute initiated by the Alibaba Group. This, he says, means thinking outside the box and looking for non-traditional indicators, such as digital apps and internet services. It also signifies a significant shift as economists dig into high-frequency information to illustrate what is happening to our economy.

This article was written by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not produced by the editorial staff.

The pandemic has seen a flowering of interdisciplinary research between economists and academics in fields that would not typically have been considered adjacentepidemiologists and anthropologists for example, rather than mathematicians and statisticians.

Behavioral economics, which begins from a standpoint that social norms can have as much influence over human behavior as the rational self-interest of individual actors, has featured heavily in advice to policymakers.

One example comes from India. At Mumbais Monk Prayogshala Research Institute, behavioral economist Anirudh Tagat worked with psychologistHansika Kapoor tomake policy recommendationsthat nudge Indians into conformity with social distancing. These include drawing a line of chalk beyond the door to a home to encourage families to stay home, an idea borrowed from the Hindu Lakshmana Rekha myth.

Behavioral economics has also been used to highlight risks that may require attention. For example, a much-discussed paper drew attention to a correlation betweencultural attitudes to hand washingin different countries and the size of covid-19 outbreaks.

The pandemic has also gone some way to breaking the silo between development economics, and its mainstream counterpart. The study of extreme market failuresshutdowns due to war, for examplehas generally been the preserve of the former discipline, but the pandemic has forced the wider economics profession to switch focus.

The rush of stimulus spending by developed world governments has emboldened development economists to call for areconsideration of public sector financing. Rgis Marodon of the Agence Franaise de Dveloppement is compiling a database of global development banks. So far, he counts 400 institutions with more than $11 trillion in assets that are responsible for 10% of world gross fixed capital formation each year. He expects to make the database publicly available in November.

Absent multilateral funding, developing economies have been unable to match the stimulus efforts of their rich world counterparts. A McKinsey study shows the stimulus programmes of India, South Africa, and Brazilhave been much smaller, as a percentage of GDP, than developed countries such as Germany and France.

Back in 2009, Andrew Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, famously described the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the 2002 SARS pandemic in China, as two examples of the same phenomenon: the behavior under stress of a complex, adaptive network.

This description is equally appropriate for the current pandemic, and economists are once again starting to conceptualize the economy not as a robust and self-correcting market, but a delicate and complex organism, in which a general resilience needs to be fostered, rather than individual problems remedied.

After the financial crisis, building resilience involved higher capital requirements for banks, and regular stress testing. By definition this meant lower returnsbecause banks had to leave some capital idle rather than deploy it.

Business economists are arguing over what the equivalent measures now would be to ensure that governments and companies are able to meet the needs for basic medical supplies in a future crisis. One area of focus is supply chains, where in the past three decades shareholder optimization has led to an emphasis on endless subcontracting.

Yossi Sheffi, director ofMITs Center for Transportation and Logistics, does not see subcontracting and geographically distant supply chains as necessarily a bad thing, but has called for more transparency. For instance, it is crucial to know if every ventilator producer, for example, relies on the same supplier at the fifth or sixth level of their supply chain.

Oxford Universitys Professor Doyne Farmer, an expert in the economics of complexity, has called for governments to incentivize companies to reveal supply chain information, or simply require them to do so. We need to be able to make better economic models that we build from the bottom up if we ever want to really understand macro properly, he told the OECD conference in April. Having data about global supply networks is a fundamental aspect of that.

This could pave the way for collaboration between economists and technologists, with the use of blockchain, for example, to track every component that goes into a product, increasing the transparency of dependencies within systems of production.

Again, there is potentially much to learn from development economics. Farmer points to the example of Chiles VAT system, which requires both counterparties in any trade to report the transaction details and priceelectronically in real time. Implemented on a global level, this could allow supply chains to be retrospectively reconstructed by economists from public records.

A more prosaic part of the response to covid-19 has been for economists to reconsider the data they provide to policymakers and the wider public. To satisfy the need for timely data, government statistical releases are generally based on surveys, but response rates to those surveys have fallen during the pandemic, bringing into question the accuracy of numbers derived from them.

Some economists have responded by gathering hard data in close to real time to measure the impact of the pandemic and government responses to it. In apaper released in September, economists including Raj Chetty at Harvard University pulled together anonymized credit and debit card spending data to provide azip code level viewof both consumer spending and business receipts in the US during the pandemic.

The conclusion: the wealthiest American households are not fully spending the stimulus checks issued to all families by the federal government because avenues for consumption, such as restaurants, are closed. Rather than try to save companies by stimulating spending, the government might be better served providing social insurance to those that will inevitably lose jobs. This is real-time feedback as the government embarks on a gigantic program of public spending.

Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic advisor to insurance firm Allianz, has called formore humilityamong forward-looking forecasters. When forecasts have to be made, he advocates the use of fan charts, where a range of possible outcomes are shown, rather than one central case, which suggests an unrealistic amount of certainty about the future path of growth, for example, on which companies, individuals, and governments may then act.

Fan charts are a staple of forecasting in the UK. In an amusing moment in aRoyal Economic Society webinar on forecasting, Garry Young of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research showed the forecasts for UK GDP that his organization issued in February 2020 and May 2020, side by side. In the February chart, the GDP growth rate was forecast to remain within a range of 0 to 5% for the next 5 years. By May, with the UK in a pandemic-induced lockdown, forecasts ranged from -20 to +20% growth: tougher to make fixed plans, but this is the point in a time of uncertainty.

In the future, economics may become more like an interdisciplinary data science discipline. With the digitization of the economy and the explosion of data, both the objects and the ways of research are going through fundamental changes, says Chen. It is becoming more and more reliant on data science and code and transforming into a field of study that encompasses many different subjects, from psychology to computer science.

If the economics profession wants to respond in a more diverse manner, as many in the field have earnestly professed, one statistic to have come out of the pandemic gives cause for concern.

A study of the number economic working papers issued so far this yearshows a sharp increasecompared to 2019 or 2018. That makes sense; economists have rushed to analyze disruptions to economic activity and government responses. However, the study also revealed a pronounced drop in publications authored by women, with the writers suggesting the burden of caregiving was limiting publications by female economists.

IMF economists meanwhile havepointed outthe tiny number of articles in top economics publications that deal with race. The IMF authors suggested fertile grounds for future interdisciplinary study, for example sociological studies of everyday interpersonal discrimination, as well as a redoubling of attempts to increase diversity among economists.

Covid-19 has triggered economists to rethink their profession all the way from the philosophical down to the practical. This is no mere academic exercisethe pandemic has shown us that citizen welfare, economic recovery, and future resilience are at stake.

ThePandemic Economy Tracker (PET) projectfrom the Luohan Academy offers real time estimates of economic activity and mobility based on anonymized data from providers including Apple and Google.

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Econ 3.0? What economists can contribute to (and learn from) the pandemic - MIT Technology Review

Human Behavior

Science untangles the elusive power and influence of hope in our lives – goskagit.com

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Richard Miller, Arizona State University

(THE CONVERSATION) On Erin Gruwells first day as a high school English teacher, she faced a classroom of 150 at risk freshmen. Most of these kids, statistically, were going to fail. They were tough, their young lives already defined by poverty, gangs, violence and low expectations. These students, she wrote, knew nearly every four-letter word except one: hope.

Yet four years later, every one of her at risk students at Wilson High School in Long Beach, CA, had graduated from high school. More than half went on to graduate from college. The stories written by Gruwells students were published as a book called The Freedom Writers Diary. It became a New York Times bestseller and in 2007 was made into a major motion picture called Freedom Writers starring Hilary Swank.

Gruwell taught English but also taught them an elusive trait: hope. Science has, in the past 30 years, documented that hope can serve as a strategy for success.

Teaching hope

Although hope is a common theme in mythology, philosophy and theology, it wasnt a subject of psychological research until University of Kansas psychologist Richard Snyder began his pioneering study in the 1990s. His work paved the way for science to measure, teach and distinguish hope from other psychological disciplines. His research recognized hope as a cognitive function, an emotional state accompanied by action.

Goals are basic to human behavior, Snyder noted, whether they are long- or short-term. They are the first step in imagining future achievement. Being successful, he writes, requires a way to pursue a goal and the will not give up will power and way power. Snyder and social scientist Shane Lopez confirmed that hope can be taught and learned and that it provides benefits in the public sphere.

What kids need to excel

I am a professor of practice and clinical director for Arizona State Universitys Center for the Advanced Study and Practice of Hope. The centers team is made up of researchers, practitioners and graduate students who are advancing the understanding, strategy and practice of hope.

Other academic institutions including the University of Oklahomas Hope Research Center are committing resources to better understand the dynamics of hope. In 2014, the John Templeton Foundation funded The Hope and Optimism initiative, a $4.5 million, four-year grant at Notre Dame and Cornell. The project explored hope from various lenses including religion, medicine, sociology and psychology.

There is a new generation of hope scientists emerging on university campuses around the globe dedicated to further unraveling hopes potential. These research topics include coping skills, depression, aging, social justice and creating communities of hope.

It is my long-standing belief that society often defines children and their future by disproportionately identifying and focusing on risk and trauma but ignoring hope.

Applying hope to life

To better understand how hope theory could be translated into practice, in 1993 I enlisted a group of seven researchers, practitioners and graduate students to participate in a seven-year literature review. In 2000, our team shared its conclusions, launching a new initiative called Kids at Hope. The Kids at Hope strategy, at its core, promotes the practices and belief that all kids are capable of success no exceptions.

These findings informed the design of a framework that teaches hope as a cognitive skill. Teaching hopefulness begins by believing in all kids, connecting with young people in meaningful ways and teaching children how to imagine their goals, a process called mental time travel, that encourages the brain to plan for future opportunities and challenges.

The ability to mentally time travel is the process of remembering the past to draw from those memories and construct a future. Recalling past events is a great advantage in determining who and what to trust, and what works and what doesnt. Through past experiences, people are able to picture where they would like to be and how to get there.

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A central part of this work focuses on teaching the science of hope so that it can flourish in communities whether that is the juvenile justice system, education, child welfare, behavioral health or youth development systems. The science is clear. Hopeful people are happier, healthier and achieve more of their goals than those who lack hope.

If it takes a village to raise and educate a child, I believe hope theory should be part of that strategy. As Gruwell and her students discovered, hope is a gift that can positively change lives.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/science-untangles-the-elusive-power-and-influence-of-hope-in-our-lives-144546.

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Science untangles the elusive power and influence of hope in our lives - goskagit.com

Human Behavior

ESAs -Week 2020 Highlights Digital Twin Earth, AI, and Quantum Computing – Science Times

This year's ESA's -week event started on September 28 and would last until October 2. It showcases a series of stimulating speeches about Digital Twin Earth, an update on -sat-1, and an exciting novel initiative that involves quantum computing.

ESA's 2020 -weekgives people to connect and form networks with experts, scientists, educators, students, developers, global industries, start-ups, and institutions in the field of space. It aims to explore the latest applications of transformative technologies and inspire early-career scientists, citizens, entrepreneurs.

The -week event goes virtual this year and focuses on how Earth observation contributes to Digital Twin Earth. The Digital Twin Earth provides a precise representation of Earth's past, present, and future changes.

Through Digital Twin World, human and nature activity on the planet will be visualized, monitored, and forecasted. Digital Twin Eart will monitor the Earth's health and conduct simulations of the interconnected system of Earth with human behavior, and support viable development that reinforces Europe's efforts for a better environment in response to Green Deal's the urgent challenges and targets.

Experts will discuss the concept, practical implementation, and infrastructure of the Digital Twin Earth and exhibit insights on the way industries. The community contributes to making the project successful during the ESA's 2020 -week.

On September 3, the first artificial technology (AI) was launched onboard the European Earth Observation Mission. The -sat-1 is the first of its kind and the first experiment in improving the efficiency of sending vast quantities of data back to Earth.

ESA and cosine remote sensing are delighted to reveal on the first day of ESA's -week event that the Deep Convolutional Neural Network has performed the first-ever hardware-accelerated artificial intelligence inference Earth observation images on an in-orbit satellite. It was the University of Pisa that developed the Deep Convolutional Neural Network.

The -sat-1was successful in prefiltering Earth observation data. Only the essential usable part of the image is downlinked to the ground, which improves the bandwidth utilization and significantly reduces the aggregated costs of the downlink.

Initial data coming from the satellite showed that that the automatic cloud detection algorithm operated by the AI has correctly filtered hyperspectral Earth observation imagery from the sensor of the satellite into cloudy and non-cloudy pixels.

Read Also: Watch! Latest Flyover Footage From ESA's Spacecraft Shows Stunning View of Ice-Filled Crater of Mars

As mentioned in the opening speech, the novel initiative involving quantum computingexploits quantum phenomena like superposition, entanglement, and tunneling to improve performance, decrease computational costs, and solve intractable problems in Earth observation.

The novel initiative uses artificial intelligence to support programs like Digital Twin Earth and Corpenicus in creating a quantum capability that can solve the demanding Earth observation problems. Quantum computing will be developed at ESA's -lab at ESA's center for Earth observation in Italy that embraces transformational observation.

ESA and CERN collaborated on many projects before, and this will be extended to the CERN Quantum Technology Initiative announced last June this year by Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director-General.

Through this, both ESA and CERN will make new synergies and build on their shared experience in data mining, big data, and pattern recognition.

Read More: NASA/ESA's Hubble Captures Images of Cygnus Supernova Blast

Check out for more news and information on ESA at Science Times.

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ESAs -Week 2020 Highlights Digital Twin Earth, AI, and Quantum Computing - Science Times

Human Behavior

The US health department is planning a $250 million COVID ad campaign to ‘defeat despair’ before the election – Poynter

Covering COVID-19 is a daily Poynter briefing of story ideas about the coronavirus and other timely topics for journalists, written by senior faculty Al Tompkins. Sign up here to have it delivered to your inbox every weekday morning.

Politico has six sources for its story that says you can expect to begin seeing a star-studded ad campaign from the Department of Health and Human Services before the election aimed at defeating despair over the COVID-19 pandemic.

The campaign is mentioned in some federal government budget documents and is estimated to be worth around $250 million. Politico reports:

Senior administration officials have already recorded interviews with celebrities like actor Dennis Quaid and singer CeCe Winans, and the Health and Human Services Department also has pursued television host Dr. Mehmet Oz and musician Garth Brooks for roles in the campaign.

The public awareness campaign, which HHS is seeking to start airing before Election Day on Nov. 3, was largely conceived and organized by Michael Caputo, the health departments top spokesperson who took medical leave last week and announced on Thursday that he had been diagnosed with cancer. Caputo, who has no medical or scientific background, claimed in a Facebook video on Sept. 13 that the campaign was demanded of me by the president of the United States. Personally.

Politico adds that Dr. Ozs representative says Oz is not scheduled to be involved at this time. And while Politico says campaign planners have talked with Brooks, there is no confirmation that he is going to be involved.

HHS said in a statement that the campaign would be strictly informative, not partisan, and intended to help Americans make informed decisions about the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 and flu.

One of the first words about the campaign came when HHS started looking for public relations agencies to which to make proposals. Politico published that story Aug. 31, which said:

Several weeks ago, the department sent out to a number of communications firms a performance work statement, which lays out what work will be expected of the winning firm. The document says that the vast majority of the money will be spent from now until January.

The document also lists the goals of the contract: defeat despair and inspire hope, sharing best practices for businesses to operate in the new normal and instill confidence to return to work and restart the economy, build a coalition of spokespeople around the country, provide important public health, therapeutic and vaccine information as the country reopens, and give Americans information on the phases of reopening.

By harnessing the power of traditional, digital and social media, the sports and entertainment industries, public health associations, and other creative partners to deliver important public health and economic information the administration can defeat despair, inspire hope and achieve national recovery, the document also says.

There certainly is nothing unprecedented about having celebrities deliver public service messages. History is full of instances of celebs helping to promote vaccines, for example. But when the government launches a dont despair campaign worth hundreds of millions of dollars right before an election, it is no surprise that Democrats are already asking for an investigation.

Democrats are pushing HHS Secretary Alex Azar to suspend the contract for the ad campaign and to supply documents about the contract with the public relations firm producing it and information about how HHS will keep the campaign from being overtly political.

Here are the 10 vendors who were asked to submit proposals for the campaign. The Democrats letter to Azar mentions that the contract went to Fors Marsh Group, based in Arlington, Virginia. The firms website lists the many federal agencies that have used its work over more than 16 years, producing campaigns and research on everything from reducing alcohol abuse in the military to fighting Medicare and Medicaid waste and fraud.

PR Week says the request for proposals included this description of what was expected:

The campaign would be divided into four parts: program management and strategy and evaluation (10%); market research (10%); message and material (PSAs) production (15%); and paid and earned media distribution (65%).

The campaign would have a large paid traditional and digital media component, the document stated but would also include earned media and digital and social media outreach.

The digital campaign would also share content with bloggers and influencers and place HHS subject matter experts in social media events on Facebook and Twitter. It would also develop and manage HHS-led social media events.

Campaign, a website that tracks the work of public relations agencies, reports:

Ben Garthwaite, CEO of Fors Marsh, said via email that his firm proposed an evidence-based approach built upon principles of behavioral and social science in its bid. It also focused on understanding and meeting the needs of the communities hardest hit by COVID-19 and bringing in partners to help with media access and purchasing power.

Two of our key large partners include VMLY&R and iHeartMedia, which will be integral to our creative execution and media outreach strategy, he said.

iHeartMedia, as you no doubt know, owns 850 radio stations in 153 markets across America and so is heard virtually everywhere in the country over the airwaves, online and through apps.

Perhaps in the presidential debate tomorrow night we could hear more about how the candidates propose to improve health care in a pandemic. Big issues including protection for people with preexisting health conditions, drug pricing and to what extent the government will make health insurance available are all at stake.

Then there is the matter of the president promising $200 drug discount cards to every person on Medicare within weeks.

On Thursday night, President Donald Trump surprised everyone by announcing that within the next few weeks meaning a few weeks before the 2020 election 33 million Medicare recipients will get coupons that the president says can be used to help pay for medications. This is all he has said about it, and the White House has not added much more to explain it. The president said:

The America First Healthcare Plan includes another historic provision to benefit our great seniors. Under my plan, 33 million Medicare beneficiaries will soon receive a card in the mail containing $200 that they can use to help pay for prescription drugs. Nobody has seen this before. These cards are incredible. The cards will be mailed out in coming weeks.

That would amount to a $7 billion program. Nobody is able to say how it would work, how the government will pay for it or how the president might offer such a benefit without Congressional approval.

As the Washington Post explained:

One White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to be candid, said the idea of a drug discount card was a last-minute thing that is still being worked out and originated in the office of White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

StatNews reported:

The nearly $7 billion required to send the coupons, A White House spokesman said, would come from savings from Trumps most favored nations drug pricing proposal. That regulation has also not yet been implemented meaning the Trump administration is effectively pledging to spend $6.6 billion in savings that do not currently exist. The cards, he said, would be actual discount cards for prescription drug copays.

The so-called most favored nation policy is something the pharmaceutical industry has bitterly battled and will almost certainly litigate. If any discount cards go out in weeks as the president promised, they will be spending money that has yet to be saved and may not be saved. And then there is the question of Congress: Even if Medicare does save money somehow, it is Congress that approves spending. StatNews says:

It is unclear whether Trumps promises on $200 credits for prescription drug coupons will come to fruition. Under the Constitution, it is Congress, not the White House, that is empowered to spend taxpayer money, and it is unclear where the roughly $6.6 billion for the program would come from. The idea has never been formally proposed or sketched out by health officials, though the New York Times reported this week that Trump officials had tried to convince the pharmaceutical industry to pay for similar cards worth $100. The drug industry refused.

A spokesperson for PhRMA, the drug industry trade group, said that one-time savings cards will neither provide lasting help, nor advance the fundamental reforms necessary to help seniors better afford their medicines.

Gallup updates its polling every month on the most important problem facing the country today. You will often find these numbers come to life in the messages that candidates deliver because these are the topics their own polling shows will resonate with the public.

Conventional wisdom usually is that the economy is the No. 1 issue, except in wartime. But now, the economy is far from the top.

The coronavirus tops the list of the issues that concern Americans the most, tied with the government/poor leadership. Concerns about leadership rose in September while Americas concern about COVID-19 is down from July and August.

It is important to point out that while concerns over the judicial system rank low in this survey, the polling occurred before the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Concerns over race relations dropped some from this summer while concerns about crime doubled since August. The Marshall Project shines some light on those concerns by compiling the latest crime data for 2020:

Most types of crime decreased this summer, while serious violent crimes such as aggravated assault and murder increased, according to an analysis of crime rates in 27 major US cities by the Council on Criminal Justice, a criminal justice think tank. A preliminary crime report published by the FBI earlier this month shows similar trends nationwide.

It is interesting to look back four years to see what was on our minds before the last election. The economy ranked No. 1 and the more generic answer government was No. 2. Race relations was named top by 8% of Americans, which was way up from previous years. In July 2016, race relations saw a spike of interest in Gallup polling after the high-profile police killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling.

Leslie Cooper sings inside a closed and empty Back Room in New Orleans, Tuesday, April 28, 2020, as part of a livestream. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

I recommend you take a look at this piece from NBCLX that takes us inside the struggling music world where bands you have not heard of are hanging on by their toenails. The piece reminds us that the band members are the proverbial tip of the iceberg when it comes to the performance world. All of the people who support concerns big and small are out of work, too. Save our Stages, an effort by the National Independent Venue Association, is urging supporters to contact members of Congress to ask for help.

WAFF TV in Huntsville, Alabama, reported:

If there isnt some sort of help, federal help, the estimation is 90 percent of those venues is going to close, Ryan Murphy said.

Ryan Murphy is the president of the Huntsville Venue Group, he says the Save our Stages Act thats on the table in Washington D.C. is needed.

I am starting to see more newspapers and news sites get behind a rescue movement for these venues. This is an op-ed from the Missoulian in Montana.

The Mercury News brings us one of the more interesting stories of the day. Scientists have discovered that when we humans produced less noise while we were sheltered in place this spring, the birds sang more softly than when they had to compete with human-produced noise.

The sound levels of bird songs fell by more than four decibels during the shutdown; because decibels are measured on a logarithmic scale, songs were about one-third softer. No longer forced to compete with human pandemonium, birds also dropped their pitch by 160 vibrations per second.

It highlights how much of an effect that humans have on wildlife behavior and how quickly wildlife can respond when human behavior changes, said lead researcher Elizabeth Derryberry, an animal communication expert at the University of Tennessee.

Nature takes over as soon as people get out of the way, she said.

We found clear evidence that birds responded to the reduction in noise pollution during the COVID-19 shutdown, the researchers reported in the Science journal.

And the study found the birds had a greater vocal range: Birds also exhibited greater vocal performance in response to being released from masking by high energy, low frequency noise. We found that birds sung at lower minimum frequencies, achieving greater bandwidth songs in newly open acoustic space.

White House reporters have normal lives, too.

Saturday=mask washing day! Amazed how kids get food ON their masksare they trying to eat while wearing it?

(This is probably only 1/3 of our collection ) pic.twitter.com/FpwClIIXxq

Karen Travers (@karentravers) September 26, 2020

Well be back tomorrow with a new edition of Covering COVID-19. Sign up hereto get it delivered right to your inbox.

Al Tompkins is senior faculty at Poynter. He can be reached at atompkins@poynter.org or on Twitter, @atompkins.

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The US health department is planning a $250 million COVID ad campaign to 'defeat despair' before the election - Poynter

Human Behavior

Making Room at the Top: Andrew and Peggy Cherng – UNLV NewsCenter

As Asian immigrants who turned a Los Angeles-area mom-and-pop Chinese restaurant into a multibillion-dollar corporation, Andrew and Dr. Peggy Cherng know a little something about living the American dream.

They also know a little something about whats required to achieve that dream: Hard work and perseverance. Ingenuity, adaptability, and humility. A whole lot of guts. And a little bit luck.

Each of those ingredients was essential to the Cherngs growing their Panda Restaurant Group into one of the nations largest, most successful privately owned restaurant companies including more than 2,200 Panda Express stores. It's made the Cherngs the undisputed champions of the fast-casual restaurant concept.

But the couple, who this year celebrated their 45th anniversary, will be the first to tell you that genuine life fulfillment comes not from an annual revenue report but rather what you do with those revenues to improve the lives of others. Call it the secret ingredient to truly living the American dream: giving back.

Giving is essential for us, says Peggy Cherng. Giving allows us to show our appreciation to communities that embraced us.

Adds Andrew Cherng: We didnt have a lot growing up, so we are very blessed to have what we have today. Giving back and helping others are our way of paying it forward its simply a question of why not give back when we can?

Through the years, academic institutions have benefited greatly from that giving philosophy, as the Cherngs have donated millions of dollars to support various university programs. UNLV became the latest benefactor when the Cherngs recently donated $5 million to the William F. Harrah College of Hospitality. This historic gift, announced during a small celebration on September 10, will be used to enhance current programs and create new ones including a first-of-its-kind fast-casual concentration.

It continues a valued relationship that began several years ago when the Cherngs relocated to Las Vegas and were introduced to Hospitality College Dean Stowe Shoemaker. Not long after that initial introduction, Andrew Cherng began serving on the Hospitality Colleges Deans Global Advisory Board.

Since moving to Las Vegas, we have gotten to know the community as well as Dean Shoemaker, says Andrew Cherng. We believe in his vision and passion for the fast-casual space and know the [new fast-casual] program will help so many students discover a great career path and financial success.

UNLVs hospitality program and staff are top-notch, and we want to be part of developing these students and providing them with opportunities to thrive in all aspects of their lives. We look forward to the program growing and becoming very relevant under UNLVs leadership.

Shoemaker calls the gift transformative for the college.

With this gift, I and future deans will be able to ensure that the educational opportunities presented to students are at the highest level, he says. Whats especially inspiring is the primary motivation for Mr. and Dr. Cherng has always been trying to improve the lives and opportunities of people thats their core philosophy. They practice this belief every day as they run their business. And their success has allowed them to give back to organizations that share their same beliefs.

The relationship between the Hospitality College and Panda Restaurant Group goes far beyond a friendship between the Cherngs and Shoemaker. In fact, of the 70 Panda Express restaurants based in Southern Nevada, no fewer than 30 are managed by current Hospitality College students or alumni. Additional alumni left the Southern Nevada market to assist with Pandas national growth, having been promoted to leadership positions. On top of that, dozens of UNLV students work as associates at Pandas local stores, including one at the campus Student Union.

We have been fortunate to recruit UNLV alumni who are growing in the company, Andrew Cherng says. Many have since transferred out of state to open up Panda stores in other markets, taking their knowledge from UNLV and their Las Vegas Panda experience to help others.

More than just a paycheck, all of the current and former UNLV students who have worked for Panda have benefitted from the organizations deep-seated ambition to enrich the mind, body and soul of every associate. Its a culture that Andrew Cherng says places a strong emphasis on developing not just better employees but better people in a way that inspires them to better their lives and see more possibilities for themselves, for each other, and for our company.

Shoemaker, for one, has witnessed first-hand the positive impact of that employee-first philosophy.

Our students who have chosen to work with Panda have truly had life-changing experiences, Shoemaker says. For not only do the Cherngs educate their associates on how to better do their jobs, but they also spend a lot of time educating them on how to lead better lives. They truly are concerned about the holistic view of the employee, not just what the employee can do for them over the course of their daily eight-hour shift. And thats rare.

Also rare: A universitys hospitality program offering students the opportunity to learn the complexities of the fast-casual restaurant industry that Panda has dominated since the first Panda Express opened in the food court of a southern California mall in 1983. A spinoff of the Panda Inn full-service restaurant that Andrew Cherng opened a decade earlier in Pasadena, California, the original Panda Express served customerstop-quality Chinese foodbut at a faster pace and lower price point.

When Panda Express proved an immediate hit, the Cherngs set about expanding to additional food courts, and later brick-and-mortar establishments. By 1993, the company had opened its 100th Panda Express location. Today, Panda Restaurant Group operates more than 2,200 restaurants (including dozens under the Hibachi-San brand of Japanese teppanyaki grills). Those establishments which are spread across 49 U.S. states/territories and 12 countries are staffed by more than 40,000 associates.

Given the immense success of Panda Express across nearly four decades, its no surprise that many competitors over the years have jumped into the fast-casual game which means those Hospitality College students who choose to pursue the fast-casual concentration are poised to have a distinct advantage when they enter what is an ever-expanding job market.

Peggy and I have enjoyed great success through Panda, and we wanted to help provide an education and curriculum for the fast-casual industry to help young talent see the possibilities in this sector, Andrew Cherng says. Fast-casual restaurants continue to be one of the fastest-growing industries, even in the midst of the pandemic. We believe the fast-casual sector is still not well understood, but through this specialized program, well be able to introduce this exciting entrepreneurial career to more young talent.

Students who choose the fast-casual concentration will be able to learn everything that goes into running their own business, from cleaning the store to business strategies for growth.

That opportunity to gain a broad range of skills is a big reason why Shoemaker believes the new concentration, which will launch its first class in the spring semester, will be a big hit with current and future Hospitality College students.

Managing a fast-casual restaurant is very technical, he says. It requires financial knowledge; it requires human-resources knowledge the understanding of human behavior as you try to build a team. It also involves lots of peaks and valleys, if you consider the breakfast, lunch and dinner rushes, as well as a broad understanding of all of the operational aspects of running a restaurant. The people who run these restaurants are well paid because of the talent it takes to run the operations.

And who knows? Maybe a future UNLV Hospitality College student who completes the fast-casual concentration will one day create their own restaurant concept, work tirelessly to grow it into a multibillion-dollar business, and live their version of the American dream.

Certainly, nothing would be more pleasing to Andrew and Peggy Cherng especially if that future entrepreneur was generous enough to pay it forward.

Our mission is about supporting people in our industry, Andrew Cherng says. That includes support through education, health needs, and related charities. We believe strongly that generosity can become contagious the more you practice it.

And practice they have: Since establishing their philanthropic arm, the Panda Cares Foundation, the Cherngs have raised more than $216 million. Thats in addition to countless personal gifts, such as the one bestowed upon the Hospitality College.

This gift shows that Mr. and Dr. Cherng have faith that the William F. Harrah College of Hospitality is heading in the right direction and that they want to help us continue to move forward, Shoemaker says. It shows they believe our college isnt just educating students but truly changing their lives.

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Making Room at the Top: Andrew and Peggy Cherng - UNLV NewsCenter

Human Behavior

Can machines change human behavior? OpenWeb, using Jigsaw’s Perspective API, releases case study measuring the effects of real-time feedback and…

The study involved nearly half a million comments and 50k users across sites including AOL, Salon, Newsweek, RT, and Sky Sports; demonstrates the ability of technology to positively affect the quality of conversation.

NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- OpenWeb, a leading audience engagement and conversation platform released the findings of an extensive study done in collaboration with Jigsaw's Perspective API. Jigsaw is a unit within Google that forecasts and confronts emerging threats, creating future-defining research and technology to keep our world safer. Perspective API is a tool developed by Jigsaw that makes it easier to host better conversations, by using machine learning models to detect the potential toxicity of a comment.

The study measured the impact of deploying a "nudge" to potentially offensive or profane comments, encouraging commenters to reevaluate their message. The goal of the test was to measure if such a nudge could reduce toxicity within conversations. The study involved more than 400,000 comments across a select number of OpenWeb's partner publishers, including AOL, Salon, RT, and Newsweek.

In addition to testing the effect of the "nudge," OpenWeb created a variety of messages to measure how users react to different statements. The study then assessed the effect that responses to the nudge had on overall community behavior and toxicity.

Highlights from the study:

400,000 comments and 50k users were analyzed over 3 months, from May through July 2020

34% of commenters who received a nudge edited their comments

12.5% lift in civil and thoughtful comments being published overall

"The results of this case study are further evidence that technology can have an effect on human behavior," said Nadav Shoval, CEO and co-founder of OpenWeb. "There are ways machines can learn and respond to behavior and create safer environments for us all, without suppressing speech. That's what we're working to achieve."

Story continues

"We're thrilled to see more platforms using Perspective to help host better conversations online, especially platforms with such diverse and comprehensive audiences as OpenWeb. Machine learning has the potential to open up more spaces online for people to express themselves and interact with the community, but the technology is only as useful as the partners who implement it and bring it to users. This case study shows how Perspective can deliver measurable improvements in reducing toxicity. We're proud to be working with OpenWeb to bring better conversations to millions of users across the web," said Jared Cohen, Founder and CEO of Jigsaw.

"Ensuring that every member of the Salon community has an engaging experience with our features, videos, and our comments has always been a priority for us," said Mary Elizabeth Williams, Director of Community at Salon. "OpenWeb's Real-time Feedback encourages commenters to contribute their ideas and opinions in a meaningful way. News today relies on sharing, and we want that experience to be honest, insightful, and far from toxic."

OpenWeb aims to improve the quality of online discourse through extensive, layered, moderation technology and proprietary AI, and runs Perspective ML models on millions of comments to catch abuse and toxicity in real-time. This Real-Time Feedback feature gives users an opportunity to change their message if it is suspected to break the Community Guidelines, using the nudge concept, a known theory in behavioral sciences that proposes positive reinforcement and indirect suggestions as ways to influence the behavior and decision making of groups or individuals.

"We believe encouraging good behavior is equally as important as removing the bad actors to support a thriving community," said Nadav Shoval, CEO and co-founder of OpenWeb. "We want to inspire an open exchange of ideas across the web with less hostility and toxicity - and are constantly experimenting with ways to encourage and develop this."

While initially deployed as a test, due to the findings of the study, OpenWeb has begun rolling out the feature to its entire network of publishers.

To see the complete case study, and learn aboutOpenWeb's multilayered moderation, visit OpenWeb's blog.

About OpenWeb

OpenWeb (formerly Spot.IM) is on a mission to democratize and improve conversations online. The platform utilizes AI and machine learning to incentivize healthy dialogue, decrease toxicity, and create thriving, engaged communities. OpenWeb works with more than 700 top-tier publishers and hosts 100 million active users each month.

Founded in 2012, OpenWeb has 100 employees in New York City and Tel Aviv and is backed by world-class investors including Insight Partners, AltaIR Capital, ScaleUp, Norma Investments, and Index Ventures. To learn more about OpenWeb's quality conversation platform visit OpenWeb.com, or follow @OpenWebHQ onLinkedIn,Twitter, andInstagram.

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SOURCE OpenWeb

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Human Behavior

Research explores strategies to improve nutrition in parts of Asia and Africa – Penn State News

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. New studies underway in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are seeking answers about how best to plan and implement health services in low- and middle-income countries, as well as how to best evaluate outcomes as health services evolve. The results will inform data-driven and culturally appropriate strategies for conducting humanitarian work. In collaboration with governments, UN organizations, and community stakeholders across continents, the studies are animated by the common insight that social and behavioral variables can play a decisive role in determining the effectiveness of interventions.

Stephen Kodish, assistant professor of biobehavioral health and nutritional sciences. Kodish is advancing research on strategies to improve nutrition among vulnerable populations in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

IMAGE: Courtesy of Stephen Kodish

The research is being headed up by Stephen Kodish, assistant professor of biobehavioral health and nutritional sciences in the College of Health and Human Development, whose expertise centers on understanding the factors contributing to malnutrition among vulnerable populations. His work aims to identify the modifiable factors that influence health inequity and to work with communities to mobilize the necessary resources to reach under-served areas of the world.

Kodish is overseeing three related research projects that are intended to inform both government actions and future humanitarian initiatives.

These studies all contribute to the broader goal of satisfying nutritional requirements at key stages of development and supporting governments as they strive to achieve the UNs second sustainable development goal: end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.

Disease burdens fall on vulnerable populations in vastly disproportionate measure, and thats not simply an accident of fate; structural inequities create environments that are not enabling for positive health behavior change for far too many communities, Kodish said. And where enabling environments do exist, our own behavioral choices, even if motivated by good or benign intentions, have consequences. The coronavirus pandemic has underscored the importance of human behavior -- mask-wearing, staying inside, physical distancing -- all of which impact health outcomes. Were taking that behavior change focus and asking how it can be harnessed to better address malnutrition.

Kodishs research has been bolstered by the Ann Atherton Hertzler Early Career Professorship in Nutritional Sciences, a three-year appointment that began in the summer of 2019. He has used the additional financial resources to enhance his research team, which now includes co-investigators from the Penn State College of Medicine, as well as several undergraduates and two doctoral students. The early career professorship has also amplified the reach of his findings by giving him the opportunity to present research findings at an international nutrition conference held last year that was hosted by Action Against Hunger in Paris.

Kodish is slated to deliver a virtual presentation on his global health projects later this month. The event, which will cover the impetus behind his research approaches and highlight current projects in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, is open to the public and will take place over Zoom at 8 p.m. Oct. 22. Details and registration information can be found by visiting the College of Health and Human Development alumni event calendar.

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Research explores strategies to improve nutrition in parts of Asia and Africa - Penn State News

Human Behavior

Studies with monkeys find early attachment brings generations of benefits – Yale News

To understand the importance of early-life attachment to mothers and how it affects the likelihood of success across generations, we can learn a lot from monkeys, say scientists.

In a long-term study of rhesus monkeys, Yale researchers have quantified the health and social benefits of secure mother-rearing and attachment. The working paper,published in the National Bureau of Economic Research, suggests that the benefits of early attachment persist for generations.

The study was led by Amanda Dettmer, associate research scientist at Yale, along with economists including Nobel laureate James Heckman from the University of Chicago, and represents a unique collaboration between primatology and economics.

Its really novel to show intergenerational effects, said Dettmer, a primatologist and behavioral neuroscientist. And its a really novel collaboration between two very different fields of study.

For the study, the scientists observed 650 mother-infant pairs. At birth, monkeys were randomly assigned to be reared by their mothers or reared in a nursery. Those monkeys who were nursery reared had human caregivers for the first 40 days and were then either assigned to a cloth surrogate with daily peer playtime, or housed together with four other monkey peers. After eight months, all monkeys were housed and treated identically. This randomization occurred in subsequent generations as well.

According to Dettmer, rhesus monkeys can reveal important insights for understanding human behavior. They share 93% of their DNA with humans, develop attachment at infancy, and have similar social structures to humans. They are very valid models for human conditions, but they develop four times faster, she said. We can get answers much faster than we can from humans.

Unlike in studies of humans, in which children cannot be randomly assigned to particular early life experiences, this experimental paradigm allowed researchers to test causality rather than simply correlation between early social experiences and later health outcomes. And because the researchers had access to data collected over four decades, they were also able to show how these early-life advantages benefited generations of descendants.

Researchers found that in cases where monkeys were reared by their mothers and descended from generations of monkeys reared by their mothers, they were most likely to have healthier outcomes later in life and to require less veterinary care. These monkeys also scored higher on dominance measures achieving a higher social ranking as evidenced through easier access to food and sweets and grooming from preferred partners.

These were the monkeys who got the banana first, Dettmer said.

Nursery-reared monkeys whose mothers were reared by their mothers did not realize the same benefits. That is, researchers found that the benefits of mother-rearing were only positive for the offspring of mothers who themselves were reared by mothers. Parenting, the authors conclude, is the primary channel of intergenerational transmission of early-life advantage.

Dettmer noted that monkeys assigned to nurseries were still given an extremely enriched environment with access to caregivers around the clock as well as daily playtime and stimulating cognitive assessments. But the absence of a mother caregiver had a lasting impact, she said.

Heckman haspreviously shownthat investments in a childs early years via quality early childhood programs yielded benefits across their lifespan.

The current paper looks at how investments in early care and secure attachments provides benefits that persist across generations. The monkeys who were nursery-reared can be equated with children who are unable to develop secure attachments, said Dettmer, such as might be experienced by those in foster care.

Dettmers lab is continuing research, not only into the health and behavioral outcomes of early attachment but also into changes that might be happening at the biological level. We want to see how early experiences influence DNA methylation and how that, too, helps to explain differences, she said.

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Studies with monkeys find early attachment brings generations of benefits - Yale News

Human Behavior

VDH: Models are tools, not predictive | Nvdaily | nvdaily.com – Northern Virginia Daily

Following months of collecting data and updating models, the Virginia Department of Health and modelers with the University of Virginia Biocomplexity Institute wrote on Friday that it's important for Virginians to understand that models help show trends but don't predict the future.

Every week, modelers write in their Data Insights Report that models are used to show what could happen with COVID-19 and are not designed to predict what will happen. As the pandemic has worn on, the data collected has become comprehensive and leads to a change in modeling from the early days of the pandemic.

Previous models showed a worst case scenario for Virginia that simply mapped a full rebound of COVID-19 spread onto the state in the long run a scenario that was not meant to be predictive, modelers wrote, but was useful to show a range of possible outcomes.

In a very real sense, the goal of models is to be wrong, modelers wrote. By alerting people to the likely consequences of the status quo, they change the future. By definition, modeling infectious disease transmission requires predicting human behavior. This is always difficult but presents particular challenges for a novel virus.

While models projecting what could happen in the future are prone to change, the constant collection of data has been useful to see how the state is adapting to the virus.

On Friday, the VDH reported the reproduction rate in Virginia remained below 1.0 and that statewide the weekly case rate is lower than the national average the United States is averaging 14,600 cases per 100,000 people and Virginia is averaging 11,000.

Modelers are projecting that Virginia will have recorded 205,931 cases by Thanksgiving.

The VDH reported 941 new cases, 37 new hospitalizations and 23 new deaths on Friday, bringing its total to 144,433 cases, 10,806 hospitalizations and 3,136 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic. Total figures include 7,150 probable cases, 85 probable hospitalizations and 206 probable deaths.

The Lord Fairfax Health District reported 12 new cases, no new hospitalizations and one new death on Friday, bringing its total to 3,072 cases, 266 hospitalizations and 111 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic. Total figures include 333 probable cases, one probable hospitalization and 10 probable deaths.

Local cases

Frederick County has had 873 cases, 66 hospitalizations and 13 deaths.

Shenandoah County has had 805 cases, 87 hospitalizations and 58 deaths.

Winchester has had 495 cases, 35 hospitalizations and four deaths.

Warren County has had 415 cases, 24 hospitalizations and seven deaths.

Page County has had 390 cases, 42 hospitalizations and 29 deaths.

Clarke County 94 cases, 12 hospitalizations and no deaths.

Regional cases

Harrisonburg has had 2,578 cases, 93 hospitalizations and 34 deaths.

Rockingham County has had 1,414 cases, 115 hospitalizations and 21 deaths.

Schools and

universities

James Madison University reported on Friday it had 89 active cases and 1,385 cases considered to be recovered since July 1. The university has had 855 students, staff and faculty self-report positive COVID-19 tests.

The University Health Center conducted 24 COVID-19 detection tests on Thursday and returned two positive test results. The health center has conducted 2,588 tests since July 1 and returned 619 positive results giving the health center a positivity rate of 24.07%.

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VDH: Models are tools, not predictive | Nvdaily | nvdaily.com - Northern Virginia Daily