Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

Living on Less, Liking it More – mySteinbach.ca

Already back in 1976, Maxine Hancock wrote a book entitled, Living on Less and Liking it More. She eloquently made the case that the quality of ones life is not dependent upon acquiring more stuff, but rather in modest living, sharing good things and looking out for one another.

That same year, Gary Becker published The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. In his book he sought to prove that all human behavior is guided by the same self-centered greed that underlies economic capitalism. For this discovery, Becker received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1992. In other words, the brightest minds on the planet agreed that selfishness is what makes the world go round. That people only practice generosity if that somehow serves their self-interest.

I think Becker has had more influence on how people live today than has Hancock. And the consequences are stark: Greater degrees of injustice. Deterioration in political discourse and stability. More unhappiness. And a huge strain on environmental integrity.

But the good news is that many studies since 1976 have proven Hancock to be at least as realistic about human nature and potential as Becker. Although the degree of cooperation varies widely, all the studies show that in no cultures do people behave 100 percent selfishly. And, furthermore, studies in neuroscience have proven that humans have in-built desires for altruism and fairness as well as selfishness and avarice. Different areas of the brain light up when in the process of grasping for ones self or sharing with others.

From a faith perspective, it is right after all then, to assert that all humans carry the image of God within them. Another way of saying it is that underneath the veneer of selfishness we have come to expect from one another, there lies a more cooperative spirit than we had thought. We have all experienced how such virtue surfaces in the context of emergencies like natural disasters.

This brings me to my point about downsizing for resilience. One way to tackle the ecological crisis facing our planet is to look for alternative sources of energy and materials to satisfy our needs at present levels of consumption. Another is to downsize our expectations on a broad front. And in order to accomplish this we can appeal to those deeper levels of altruism and fairness in people that often lie hidden behind a faade of selfishness and greed we have come to expect.

If those of us in the overprivileged world begin to understand the human and environmental holocaust that is unfolding around the world we can find it in our hearts to downsize for the sake of a little more justice, peace and environmental protection. Downsizing will not look the same for everyone. But if we are serious about it, we can find ways to downsize our homes, travel plans and our need for ever-more stuff. And in the process we will discover that we can live on less and like it more.

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Living on Less, Liking it More - mySteinbach.ca

Human Behavior

Visualizing Data To Save Lives: A History of Early Public Health Infographics – The MIT Press Reader

A wave of statistical enthusiasm, coupled with new technologies, paved the way for data visualization that laid the foundations for social reform in 19th-century Britain.

By: Murray Dick

When publicized far and wide enough, infographics, some experts argue, can save lives.

The communicative value in visualizing data toward improving public health outcomes is long-established, going back over two centuries. And while the earliest examples were intended to inform discussion and debate among an elite social sphere, they also sought to address real-world problems.

From 1820 to 1830, an enthusiasm for statistics began to emerge across the western world, leading to an era of statistics concerned with reform. It was led by individuals who sought to disrupt what they saw as the chaos of politics and replace it with a new apolitical regime of empirical, observed fact. This new approach would come to be seen as a field of action, as an applied science, providing empirical weight to the new, intellectually dominant spirit of political economy.

Following the creation of the General Register Office (GRO) in 1837, the first wave of statistical enthusiasm was applied to poverty and to the lived environment of the poor; the progressives who undertook these surveys did so in the legal context of the reforming acts of the early 1830s. Separate from (but at the same time, often socially or professionally connected to) the governments of this era, a network of liberal-minded, reforming individuals hailing from business and professional classes busied themselves in statistical pursuits. Within a few years, in the capital and in the major cities of the industrial north, a series of societies was founded, each bearing the imprint of their own members interests and concerns.

Health matters tended to dominate the concerns of the societies in part because health represented a fundamental component of the well-being of the working classes, as medical historian John Eyler writes in his book Victorian Social Medicine; but also because data were comparatively easy to produce.

The emergence of these new societies coincided, in the 1840s, with a wider publishing revolution; new communications and printing technologies were making possible both increasingly affordable and improved-quality print publications, paving the way for early public health visualizations.

Health matters tended to dominate the concerns of the societies in part because health represented a fundamental component of the well-being of the working classes.

William Farr, regarded as one of the founders of medical statistics and epidemiology, started his career in medical journalism rather than in practice, which in turn helped him cement his reputation as an expert on vital statistics. In 1839 Farr joined the Statistical Society of London, remaining a core member until his retirement. A regular contributor to one of the worlds oldest medical journals, The Lancet, Farr combined sympathies for liberal reform with the demeanor of the professional statistician. Like many of his peers in the statistical societies of this era, he struggled to balance an ideological inclination toward self-help, with statistical findings that mitigated state intervention.

The GROs policies under Farr were anti-contagionist (in terms of medical outlook), and environmentalist (in terms of reform), writes the late sociologist and historian of science Alain Desrosires. Farr used graphics in his publications for the GRO, some of which, though certainly not innovative, had a striking impact. For example, in his summary report, published in the Fifth Annual Report (1843), three line graphs are used to juxtapose mortality rates between Surrey, Liverpool, and an average Metropolis, demonstrating wide variation in the laws of mortality across the distributions. The middle of these three charts, representing Liverpool, showed that half the children there died before the age of six challenging previously held convictions of the time that the rapid growth of the city was proof that its environmental climate was healthy.

Another medical journalist who experimented with data visualization, John Snow, started his trade in London during the mid-1830s, having several papers published in The Lancet and the London Medical Gazette. On the Mode of Transmission of Cholera (1849) was published in the same year that Snow published articles about cholera in the Medical Gazette and Times. He proposed that the disease was carried in water supplies contaminated with diarrhea and that it passed via human contact and through contact with contaminated matter.

In his statistical maps, he used GRO data reports Weekly Return of Births and Deaths in London to map local incidences of the disease and to compare them with previous outbreaks. The centrality of Snows findings to medical cartography, geography, and epidemiology are long established in the literature but a question remains as to why he failed to convince his contemporaries of the logical conclusion of his findings. Tom Koch, a clinical ethicist and the author of Cartographies of Disease, suggests Snow did not put forward a compelling general theory to substantiate his local findings he refused to challenge the zymotic theory (the belief that infection was exclusively a consequence of airborne vapors), a theory promoted in the writings, diagrams, and maps of, among others, William Farr.

Through family ties, Florence Nightingale, a trailblazing statistician, social reformer, and nursing pioneer, became acquainted with many of the leading medical figures of the day, including Farr. Nightingale and Farr developed a mutually advantageous relationship based on shared goals, at least initially, in which he provided her with statistical advice, while she provided him with access to her politically influential contacts. When the Crimean War broke out in September 1854, The Timess William Howard Russell sent back a series of damning reports from the front, causing great disquiet among its readers and the wider public, raising awareness of the armys lack of preparedness, and poor medical management of the wounded. War Secretary Sidney Herbert was compelled to act, asking Nightingale to visit the army hospitals, in the Crimea, at government expense.

Just as Nightingales presence at Scutari Barracks hospital, Istanbul, had been precipitated by the press, so too her reputation was cultivated, as a consequence of favorable coverage in The Times that popularized her persona as The Lady with the Lamp who spent much of her time doting on convalescing soldiers. Although taking up what was primarily an administrative role, Nightingale paid regular visits to the wards, developing a strong affection among the soldiers, leading to her symbolic association with maternal caring.

For Nightingale, disease was a quality of the human condition, not something that may be isolated and treated in a particular context.

After the war, in September 1856, Nightingale was invited to Balmoral to discuss her experiences and thoughts with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, leading a few days later to an interview with Lord Panmure, who agreed to the setting up of a commission to investigate the shortcomings of the armys medical infrastructure.

Nightingales Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army (1858) was damning in its conclusions about the consequences of the deleterious sanitary conditions in the army hospitals of the Crimea; deaths from (mostly) preventable disease outnumbered deaths on the battlefield (or injuries accrued on the battlefield) by a factor of seven to one. For Nightingale, disease was a quality of the human condition, not something that may be isolated and treated in a particular context.

Nightingale had a natural flair for infographic design, or statistical aesthetics, to quote John Eyler, which she used to accentuate her work. She was as attuned to the persuasive power of data visualization as she was in her use of written rhetorical techniques. She thought her graphical forms had the power to speak both to the public and to the Queen; however, these forms were not discursively addressed to a wide-ranging, reading public indeed some were only published, if at all, buried away in the appendixes of several-hundred-page-long government reports.

In March 1858, Nightingale developed a sophisticated media campaign, in order to maintain the political momentum of the commissions findings and to ensure its recommendations were carried out. She identified a number of editors who could be enlisted in getting her message across, supplying their names to the commissioner (and close personal friend) Sydney Herbert. She focused her efforts on the heavies the quarterlies and reviews whose editors garnered a higher degree of respect in polite society than any daily newspaper editor of the day could realistically hope for. Nightingale put together individualized press packs for each one of these contacts, comprising outlines, the facts, even the headings for all articles; though all were to be published anonymously.

Both Nightingale and Farr were concerned in their statistical investigations with uncovering natural laws about human behavior. If man could discover these laws, they reasoned, he might adapt society accordingly, in an act of progressive improvement.

Both Nightingale and Farr were concerned in their statistical investigations with uncovering natural laws about human behavior.

This deterministic (albeit not fatalistic) principle owes a debt to Adolphe Quetelet. In 1831, Quetelet published a map of property crimes in France, which was used to visually support his argument that, regardless of human agency, crime obeyed natural laws and increased in relation to increasing social inequality. Quetelets approach was empirical, experiential, and predicated on statistical enquiry. Later, his Sur lhomme et le dveloppement de ses facults, ou Essai de physique sociale (1835), the first work to apply statistical method to social problems, exerted a particularly strong influence over Nightingale. In this book she could perceive the intellectual culmination of a mind she thought keenly attuned, like hers, to the systematic collection of data.

Nightingale was acutely aware of the rhetorical power of infographics. She took much the same aesthetic delight in statistics as Priestley took in chronographs; they represented for her a moral imperative, a religious duty, writes Eyler, toward Gods divinely ordained plan. That said, Nightingales contribution to public health was thoroughly pragmatic. She was a shrewd publicist and political actor, but her legacy as a popularizer of infographics is not so clearly established. Those texts containing her diagrams were not commonly available in public library catalogs of the day.

Nightingales polar area diagrams (or exploded pie charts) owe a debt to William Playfairs innovations, but also, no doubt, to her long-term collaborator William Farr, who experimented with circular charts in his earlier publications. Lee Brasseur, an expert in the field of visualization, has set out a compelling critique of the visual rhetoric of three of Nightingales diagrams as they appear in her 16-page pamphlet, A Contribution to the Sanitary History of the British Army (1859) (a publication that attributes tables and diagrams to Farr). These three lithographic prints, published in a short, highly impactful pamphlet, comprise (according to Brasseur) a coherent (and persuasive) sequential progression in visual rhetoric.

The first, titled Diagrams of the Mortality in the Army in the East, sets out monthly mortality rates in the army during the first and second years of the war; the first (larger) diagram concerning mortality rates in the first year draws the viewers eye to the right, before a dotted line draws attention over to the smaller diagram on the left, concerning the second years mortality rates. The viewer is invited to juxtapose these mortality rates against a concentric circle in each diagram that expresses the average mortality rate of Manchester, one of the deadliest towns in England at the time.

Inviting the viewer to reflect upon what might be the cause of these discrepancies, the second chart, Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East demonstrates using color-coordinated polar area diagrams that the majority of fatalities are due to preventable disease. Having first set out the scale of the problem, and then second, having explored the reasons for the anomaly, Nightingale then sets out in a third diagram, comprising monthly mortality rates, the outcome of improvements that had been made after March 1855, in Scutari and Kulali army hospitals. Collectively, these three diagrams represent a devastating visual critique of the armys culpability in many needless deaths at the Crimean front.

Nightingales polar area diagrams play with the metaphorical implications in William Playfairs circle diagrams in a highly effective way. These charts challenge the seeming unity, continuity, and coherence of the phenomena they express. The variation in the scaling of each section implies a sense of discontinuity, but also the same spirit of cartographic empiricism that speaks through the wider statistical maps of the 19th century.

These forms embolden the viewer with a sense of power, authority, and purpose, to cast a scrutinizing lens over the problem of the social ills of the day. But they also represent discontinuity; things clearly cannot simply go on as they are change is implicit, change is necessary. This pamphlet is a multimodal medium, combining highly charged interpretive and explanatory discursive elements, into a compelling work of publicity. Nightingales approach speaks more to technique than to method. She sought to communicate Quetelets foundational statistics to a non-specialist, but nonetheless elite audience.

However, passionate statistician though she may have been, the Victorian press had, it seems, little to say about Nightingales innovations. Though read within (and presented to) an esteemed audience, the visualizations of Nightingale and Farr could hardly be said to have had a significant, direct public impact. It wouldnt be until the rise of popular almanacs toward the turn of the 20th century, and in turn the modern daily popular British press, that the wider public would begin to encounter infographics.

Murray Dick is a lecturer in multimedia journalism at Newcastle University and the author of The Infographic: A History of Data Graphics in News and Communications, from which this article is adapted.

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Visualizing Data To Save Lives: A History of Early Public Health Infographics - The MIT Press Reader

Human Behavior

Tips to help kids cope with the stress of online learning with health and human behavior expert Dr. Alok Trivedi – KTLA

Master trainer for AKT Alissa Tucker joined us to tell us all about AKT and the workout classes they offer.AKT is known for their dance cardio classes.Celebs like Alicia Keys, Shakira and Kelly Ripa are fans of the workout.Theyve expanded their classes to include bands, tone and circuit training as well.And theyre now offering outdoor classes at their Yorba Linda location.For more info, you can visit their websiteor follow them on Instagram @TheAKTStudiosThis segment aired on the KTLA 5 Morning News on August 20, 2020.

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Tips to help kids cope with the stress of online learning with health and human behavior expert Dr. Alok Trivedi - KTLA

Human Behavior

Letter to the Editor 8/21: Hybrid learning is the wrong approach – The Daily Gazette

Hybrid learning is the wrong approach

Currently, schools in New York state are considering plans for reopening using a combination of distance teaching and classroom teaching.This hybrid approach might work in a few unique school settings. However, for most school districts, this approach will not work for the reasons noted below.1. Human behavior is imperfect.We all tend to take shortcuts occasionally. Will protocols always be followed inside and outside the classrooms? Errors in judgment can always have negative consequences on the best of plans.2. COVID-19 testing time.The plans typically are based on a 24-hour turnaround for COVID-19 testing. I am skeptical about achieving this target given current experience with testing turnaround times, and the additional load presented by opening schools.3. Not all schools are equal.Schools in poor, crowded, and underserved areas will not have the resources necessary to carry out the protocols required for safely opening classrooms.4. Asymptomatic carriers. Infected people who have no symptoms may not be detected. These individuals shed the virus and can cause an outbreak.I believe that the best use of the limited resources should be directed to enhancing distance learning, since this will be the most likely mode during the fall semester.Don SteinerSchenectady

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Letter to the Editor 8/21: Hybrid learning is the wrong approach - The Daily Gazette

Human Behavior

The long, complicated history of people analytics – MIT Technology Review

Or perhaps you work for one of the health-care, retail, or financial-services companies that use software developed by Receptiviti. The Toronto-based companys mission is to help machines understand people by scanning emails and Slack messages for linguistic hints of unhappiness. We worry about the perception of Big Brother, Receptivitis CEO recently told the Wall Street Journal. He prefers calling employee surveillance corporate mindfulness. (Orwell would have had something to say about that euphemism, too.)

Such efforts at what its creators call people analytics are usually justified on the grounds of improving efficiency or the customer experience. In recent months, some governments and public health experts have advocated tracking and tracing applications as a means of stopping the spread of covid-19.

But in embracing these technologies, businesses and governments often avoid answering crucial questions: Who should know what about you? Is what they know accurate? What should they be able to do with that information? And is it ever possible to devise a proven formula for assessing human behavior?

Such questions have a history, but todays technologists dont seem to know it. They prefer to focus on the novel and ingenious ways their inventions can improve the human experience (or the corporate bottom line) rather than the ways people in previous eras have tried and failed to do the same. Each new algorithm or app is, in their view, an implicit rebuke of the past.

But that past can offer some much-needed guidance and humility. Despite faster computers and more sophisticated algorithms, todays people analytics is fueled by an age-old reductive conceit: the notion that human nature in all its complexities can be reduced to a formula. We know enough about human behavior to exploit each others weaknesses, but not enough to significantly change it, except perhaps on the margins.

If Then, a new book by Jill Lepore, a historian at Harvard University and staff writer at the New Yorker, tells the story of a forgotten mid-20th-century technology company called the Simulmatics Corporation. Founded by a motley group of scientists and advertising men in 1959, it was, Lepore claims, Cold War Americas Cambridge Analytica.

A more accurate description might be that it was an effort by Democrats to compete with the Republican Partys embrace of the techniques of advertising. By midcentury, Republicans were selling politicians to the public as though they were toilet paper or coffee. Simulmatics, which set up shop in New York City (but had to rent time on IBMs computers to run its calculations), promised to predict the outcome of elections nearly in real timea practice now so common it is mundane, but one then seen as groundbreaking, if not impossible.

The companys name, a portmanteau of simulation and automatic, was a measure of its creators ambition: to automate the simulation of human behavior. Its main tool was the People Machine, which Lepore describes as a computer program designed to predict and manipulate human behavior, all sorts of human behavior, from buying a dishwasher to countering an insurgency to casting a vote. It worked by developing categories of people (such as white working-class Catholic or suburban Republican mother) and simulating their likely decision-making. (Targeted advertising and political campaigning today use broadly similar techniques.)

The companys key players were drawn from a range of backgrounds. Advertising man Ed Greenfield was one of the first to glimpse how the new technology of television would revolutionize politics and became convinced that the earliest computers would exercise a similarly disruptive force on democracy. Ithiel de Sola Pool, an ambitious social scientist eager to work with the government to uncover the secrets of human behavior, eventually became one of the first, prescient theorists of social networks.

More than any other Simulmatics man, Pool embodied both the idealistic fervor and the heedlessness about norm-breaking that characterize technological innovators today. The son of radical parents who himself dabbled in socialism as a young man, he spent the rest of his life proving himself a committed Cold War patriot, and he once described his Simulmatics work as a kind of Manhattan Project gamble in politics.

One of the companys first big clients was John F. Kennedys presidential campaign in 1960. When Kennedy won, the company claimed credit. But it also faced fears that the machine it had built could be turned to nefarious purposes. As one scientist said in a Harpers magazine expos of the company published shortly after the election, You cant simulate the consequences of simulation. The public feared that companies like Simulmatics could have a corrupting influence on the democratic process. This, remember, was nearly half a century before Facebook was even founded.

One branch of government, though, was enthusiastic about the companys predictive capabilities: the Department of Defense. As Lepore reminds readers, close partnerships between technologists and the Pentagon were viewed as necessary, patriotic efforts to stem the tide of Communism during the Cold War.

MIT MUSEUM (POOL); RICHARD RODSTEIN | WIKIMEDIA VIA CC SA (POOL, 1953); LBJ PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY FOLDER: RECORDS OF THE NACCD, SERIES 39, BOX 7

By 1966, Pool had accepted a contract to oversee a large-scale behavioral-science project for the Department of Defense in Saigon. Vietnam is the greatest social-science laboratory we have ever had! he enthused. Like Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (whom Barry Goldwater once referred to as an IBM machine with legs and who commissioned the research), Pool believed the war would be won in the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, and that it required behavioral-science modeling and simulation to win. As Lepore writes, Pool argued that while statesmen in times past had consulted philosophy, literature, and history, statesmen of the Cold War were obligated to consult the behavioral sciences.

Their efforts at computer-enabled counterinsurgency were a disastrous failure, in large part because Simulmatics data about the Vietnamese was partial and its simulations based more on wishful thinking than realities on the ground. But this didnt prevent the federal government from coming back to Pool and Simulmatics for help understandingand predictingcivil unrest back home.

The Kerner Commission, convened by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967 to study the race riots that had broken out across the country, paid Simulmatics Urban Studies Division to devise a predictive formula for riots to alert authorities to brewing unrest before it devolved into disorder. Like the predictions for Vietnam, these too proved dubious. By the 1970s, Simulmatics had declared bankruptcy, and the automated computer simulation of human behavior had fallen into disrepute, according to Lepore.

The profit-motivated collection and use of data about human behavior, unregulated by any governmental body, has wreaked havoc on human societies.

Simulmatics lurks behind the screen of every device we use, Lepore argues, and she claims its creators, the long-dead, white-whiskered grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin and Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk, are a missing link in the history of technology. But this is an overreach. The dream of sorting and categorizing and analyzing people has been a constant throughout history. Simulmatics effort was merely one of many, and hardly revolutionary.

Far more historically significant (and harmful) were 19th-century projects to categorize criminals, or early 20th-century campaigns to predict behavior based on pseudoscientific categories of race and ethnicity during the height of the eugenics movement. All these projects, too, relied on data collection and systematization and on partnerships with local and state governments for their success, but they also garnered significant enthusiasm from large swaths of the public, something Simulmatics never did.

What is true is that Simulmatics combination of idealism and hubris resembles that of many contemporary Silicon Valley companies. Like them, it viewed itself as the leading edge of a new Enlightenment, led by the people best suited to solve societys problems, even as they failed to grasp the complexity and diversity of that society. It would be easier, more comforting, less unsettling, if the scientists of Simulmatics were villains, Lepore writes. But they werent. They were midcentury white liberals in an era when white liberals were not expected to understand people who werent white or liberal. Where the Simulmatics Corporation believed that the same formula could understand populations as distinct as American voters and Vietnamese villagers, todays predictive technologies often make similarly grandiose promises. Fueled by far more sophisticated data gathering and analysis, they still fail to account for the full range and richness of human complexity and variation.

So although Simulmatics did not, as Lepores subtitle claims, invent the future, its attempts to categorize and forecast human behavior raised questions about the ethics of data that are still with us today. Lepore describes congressional hearings about data privacy in 1966, when a scientist from RAND outlined for Congress the questions it should be asking: What is data? To whom does data belong? What obligation does the collector, or holder, or analyst of data hold over the subject of the data? Can data be shared? Can it be sold?

Lepore laments a previous eras failure to tackle such questions head-on. If, then, in the 1960s, things had gone differently, this future might have been saved, she writes, adding that plenty of people believed at the time that a people machine was entirely and utterly amoral. But it is also oddly reassuring to learn that even when our technologies were in their rudimentary stages, people were thinking through the likely consequences of our use of them.

As Lepore writes, Simulmatics was hobbled by the technological limitations of the 1960s: Data was scarce. Models were weak. Computers were slow. The machine faltered, and the men who built it could not repair it. But though todays people machines are sleeker, faster, and seemingly unstoppable, they are not fundamentally different from that of Simulmatics. Both are based on a belief that mathematical laws of human nature are real, in the way that the laws of physics area false belief, Lepore notes:

The study of human behavior is not the same as the study of the spread of viruses and the density of clouds and the movement of the stars. Human behavior does not follow laws like the law of gravity, and to believe that it does is to take an oath to a new religion. Predestination can be a dangerous gospel. The profit-motivated collection and use of data about human behavior, unregulated by any governmental body, has wreaked havoc on human societies, especially on the spheres in which Simulmatics engaged: politics, advertising, journalism, counterinsurgency, and race relations.

While Simulmatics failed because it was ahead of its time, its modern counterparts are more powerful and more profitable. But remembering its story can help clarify the deficiencies of a society built on reductive beliefs about the power of data, and illuminate a path toward a dignified, vibrant, human future.

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The long, complicated history of people analytics - MIT Technology Review

Human Behavior

Six book recommendations for your summer staycation from the Graduate School of Business | The Dish – Stanford University News

by Jenny Luna & Steve Hawk on August 18, 2020 3:42 pm

The Graduate School of Business asked its professors to reveal what theyve been reading this summer. Their responses range from insights into the neurological origins of human behavior to a debunking of the belief that businesses exist only to make money. As the closing weeks of summer approach, carve out some quiet time and dive in.

From neurobiology to capitalism reimagined, here are some books to enrich your summer. (Image credit: iStock)

ROBERT JOSS, the Philip H. Knight Professor and Dean, Emeritus: Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson.

This book has an important message about the critical role of purpose-driven businesses in our society and how capitalism and democracy need to interact constructively to solve our most pressing challenges.

SUZIE NOH, assistant professor of accounting: Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight.

This book provides an inspiring and captivating story of how Phil Knight turned a small startup into the worlds most iconic company. It is filled with helpful tips on how to be a successful businessperson. Id recommend it to all aspiring entrepreneurs.

KEVIN SMITH, assistant professor of accounting: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worstby Robert Sapolsky.

A fascinating, state-of-the-art exploration of the enormity of factors that influence human behavior. While the book contains a multitude of insights, one that stands out is that the relationship between behavior, hormones and neurochemicals is far more complicated than typically conveyed in popular science.

Read the full reading list on the Graduate School of Business website.

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Six book recommendations for your summer staycation from the Graduate School of Business | The Dish - Stanford University News

Human Behavior

Fish and Game reminding folks to lock up their trash – 6 On Your Side

BLAINE COUNTY, Idaho Idaho Fish and Game says they've been getting more calls in the Wood River Valley about bears getting into garbage.

It's a dangerous situation not just for people, but for the bear.

"This is a human-caused problem," explained Terry Thompson, Fish and Game Magic Valley's Communications Director. "There's a saying, 'a fed bear is a dead bear.' Unfortunately, that is the case. Food-conditioned bears are a threat to public safety."

Food-conditioned means the bear becomes used to receiving food from human sources like unsecured garbage.

"That's a bad situation," Thompson said. "Bears learn very quickly where they can find food. The problem is, you can't unlearn that behavior."

Thompson explains non-lethal options like trying to relocate a food-conditioned bear usually does more harm than good: the bear will either come back, search for food in the communities in its new area, or it could have territorial issues with another bear already in the area.

"Relocating makes us feel good as humans, but for the outcome of the bear, it doesn't end well," Thompson explained.

That's why Fish and Game says often, their only option once a bear becomes food-conditioned is to euthanize it.

"What we've found is it's much easier to change human behavior than it is to change wildlife behavior, so our goal, what we want to see in the Wood River Valley especially, is we want to see residents change their behavior in how they secure their garbage so we don't have to euthanize a bear because of public safety issues," Thompson said.

Fish and Game says it's best to secure your garbage in your garage or a locked shed. They also recommend waiting until the morning of trash day to bring your trash cans to the curb.

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Fish and Game reminding folks to lock up their trash - 6 On Your Side

Human Behavior

The Mythology of Karen – The Atlantic

What does it mean to call a woman a Karen? The origins of any meme are hard to pin down, and this one has spread with the same intensity as the coronavirus, and often in parallel with it. Karens are the policewomen of all human behavior. Karens dont believe in vaccines. Karens have short hair. Karens are selfish. Confusingly, Karens are both the kind of petty enforcers who patrol other peoples failures at social distancing, and the kind of entitled women who refuse to wear a mask because its a muzzle.

Oh, and Karens are most definitely white. Let that ease your conscience if you were beginning to wonder whether the meme was, perhaps, a little bit sexist in identifying various universal negative behaviors and attributing them exclusively to women. Because Karen is white, she faces few meaningful repercussions, wrote Robin Abcarian in the Los Angeles Times. Embarrassing videos posted on social media is usually as bad as it gets for Karen.

Sorry, but no. You cant control a word, or an idea, once its been released into the wild. Epithets linked to women have a habit of becoming sexist insults; we dont tend to describe men as bossy, ditzy, or nasty. Theyre not called mean girls or prima donnas or drama queens, even when they totally are. And so Karen has followed the trajectory of dozens of words before it, becoming a cloak for casual sexism as well as a method of criticizing the perceived faux vulnerability of white women.

To understand why the Karen debate has been so fierce and emotive, you need to understand the two separate (and opposing) traditions on which it draws: anti-racism and sexism. You also need to understand the challenge that white women as a group pose to modern activist culture. When so many online debates involve mentally awarding privilege points to each side of an encounter or argument to adjudicate who holds the most power, the confusing status of white women jams the signal. Are they the oppressors or the oppressed? Worse than that, what if they are using their apparent disadvantagebeing a womanas a weapon?

One phrase above all has come to encapsulate the essence of a Karen: She is the kind of woman who asks to speak to the manager. In doing so, Karen is causing trouble for others. It is taken as read that her complaint is bogus, or at least disproportionate to the vigor with which she pursues it. The target of Karens entitled anger is typically presumed to be a racial minority or a working-class person, and so she is executing a covert maneuver: using her white femininity to present herself as a victim, when she is really the aggressor.

Read: How a popular joke about entitled white women became a pandemic meme

Call Donald Trump the ultimate Karen if you like, but the words powerits punchcomes from the frequently fraught cultural space white women in the United States have occupied for generations. This includes the schism between white suffragists and the abolitionist movement, where prominent white women expressed affronted rage that Black men might be granted the vote ahead of them. If intelligence, justice and morality are to have precedence in the government, let the question of women be brought up first and that of the negro last, declared Susan B. Anthony in 1869 at a conference of the American Equal Rights Association. (She was responding to the suggestion by Frederick Douglass that Black male enfranchisement was a more urgent issue than womens suffrage.) There are also echoes in the Scottsboro Boys case, where eight Black men were wrongly convicted of raping two white women in 1930s Alabama; and the rape of the Central Park jogger, where the horrifying violence suffered by a white woman was the pretext for the states persecution of innocent men.

The tension is even more obvious in another infamous case. In August 1955, Carolyn Bryant Donham was 21 years old, and working in a store she owned with her husband, Roy Bryant, in the Mississippi Delta. A Black teenage boy walked into the store, and thenwell, no one knows, exactly. Bryant Donhams initial story was that he wolf-whistled at her. In court, later, she said he grabbed her, insulted her, and told her hed been with white women before. Decades later, she said that she had made it all up, and couldnt remember exactly what had happened.

None of that made any difference to the boy, who was hunted down by Roy Bryant and killed. His body was found days later, so mutilated that his mother insisted on an open-casket funeral, which would force the world to witness what had been done to him. His name was Emmett Till.

That story is vital to understanding Americas Karen mythology. A white womans complaint led white male authority to enact violence on a Black person, and neither she nor they suffered any consequences. Roy Bryant and his half brother were put on trial for Tills murder, but acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury. Within a racist, patriarchal system, Bryant Donhams fragilityher white femininitywas not a weakness, but a weapon, because she could always call on white men to protect her. (Yet even that case is more morally complex than it once seemed. In 2017, the Duke University professor Timothy B. Tyson, who was researching a book on the case, discovered that Roy Bryant was physically abusive to his wife. The circumstances under which she told the story were coercive, he told The New York Times. Shes horrified by it. Theres clearly a great burden of guilt and sorrow.)

All of this is why the earnest feminist contribution to the Karen debatewhy isnt there a name for haughty, shouty men who make customer-service complaints, or call the police on Black people, putting them in danger?is irrelevant. There doesnt need to be a word for that, because the concept being invoked here is the faux victim. Although they differ vastly in magnitude, a direct line of descent can be traced from the Till case to the Central Park Karen, a white woman named Amy Cooper who called the New York City police earlier this year claiming that a Black male bird-watcher was threatening her. (Cooper lost her job and is facing criminal charges for filing a false report.) A white womans tears were, again, a weapon to unleash the authoritiesstill coded white and male, despite the advances we have made since the 1950supon a Black man.

Read: 163 years of The Atlantics writing on race and racism in America

The potency of the Karen mythology is yet more proof that the internet speaks American. Here in Britain, there is no direct equivalent of the Till case, and voting rights were never restricted on racial lines. The big splits in the British suffrage movement were between violent and nonviolent tactics, and on whether men under 30 should receive the vote before women. Yet British newspapers have rushed to explain the Karen meme to their readers, because Twitter, Facebook, and Instagramthe prime sites for Karen-spottingare widely used in this country. (In fact, the Karen discussion has spread throughout the English-speaking internet, reaching as far as New Zealand.)

At some point, though, the particular American history behind Karen got lost. What started as an indictment of racial privilege has become divorced from its original context, and is now a catchall term for shaming women online.

Not very much unites the rapper Ice T and the alt-right activist Paul Joseph Watson of InfoWars, but both can agree on this: Karens are a menace. In July, Ice T identified a Karen of the Day, tweeting a video of a woman who refused to wear a mask in a dentists office. It was another instance of the memes suspicious flexibility: Is a Karen a woman flouting the rules or pettily enforcing them? (Never mind the fact that research shows men are less likely to wear masks, anyway.)

Watsons take was even more revealing, because he was not playing to an audience that considers itself progressive. That means he can say the quiet part out loud. In one YouTube video with nearly 1 million views, Watson defines a Karen as an annoying, interfering female adult, who complains about everything. The first clip in his compilation is of a man cycling past a woman, who tells the cyclist briskly but not angrily: Thats not social distancing.

Cut to Watson: Okay, Karen.

Cut back to the man on the bike, incredulous at being challenged. Stupid bitch, shut up.

Read: The coronavirus is a disaster for feminism

This is the hazard of memes, as well as the phenomenon of viral shaming more broadly. Theres no arbiter to decide which Karens are really acting in egregious or racist ways before the millionth like or view is reached, or their names are publicly revealed. Karen has become synonymous with woman among those who consider woman an insult. There is now a market, measured in attention and approbation, for anyone who can sniff out a Karen.

Whenever the potential sexism of the Karen meme has been raised, the standard reply has been that it originated in Black womens critiques of racism, that white women have more privilege than Black women, and that therefore identifying and chastising Karens is a form of punching up. In February, Aja Romano of Vox defined Karens as officious white women ruining the party for everyone else, adding that Black culture in particular has a history of assigning basic nicknames to badly behaved white women [from] Barbecue Becky and Golfcart Gail to Permit Patty and Talkback Tammy. Calling the Karen meme sexist, according to The Washington Posts Karen Attiah, only trivializes actual violence and discrimination that destroy lives and communities. And to invent oppression when none is happening to you? That is peak Karen behavior.

The best way to see the Karen meme is as a scissor, an idea popularized by the writer Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex to describe an incident or a statement that drives people to such wildly divergent interpretations that they can never be reconciled. Because white women can be both oppressors and oppressed, Karen is a scissor. Does the word describe a particular type of behavior that resonates because of the particular racial history of the United States? Yes. Is that the only way it is used? No.

As it happens, the casually sexist roots of the meme are as deep as the anti-racist ones. One of the foundational internet Karens was the ex-wife of a Redditor who chronicled their fraught relationship in the subreddit r/FuckYouKaren, created in December 2017. The intensity of the blowback when pointing facts like this out is itself instructive. The chorus of disdain that greets any white woman who questions the Karen meme comes from a broad, and unexpected, coalition: anti-racists and bog-standard misogynists. (Finally, a political stance to bring this troubled world together.)

Read: How the pandemic revealed Britains national illness

For the same reason, the Karen meme divides white women themselves. On one side are those who register its sexist uses, who feel the familiar tang of misogyny. Women are too loud, too demanding, too entitled. Others push aside those echoes, reasoning that if Black women want a word to describe their experience of racism, they should be allowed to have it. Hanging over white womens decision on which way to jump is a classic finger trap, familiar to anyone who has confronted a sexist joke, only to be told that they dont have a sense of humor. What is more Karen than complaining about being called Karen? There is a strong incentive to be cool about other women being Karened, lest you be Karened yourself.

In her 1991 essay From Practice to Theory, or What is a White Woman Anyway? the feminist and legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon referenced the Till case to explain the malignant stereotype that has grown up around the white woman in the United States. This creature is not poor, not battered, not raped (not really), not molested as a child, not pregnant as a teenager, not prostituted, not coerced into pornography, not a welfare mother, and not economically exploited, wrote MacKinnon. She is Miss Anne of the kitchen, she puts Frederick Douglass to the lash, she cries rape when Emmett Till looks at her sideways, she manipulates white mens very real power with the lifting of her very well-manicured little finger. She might have added, echoing the LA Times: Nothing worse happens to the white woman than a viral-video shaming.

Read: The epic political battle over the legacy of the suffragettes

MacKinnons point was that sexism existed, and even whiteness did not protect women from suffering it. (A response to MacKinnon by the Yale Collective on Women of Color and the Law contested some of her points, but agreed that feminism had to address the very real oppression suffered by women, despite any access women may have to social privilege.) Call the Karen meme sexist, though, and you will stumble into the middle of a Venn diagram, where progressive activists and anti-feminists can agree with each other: When white women say theyve been raped, we should doubt them, because we know white women lie. And underneath that: What do white women have to complain about, anyway?

Ageism is also a factor. As a name, Karen peaked in the U.S. in the 1960s, and is now rare for newborns, so todays Karen is likely to be well into middle age. As women shout and rant and protest in out-of-context clips designed to paint them in the most viral-friendly light possible, they are portrayed as witches, harridans, harpies: women who dare to keep existing, speaking, and asking to see the manager, after their reproductive peak.

In her essay, MacKinnon wrote that it was hard for women to organize as women. Many of us, she wrote, are more comfortable organizing around identities we share with men, such as gay rights or civil rights. I sense here that people feel more dignity in being part of any group that includes men than in being part of a group that includes that ultimate reduction of the notion of oppression, that instigator of lynch mobs, that ludicrous whiner, that equality coattails rider, the white woman, she added. It seems that if your oppression is also done to a man, you are more likely to be recognized as oppressed as opposed to inferior. That is the minefield that anyone who wants to use the Karen meme to punch up has to traverse. You will find yourself in unsavory company alongside those who see white women as ludicrous whiners.

In 2011, writing in The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates acknowledged the sexism that suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sarah Grimk faced from fellow abolitionists, and their sense of being told again and again that womens rights were important, sure, but not urgent. Coates does not acquit these white suffragists of racial entitlement, but adds: When the goalabolitionwas achieved, they hoped for some reciprocity. It did not come. Without excusing their lack of solidarity, he attempts to understand it. The Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote, came nearly 50 years after the Fifteenth, which ruled that voting rights could not be restricted on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Read: Why women still cant have it all

This uneasy history explains why the Karen debate has become so furious. It prods at several questions that are too painful for many of us to address. How far does white skin shield a woman from sexism? Do women cry rape with enough frequency to concern us, or is that another misogynist myth? How do Black women navigate competing demands for solidarity from their white sisters and their Black brothers? Does it still feel like punching up if youre joined by anti-feminists such as Watson, and a guy on a bike who shouts stupid bitch at women he doesnt like? And why is it okay to be more angry with the white women questioning the Karen meme than the white men appropriating it?

The Karen debate can, and perhaps will, go on forever, because it is equally defensible to argue that white women are oppressed for their sex, and privileged by their race. (Half victim, half accomplice, like everyone else, in Simone de Beauvoirs phrase.) If successive generations of schoolchildren can see that, maybe adults can too. After all, the most potent echo of the Till case in literature comes from Harper Lees To Kill A Mockingbird, published five years after the 14-year-olds murder. In the book, white trash Mayella Ewell testifies that her familys Black servant, Tom Robinson, raped her. It is a lie. The books hero, the lawyer Atticus Finch, exposes that lie only by also revealing Mayellas real trauma: She came on to Tom, and was beaten savagely by her father, Bob, as a result. Bob Ewells capacity for extreme violence is further demonstrated when he attempts to kill Finchs children in revenge for being humiliated in court. Mayella Ewell is half victim, half accomplicea victim of male violence, and an accomplice to white supremacy.

Her story, therefore, is one of both complicity and oppression. It is not simple or easy. No wonder it was so challenging then, and no wonder our feelings toward her daughters, the internets hated Karens, are so challenging now.

Read more:
The Mythology of Karen - The Atlantic

Human Behavior

World Photography Day: 5 of the year’s best photo series – CNN

With Wednesday marking World Photography Day 2020, CNN Style is looking back at some of the most striking photo series published over the past 12 months.

Whether showcasing new work or delving into their archives, these five photographers demonstrate the diversity and vibrancy of the medium, bringing together images from Mexico, Nigeria, England and beyond.

Justine Kurland imagines a girls' utopia

Throughout the series, ideas of freedom and belonging prevail as girls form their own communities off the grid. Credit: Justine Kurland

Justine Kurland's "Girl Pictures" imagines runaway girls roaming the American landscape in a sylvan utopia where girls make their own rules. Taken between 1997 and 2002, but released as a book this year, the images offer a nostalgic glimpse of a bygone era and an exploration of timeless themes such as defiance, self-actualization and female sexuality.

"I had this desire to make this girl world, this feminist utopic solidarity between (young) girls and teenagers," Kurland said. "But between women, really."

Steve McCurrry explores the relationship between humans and animals

Many of the photos in "Steve McCurry. Animals" include human subjects, but those that don't hint at the presence of humans, or at least what they've left behind. Credit: 2019 Steve McCurry, Long Island City, NY

"Animals are in constant motion, have a mind of their own and rarely pay any attention to directions from a photographer," McCurry said. "Understanding animal behavior is essential to making good animal photographs, just as understanding human behavior can help with taking someone's portrait.

Oye Diran embraces vintage Nigerian style

From Diran's "A Ti De" series. The photographer has honed a minimalist yet warm aesthetic, citing renowned West African photographers J.D. Okhai Ojeikere, Malick Sidib and Seydou Keta as influences. Credit: Oye Diran

For his latest project, Oye Diran looked to images from Nigeria in the 1960s to 1980s -- including old family photos -- for inspiration. The resulting series "A Ti De" (We Have Arrived) recreates the era's aesthetic through the elegant clothing his parents used to wear, including his mother's classic Nigerian "iro" and "buba" (a wrapped skirt and tailored top).

"I was struck by how appealing and rich these outfits looked and was reminded of how well my parents and their friends were attired when I was young," Diran said. "The relevance of iro and buba doesn't dissipate over time, so I came up with this story to shed light on the beauty of my heritage to the world."

Orlando Gili goes in search of 'Englishness'

Every year, a village in Gloucestershire hosts an annual cheese-rolling competition, in which participants chase a wheel of cheese down a steep hill. Credit: Orlando Gili

A cheese-rolling competition (pictured above) and an annual "bottle-kicking" are among two of the odder pastimes captured by Orlando Gili, who set about documenting how the English have fun. Inspired by the divisions caused by Brexit, his series "Trivial Pursuits" captures a humane portrait of a nation navigating its history and place in today's world.

"We are really more similar than we like to think," he said. "And going to all these different types of events, and seeing different sections of society having fun, you see essentially the same things being played out.

Tania Franco Klein asks if we can ever disconnect

Klein shot "Proceed to the route" across California, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. Credit: Tania Franco Klein

Tania Franco Klein's ongoing series "Proceed to the Route" combines dystopian unease with the warmth of nostalgia. At first glance, one might not think that the Mexican photographer is examining our modern digital age, but she wields ambiguity to examine our relationship with -- and reliance on -- digital technology.

"You cannot fully escape and fully disconnect from everything," she said. "But how can you (find) balance?"

Go here to see the original:
World Photography Day: 5 of the year's best photo series - CNN

Human Behavior

Reflecting on the ILA Webinar Literacy Teaching in Turbulent Times – Literacy Daily

I am on a major professional development binge. There are just so many free and appropriately priced online conferences, webinars, and events happening right now! It is a petri dish of opportunities. I feel as though something new pops up in my Twitter feed every day.

Soul searching

During this one-hour conversation between Ernest Morrell and Nell K. Duke, they not only spoke their truths but also invited the viewers to do their own soul searching. I was confronted with my own inherent beliefs about literacy and the individuals who sit in the seats before me each year. I was confronted with my own understanding of equity in my context. And I was confronted with my passive role in being better for every single student.

At the end of the hour, Ernest stated:

We dont want to go back, we want to go forward. Turbulence can disruptand there are some things that need to be disrupted. This is a time to forge a new narrative; a narrative of excellence that is widely distributed. An ethic of love where we mention the word love as much as we mention the word science when were talking about reading pedagogy and achievement. There is an opportunity to form a transformative vision for literacy education that will lead society. We want literate human beings, but we want humane ones. Some of the most literate societies in human history have been responsible for some of the most atrocious acts. Literacy doesnt make you a better person; humanizing education does. Its reading and writing in the interest of self-love and social transformation is what we want.

(I could end this blog post here with this mic-drop moment. Such powerful words!)

We need to remember that the current context we are in not only is happening to everyone in the world but also is no ones fault. There is no one to blame. And as such, we need to take this opportunity to come together as a collective and see the possibilities afforded to us, to focus on the little (and big) humans who come to our classes everyday (whether digitally or face to face).

One concept that was reinforced for me in this webinar was that of connection. Building relationships and creating a trusting environment must be at the forefront of all classes as schools reopen this fall.

Connecting to Tricia Ebarvias work

This webinar made me think about the work done by Disrupt Texts.

Numerous times I have been lucky to hear Tricia Ebarvia speak. She says that teaching is a political act and that teaching literacy is teaching for freedom. She asks the questions How many times do we have students cross off parts of who they are (gender, race, religion, etc.) when they walk into our schools and our classrooms? How do we show up as teachers?

We have an opportunity to nurture the self-love and social transformation that Ernest espouses through the literature that we bring into students lives. As Tricia says, we are stewards of stories, and we have the power to transform our classrooms into beautiful spaces where students can read stories of themselves and those of others. We have an opportunity to diversify our curriculum and to help create those literate and humane individuals that society desperately needs.

Nell mentioned the historical link between racism and literacy, how White people and White systems worked actively to suppress people of color from learning how to read and write. This, too, made me consider Tricias point about the literary canon (brought to you by a bunch of White men), which, just like race and religion, was socially constructed, and therefore it can be torn down and rebuilt.

The narratives within these stories dont need to be placed on a pedestal. Especially now, during these turbulent times, we need to disrupt the status quo of inequity. Educators are in a powerful position to do just that.

Breaking the cycle

In a recent Hidden Brain podcast on NPR, the host speaks to author and behavioral economist Sam Bowles about his book Moral Economy. Sam explains how he believes we have moved from the species Homo sapiens (wise human) to Homo economicus. This new species, he says, cares only about himself or herself and therefore evaluates actions that may be taken simply in terms of whats in it for me.

This shift in human behavior is affecting our ability to cope with and gain perspective on the current COVID-19 and racism pandemics. Educators have an opportunity to disrupt this me-me-me mind-set and nurture a more collective mentality.

And literature can help. Literature creates bridges to empathy. Literature can connect people from different races, classes, cultures, and generations. Literature can heal.

But we, as educators, need to step up and learn how to do it better.

Kristin Bond is currently exploring new avenues in education after 15 years of teaching high school English abroad in China, Brunei, and the UAE. She is passionate about the benefits of workshop models in the classroom and believes that at the core of student learning is first establishing a connection and community of trust. Follow her on Twitter @readwritemore.

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Reflecting on the ILA Webinar Literacy Teaching in Turbulent Times - Literacy Daily