Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

You put yourself at risk, but thats the job: Fall River doctor on front line of coronavirus fight – Fall River Herald News

FALL RIVER For weeks, Dr. Daniel Sousa slept in the she shed. Then he moved into the sunroom. But now the physician who has been on the front lines of treating COVID-19 patients is back in the house and ready to enjoy Fathers Day with his family.

The father of three children, daughter Scarlet, 8; sons Skiler, 12, and Sidney, 14, said his wife, Theresa, a stay-at-home mom, has been doing double duty as teacher since the schools closed, while hes been focused on treating COVID-19 patients.

Though its been a challenge he never imagined when he decided to become a pulmonologist and its far from over the first couple months were filled with uncertainty, recalled Sousa.

As one of the partners with Southcoast Health Pulmonary, Sousa and the other pulmonologists in the practice have been taking turns rotating shifts covering the ICU unit at Charlton Memorial Hospital, Tobey Hospital in Wareham and occasionally at St. Lukes Hospital in New Bedford.

Sousa said they had been watching what was going on in China and then it came on in this country at an exponential rate, well before the medical field was prepared for it. Suddenly their nerves were up as they saw the rates rising and then the closings started to happen mid-March. They started to realize they didnt have good therapy for it, as it was truly a novel coronavirus that was also extremely contagious, he recalled. We all started to think were going to be at risk to our families. Potentially were going to spread it to our loved ones: wives, children. And then a lot of us thought, OK, were in the thick of it, we signed up for this but its probably a matter of if not, when we get it, but please dont let me get it now because Im needed. So we kind of had that mentality, said Sousa.

Then their colleagues nurses and doctors started getting sick and Sousa said they had to intubate a doctor who contracted it. That really hyped up your perception of this, he recalled.

Thats when his thoughts turned to staying in the "she shed in the backyard as a way of keeping his family safe during those uncertain early days of COVID-19. Sousa moved into the shed, which also doubles as a mini pool house, outfitted with a futon, cable television, a refrigerator and an electric fireplace. I would eat dinner away from them and then when it was time to go to bed I would go hit the shed. After about three weeks I got sick of it, it was getting pretty lonely so then I started sleeping in the sunroom on an air mattress and I did that for about a week and then that got old, he recalled.

After a while he started going back into the house when he was five days clear of potentially dangerous situations, like his shifts covering the ICU.

In talking to his kids about the virus, he said statistically speaking, the risk to children is small and most children who get it have symptoms that are so mild they dont even know they have it. I said, youre going to be OK. If you get it, youll be fine its just your dad has to do this. I could get sick, but Ill be alright, he said. And then I said, you know what I do for a living, I take care of sick people.

Eight of the doctors at Southcoast Health Pulmonary rotate through the ICU at Charton Memorial Hospital, meaning they do one week every eight weeks. They also do one of 16 weeks at Tobey Hospital and a smattering at St. Lukes Hospital when they need help. Additionally each partner covers the COVID-19 ward every eight weeks at Charlton. When youre in the hospital, every day is different you dont know what youre going to see, he said.

Sousa joined the practice in 2004. A native of Lisbon, he immigrated to Providence when he 7 seven years old. Even as a kid he said he knew he wanted to be a doctor and having asthma as a child made him empathetic to people with breathing problems leading to his specialty as a pulmonologist. He moved to Fall River in 2004, when he joined Southcoast Health Pulmonary. Being fluent in Portuguese has been extremely handy in caring for patients, especially in this area of the state, he said.

Dealing with COVID-19 has been by far the toughest part of his career. I never want to go through this again. Its not just the medical part, its like one eye is closed and one hand is tied behind your back. The eye closed is that early on we couldnt get the testing done and when we did it took forever to get it back. And the hand behind your back is youre running as you go. You dont have a good attack plan. It takes a lot of supportive care to get people through but weve been through this to a lesser extent before in 2008/2009 when we had H1N1, he said. And during my residency training, AIDS was a terminal illness and we were taking care of AIDS patients and even then, you put yourself at risk, but thats the job. You signed up for it.

As a support system, the doctors at Southcoast Health Pulmonary have been texting each other, bouncing ideas back and forth as the set out to treat patients with COVID-19. First they tried hydroxychloroquinine because they were desperate, though they found it out didnt work. Then they turned to convalescent plasma, which was somewhat effective and now remdesivir is the latest treatment, he said.

Adding time to patient care, they have to do whats called donning and doffing, gowning up and putting on a vented hood for each patient visit. But the toughest part, he said, is the fact that families cant be there. Its hard that youre trying to express everything by a telephone call and you just dont have that face-to-face. Its hard to tell people that your loved one isnt doing well. Only when theyre dying are they allowed to come in the hospital to spend their last moments with them, said Sousa.

The most heartbreaking, he said, is seeing loved ones FaceTiming each other before the patient is put on a ventilator. At that moment theyre looking at each other and they know, that could be the last time I see you alive. Thats hard, probably the hardest part, he added.

But at the same, he said theyve had some great moments when theyve had a patient pull through after weeks of being in the ICU. One of those patients was Somerset resident Robert Ledo, who Sousa met a couple weeks into Ledo's lengthy stay in the ICU with an extreme case of COVID-19. I did a telehealth visit with him afterward and here he is sitting at his table at home and I said, I cant believe how good you look; you look amazing. That gives you the push that this is what you want to do for a living, said Sousa.

Though cases seem to be slowing down a bit locally, Sousa said he thinks COVID-19 going to be around for a while. Being a corona class virus it rears up in the winter so it will behave in that pattern, said Sousa, adding a lot it will depend on human behavior and the risk of spreading it increases as people get complacent and let their guard down. While he understands the cause behind the recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations, for instance, Sousa said he worries about the crowds spreading the coronavirus. Its going to be with us through the winter season and it will rotate around the planet, so until we get a good therapeutic or a good vaccine, weve got to hunker down.

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You put yourself at risk, but thats the job: Fall River doctor on front line of coronavirus fight - Fall River Herald News

Human Behavior

Opinion: Canada’s proposed contact-tracing app takes the right approach on privacy – The Globe and Mail

A sign in Toronto advises people to remain a safe distance apart to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus on June 18, 2020.

Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press

Derek Ruths is a professor of computer science at McGill University, where he advances the responsible use of large datasets to measure and model human behavior. He served as an adviser to the federal committee which informed the selection of the Canadian contact tracing app announced by the federal government.

Across Canada, people are taking measures to protect the rest of society: maintaining safe distances while waiting in line for stores, wearing masks and working from home. In a progressive society such as Canada, this abiding sense of social responsibility is our greatest hope for overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now, as we approach the fourth month of the pandemic, governments around the world have considered launching contact-tracing apps as part of these socially responsible behaviours. In places such as South Korea, Singapore and Germany, theyve already been rolled out. And in a press conference on Thursday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a voluntary nationwide mobile-phone app called COVID Alert, a federally backed project that was unveiled by Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, where it will be piloted.

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The federal and Ontario governments are about to test a smartphone app that can alert users if they've been close to someone who has later tested positive for COVID-19, Justin Trudeau says. The Canadian Press

Much of the debate around these solutions has focused on the issue of privacy and government surveillance. Such contact-tracing apps can help public-health workers act decisively to slow the spread of COVID-19, but they can also give authorities uncomfortable amounts of information about individual and community behaviors. While this debate is worthy and warranted, not every approach being proposed under the broad umbrella of contact-tracing apps has these issues; in fact, some carry virtually no risk of surveillance. Because these apps have huge potential in the fight against COVID-19, widespread confusion about privacy issues threatens to lead us to broadly reject reasonable solutions which include COVID Alert. This must not happen.

First, Canadians must understand that there are two very different kinds of apps that are referred to in this overbroad definition: true contact-tracing apps and exposure-notification apps. While both aim to stop the spread of COVID-19, they work in different ways, and therefore also differ on how they protect privacy and protect public health.

Apps that can be correctly called contact-tracing tend to favour rapid public-health response over privacy. Information shared from individuals phones is stored on a central server in such a way that, should an individual be diagnosed with COVID-19, public-health workers can identify and contact individuals with phones that have been in close proximity to the newly diagnosed person. This approach allows public-health workers to evaluate the risk posed by individual infections and make calculated assessments of whether a particular train station, bus line or store should be disinfected or closed. However, the shared phone data can be used to identify individuals, map their social networks and study their movements. The government and public-health workers have no foreseeable need to delve into this other information, which could potentially be used or misused for other purposes.

The other kind of contact-tracing tool being considered is better called an exposure-notification app. It allows individuals diagnosed with COVID-19 to voluntarily notify anyone who may have been exposed through close physical contact without revealing that persons identity to others. Like the true contact-tracing apps, this notification is done using phone data stored on a central server, with closeness being measured by the proximity of peoples cellphones. However, unlike with true contact-tracing apps, little information is stored or shared with the government or companies, so identifying, tracking or studying people through exposure-notification app data is pretty much impossible. This puts public-health workers in the uncomfortable position of having no knowledge of how a particular exposure affected the broader public, but it does give exposed individuals the knowledge they need in order to make decisions about whether they should self-quarantine. It also puts all responsibility for response squarely on our individual shoulders.

This latter kind of app is what COVID Alert would be, which means that, if developed properly, it poses no risk to Canadians privacy. This is the right choice for one crucial reason: Multiple studies have shown that for either kind of app to be effective, more than 60 per cent of the population needs to adopt it. Removing every possible privacy concern is the best way to achieve this level of adoption, even if we sacrifice some level of public-health visibility in the process.

The COVID Alert app will be released in a few weeks. When this happens, each of us will be presented with the decision to participate or not to install it or not. Thats a personal decision, but one that carries significance for the health and well-being of those around us. The Canadian government is giving us a promising tool in our shared struggle against COVID-19. Its now up to us to use it.

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Opinion: Canada's proposed contact-tracing app takes the right approach on privacy - The Globe and Mail

Human Behavior

Wright Reflects on Primaries in the Home Stretch – New York County Politics

Former Assemblymember and New York County Democrats Leader Keith Wright spoke with New York County Politics to share his thoughts on the imminent primary elections, scheduled for June 23.

From the get-go, he cited such new developments as early voting in the nine days leading up to Election Day as an example of new challenges. Its a whole new world and dynamic in terms of administering elections, how people run for office and how we run our elections, said Wright.

He continued, praising Manhattans district leaders and for their help in conducting voter outreach preparing for the boroughs more challenging voting bloc. We have a sophisticated, very educated electorate, said Wright. And we probably have some of the most passionate people, and they do a fantastic job.

Wright then discussed other challenges related to the current climate, and acknowledged the heroic sacrifice of employees of the city Board of Elections.

Were being assaulted on all sides. We have an economic pandemic, a sociological pandemic, and a health pandemic, and we still have to run elections, he said. They have to brave each and every night. Theyre not getting home till nine, ten oclock every night, they have to be at the board offices at 7:30, 8 oclock in the morning, they have to try and remain safe. I think the Board of Elections had people die from COVID, and these folks are still mailing out ballots and making sure they run as smoothly as possible.

Wright also discussed the importance of senior citizens in elections, due to their reliability as voters and dominant role as poll workers, but expressed concerns that the coronavirus would stunt their turnout. I dont see a lot of them ready to expose themselves to the pandemic thats in front of us right now, so its uncharted territory right now.

When asked about any particular elections that he wanted to observe, Wright insisted that every election is worth observing. Every election is case study in human behavior in terms of what people want and what they want in the future, he said.

Wright also took a neutral tone on the divide between moderate establishment Democrats and the progressive insurgency. He showed appreciation for the youth vote, saying that higher voter turnout is never a bad thing.

Ive always been one to encourage folks to vote. We were trying to make sure that young folks would come out. Well you know whats happening, he said.Im a child of the Sixties. We demonstrated, we marched, we got arrested and such. I believe in the old adage of Frederick Douglass: `agitate, agitate, agitate, and it does my heart good saying these young folks out here each and every day, and hopefully they can turn their activism into voting.

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Wright Reflects on Primaries in the Home Stretch - New York County Politics

Human Behavior

Pandemic-fueled Surge in Wild Turkey Hunting Tests Declining Populations – Audubon Magazine

Wild Turkeys. Photo: Adam Bass/Audubon Photography Awards

This spring, as Wild Turkey hunting season kicked off, Louisiana State University turkey biologist Bret Collier started receiving concerning reports from the field. "My graduate students following turkeys were sending me messages saying that they'd never seen this many people around," he says. When Collier checked in with a close colleague, University of Georgia turkey biologist Mike Chamberlain shared similar news. "I'm seeing a lot of people hunting in my own area," Chamberlain says.

When the duo put their heads together, they had a realization: Maybe turkey hunters have more time on their hands because of the coronavirus pandemic and recession. After all, like birding, hunting is a safe and responsible way to enjoy the outdoors in a socially distanced manner. "If they're like me, they have nothing else to do at this point with their spare time, Chamberlain says. If this was the case, the pair wondered whether this seemingly small change in human behavior could have an outsize impact on Wild Turkey populations, which in many areas have been steadily declining in recent years.

So, the two biologists (who both also hunt turkeys) did what biologists do: They gathered information from state wildlife officials to see if their suspicions proved out. In many states early data suggested that the increased hunting they and their students had observed is indeed a real phenomenon. And in some places, that's resulting in more dead turkeys.

In Georgia, during the first 23 days of the season, hunters shot 26 percent more turkeys than they did in 2019. Compared to last year, 34 percent more hunters shot two turkeys, and the number of hunters that killed three turkeys (the state limit) is up by nearly 50 percent. Other states reported similar stats. In Mississippi, turkey harvest on public lands was up by 60 percent compared with 2019. In North Carolina, it was up by a third over the three-year average. Tennessee's harvest was up by half, and in Louisiana it was up by 14 percent in the first week of the season alone.

In order to distribute the information as quickly as possible, Collier and Chamberlain announced their findings online in a white paper in April rather than go through the formal publication process.

These trends aren't evident everywhere. Though Pennsylvania has seen turkey populations decline in recent years, harvest rates through May 16 were around 6 percent lower than last year, says turkey biologist Mary Jo Casalena of the Pennsylvania Game Commission. And while North Carolina turkeys have been subject to an increased harvest this year, officials arent worried because the state hasn't yet seen the population declines that other states have.

Still, the broad picture for the spring 2020 turkey hunting season is one of increased harvest on top of ongoing declines. The reasons for those declines aren't entirely understood, but most biologists agree that theylikely involvea variety of factors: habitat loss, climate change, predator conservation, and more.

"What we've seen this year are extremely non-normal conditions, especially with regard to hunter effort and harvest, Collier says. This is outside the standard that turkey regulatory structures have ever had to address. No one ever planned for this.

Typically, wildlife managers can attempt to control how many turkeys are killed by hunters by changing hunting season length and timing, as well as setting a bag limit dictating howmany turkeys each hunter can legally take home. But these regulations are set several months before the season starts, or longer. The pandemic, recession, and mass unemployment came on quickly and unpredictably. Now, its possible that folks who found time to hunt just one or two days in previous years may now be setting out for the woods every weekend.

"By the time the pandemic came, the states were powerless, Chamberlain says. There was no way they could react.

These unexpected excesses of dead Wild Turkeys are superimposed onto ongoing declines in eastern populations that Chamberlain describes as "far-reaching and widespread." These declines might surprise some people because Wild Turkeys are considered one of the great American conservation successes of the twentieth century. Following centuries of unregulated market hunting, agricultural intensification, and widespread logging, by 1920 Wild Turkeys had disappeared from 18 of 39 states where they once thrived. Their population had declined to some 200,000 birdsa reduction of more than 90 percent. To bring them back, state wildlife agencies limited Wild Turkey harvest while still allowing for some sustainable hunting to occur, and instituted habitat restoration programs. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the species had recovered to between 6 and 7 million individuals.

Then, over the past decade, parts of the population began declining again. Eastern turkeys, especially in the southeast, have suffered in recent years from "a long-term precipitous decline in production, he says. That's fewer nests hatching, or fewer young turkeys surviving, or both. These variables combine in a measurement called the poult-per-hen ratio. According to a 2015 analysis published by a team including Chamberlain and Collier, that ratio has progressively declined since the 1970s and 80s in 12 of the 13 member states of the Southeast Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies' Wild Turkey Working Group.

What exactly is driving the southeastern populations decline is not fully understood, says North Carolina State University ecologist Chris Moorman. Ongoing habitat loss, in addition to recovery of predators like coyotes, bobcats, and foxes, allows for fewer turkeys on the landscape today than at their peak two decades ago. But habitat loss alone cant explain the trends. "We seem to be in a state of decline even in areas where habitat conditions look to be okay," Chamberlain says. Other factors such as weather, disease, and hunting also likely contribute. Taken individually, each may not have a large impact on the population. But together these factors decrease the number of young turkeys that hatch and survive to adulthood.

Moorman isn't concerned for the future of the species in a broad sense. "Turkeys are a very adaptable species, he says. Still, he admits that the recent hunting data from some states is alarming. Casalena agrees. "You used to always be able to rely on at least one out of every three years having a great reproductive year," she says. "We're not seeing that anymore." When you take the ongoing challenges to turkeys from climate change, development, and predator conservation, even just one abnormaly heavyhunting season could have lasting impacts.

As hunters and as biologists, Chamberlain and Collier want to ensure Wild Turkeys future. "In these extraordinary and challenging times," they wrote in their paper, "the future ability for us to enjoy hunting Wild Turkeys could be negatively impacted by our collective actions during spring 2020."The two stop short of being prescriptive, but they hope their paper will at least challenge other hunters to carefully weigh their decisions this hunting season and aim for a sustainable harvest, pandemic aside.

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Pandemic-fueled Surge in Wild Turkey Hunting Tests Declining Populations - Audubon Magazine

Human Behavior

Estimates show uneven stress on hospitals across the state from COVID-19 – WRAL.com

By Tyler Dukes, WRAL investigative reporter

Raleigh, N.C. A group of public health experts say that although North Carolina hospitals are likely a long way off from running out of beds, a recent rise in COVID-19 hospitalizations has had an uneven impact across the state.

In the fourth of a series of briefs assessing statewide hospital capacity, researchers from Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for the first time detailed how the number of patients has shifted in seven different regions across the state.

Hospitalization trends, the authors wrote, "are somewhat more threatening now than they were a month ago."

The areas of greatest concern include the counties surrounding Greenville, Charlotte and Raleigh, which "are experiencing more substantial tightening of near-term capacity than other regions."

The brief was authored by Mark Holmes, director of the Sheps Center for Health Services Research at UNC-CH; Aaron McKethan, a senior policy fellow at the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy; and Hilary Campbell, aresearch associate at Duke-Margolis.

The state Department of Health and Human Services as of Thursday counted 857 people hospitalized with COVID-19, and the researchers noted the health care system has been under increased pressure overall as the number of patients has grown.

While it's true that fewer hospital beds are available, the brief notes the growth rate of hospitalizations has decreased overall.

But that decrease has not been uniform.

Their analysis examined hospitalization data across Public Health Surveillance Team regions collections of counties that divvy up the state into seven distinct parts.

While statewide, the growth rate of hospitalizations in the week prior to June 12 stood at about 14 percent, that growth was negative for the Fayetteville and Triad areas. But the counties around Greenville saw 43 percent growth in hospitalizations during that period.

In the Triangle, it was about 21 percent.

Researchers project that, at the current statewide growth rate, COVID-19 hospitalizations wouldn't tax the health care system's capacity of normal beds for almost four months. That number varies greatly between regions, from less than two months for the Greenville area to just over three months for the Triangle.

But the study's authors acknowledge that there are plenty of caveats to their projections.

For one, the forecasts are highly dependent on the fluctuating growth rate of hospitalizations, which has seen particularly large changes in recent days.

"What is our best estimate of the growth in COVID-19 hospitalizations over the next month? Is it the growth we have had since May 15? Or is the recently rapidly increasing reported case rate a harbinger of faster growth?" researchers wrote. "This is a key point of uncertainty."

Growth rates in hospitalizations are highly dependent on human behavior, which fuels infection rates. And researchers noted in their brief that policies by federal, state and local officials have appeared to impact that behavior, beginning with responses to dire predictions at the start of the pandemic.

"Policymakers and the public then acted and slowed viral spread. That slowing made forecasts more optimistic, which then led to calls for reopening," researchers wrote. "As population mobility and contact rates have changed and the opportunity for community spread has increased, the number of reported cases has also increased."

Even with a sustained growth in patients, researchers say hospital administrators still have plenty of "relief valves" to ease demand and increase capacity.

Surge beds can allow for more patients. Hospitals can again cut back on elective procedures. And they can take advantage of regional differences to transfer patients where there's more capacity to care for them.

There's also the potential change how the state reopens. But the authors wrote that"any chosen strategy involves complex tradeoffs with profound ethical, social and economic strategies."

"The only true long-term solutions are to fully eradicate the virus and/or develop a broadly effective and safe treatment for the disease it causes."

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Estimates show uneven stress on hospitals across the state from COVID-19 - WRAL.com

Human Behavior

Space Archeologists Uncover Past and Project Future – DesignNews

The recent discovery of a 1940s weather balloon radiosonde wreckage has promoted interest in the little-known realm of space archeology. To learn more about this interesting topic and heritage, Design News reached out to two well-known experts in the field: Dr. Beth O'Leary, Anthropology Professor Emeritus at New Mexico State University (NMSU) and, Dr Alice Gorman, Associate Professor, Flinders University, Adelaide SA. What follows is a portion of that interview.

Design News: What is space archeology? What artifacts do you typically seek?

Researcher retrieves instruments from the remains of early V-2 rockets.(Image Source: NASA V2 WSNM)

Beth O'Leary: Archaeology is the study of the relationships between patterns of material culture (e.g., artifacts, sites and features) and patterns of human behavior. We can study material culture at all times and in all places where humans have been. It can be done on the Earth and off the Earth. My work has focused on the archaeological sites on the Moon, especially Tranquility Base, the Apollo 11 first lunar landing site. As archaeologists in this field, our gaze is mostly focused off Earth, looking into space and on other celestial bodies.

Space Archaeology is the study of material cultural that includes all the material culture in the aerospace and aeronautical realms that relate to the development and support of exoatmospheric realms. It is a huge cultural landscape of materials which are on Earth or have originated there and are now off Earth. Examples can be Voyager 1, now in interstellar space; Vanguard a satellite predicted to be in Earth orbit for another 600 years; and Launch Complex 33 at White Sands Missile Range. So it is a huge range or assemblage of mostly technological components including the radiosonde that was found in Cloudcroft.

Alice Gorman: Space archaeologists are interested in all material culture relating to space exploration. Everything in space at the moment - until there is spacecraft made and launched off-Earth - is connected to places on Earth, like launch sites, tracking antennas, research and test facilities. So, there is an enormous amount to be learnt by studying space sites and artifacts on Earth.

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Space Archeologists Uncover Past and Project Future - DesignNews

Human Behavior

Temporary Parking Lot In Yellowstone National Park To Be Removed – National Parks Traveler

This temporary parking lot near the Fairy Falls Trailhead in Yellowstone will be removed this fall/NPT file

Altering human behavior is proving harder than providing for humans, at least in the case of a temporary parking area created near the Fairy Falls Trailhead in Yellowstone National Park. And because of that, the parking lot will be removed this fall.

"While the lot has alleviated some traffic congestion, it has not substantially improved traffic flows within the area as originally envisioned," said Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly in an email. "Our data shows that social trailing is actually worse in some areas than previous to the parking lot being installed. And without proper supporting infrastructure, like restrooms and trash cans, litter and human waste have been very prevalent in the area."

Even if the park wanted to install restrooms at the parking area, it couldn't because of the geothermal resources in the area, the superintendent said.

Yellowstone officials back in 2016 broached the idea of building the loton land once traversed by an old stage road. It was needed, they said at the time, because once theexisting 55-spot parking lot at Grand Prismatic Spring filled up, visitors would park on the Loop Road that passed the popular spring. Some even parked in the middle of the road, according to park staff.

This ground near the Fairy Falls Trailhead was turned into the temporary parking area in 2017/NPS file

Ideally, rangers would have been positioned there to manage traffic, but the park didn't have enough personnel to take that approach.

So in 2017 a three-quarters-of-an-acre gravel lot was created near the Fairy Falls Trailhead. While the lot, which could handle about 70 vehicles, was intended for use by only passenger vehicles, buses and RVs frequently used it despite signs that said the lot was off-limit to buses, RVs, and vehicles with trailers.

At the time, a planning document distributed for public comment stated that, "the park would implement monitoring protocols to collect data on transportation capacity, visitor behavior/crowding, and resource impacts, both before and after the opening of the trailhead and parking area. This data would be compared to previous years' data and will assist the park in determining the effectiveness of this parking area and whether more analysis should be done to formalize this into a permanent parking area. If the parking area is not an effective solution to meet the purpose and needs of this project, the park would return the affected area to a natural condition."

The Fairy Falls Trail leads to both Fairy Falls and Imperial Geyser; another major draw, though, is a hill along the route that offers a birds-eye view of the nearby Grand Prismatic Spring in Midway Geyser Basin. Social media and guidebooks started driving so many people to this location that Yellowstone crews constructed an official trail and overlook to replace the many existing social trails on the hill.

The fate of this hardened overlook built in conjunction with the temporary parking lot remains to be determined/NPS file

That trail gradually climbs 105 feet over 0.6 miles from the Fairy Falls Trailhead to an overlook with views of Midway Geyser Basin.At the time, then-Superintendent Dan Wenksaid the trail and overlook provide a different view of Grand Prismatic Spring and minimize the growth of unsightly, unofficial social trails in the process.

The public, however, apparently didn't fully embrace that plan, andsome visitors seemed to gain a sense of entitlement and go where they shouldn't.

"The parking lot has encouraged visitors to get closer to thermal features than previously," Sholly said this week. "While no major resource damage has been documented, that risk exists if the parking lot continues to exist in future years."

A rehabilitation plan to erase the parking area is being developed and will be implemented this fall.

"We will initiate more formal efforts to look at the corridor and determine what options can be developed/evaluated to reduce traffic congestion and maximize the protection of geologic resources in the area," the superintendent said.

What happens to the trail that leads to the overlook of Grand Prismatic Spring will be determined down the road, he said.

The red circle shows where the gravel lot is located/NPS

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Temporary Parking Lot In Yellowstone National Park To Be Removed - National Parks Traveler

Human Behavior

Birdsong offers clues to the workings of short-term memory – AroundtheO

When a canary sings, it maintains a memory trace of the notes produced in the previous five to 10 seconds, a process that allows the bird to produce songs with long-range rules or syntactic structure, according to a new study co-written by a neuroscientist at the University of Oregons Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact.

In the project, a nine-member team used tiny, head-mounted microscopes to track the activity of the output neurons that reside in a canarys high vocal center, a brain area involved in song motor control. In prior studies, the activity of these neurons had been identified in simpler singers, revealing one of the most precise patterns of neural activity observed in any organism.

Newly applied to the more complex song of canaries, the neurons were seen activating in specific sequential contexts, with the rules of activation spanning up to 40 syllables over four seconds. The teams paper was published online June 17 by the journal Nature.

The research opens a window on theorized hidden states of the brain, a form of short-term memory that integrates past information with ongoing motor control, said Tim Gardner, an associate professor and the DeArmond Chair in Neuro-Engineering in the Knight Campus.

Studying short-term motor memory in canaries provides an opportunity to examine a high-level motor phenomenon in a controlled model system, one that is akin to how studies of the hydrogen atom helped crack the code of quantum mechanics at its inception, Gardner said.

You want to examine a new phenomenon using the simplest possible model that captures the essence of the problem, he said. We often think of songbirds in a similar way. Birdsong is a very quantifiable behavior. Sensory motor learning is 50 percent or more of what brains are all about. Its learning to integrate sensation and action to effectively control movements, in this case, vocalizations.

Songbirds are known to form detailed sensory memories for their tutor songs, and to use the memories to guide the development of their own song to match the tutor over many months. However, until the new study there was no evidence for short-term memory of song that could form a substrate for more complex song rules.

Gardner and Yarden Cohen, then a postdoctoral student and the studys lead author, began the fundamental research in Gardners Boston University lab before Gardner joined the Knight Campus in June 2019. Analyses of the data continued under Gardners tutelage after his arrival at the UO, where he also is affiliated with the Department of Physics.

These birds produce songs that contain hundreds of syllables organized in a way that indicates that they are using the short-term memory of preceding song syllables to guide the choice of the next elements in song, said Cohen, now a neurosurgery research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital, which is affiliated with the Harvard Medical School.

They create a complex syntax with long-range rules resembling properties of human behaviors like speech, dance and playing a musical instrument, Cohen said. We discovered that their song circuitry reflects the working memory required for their complex syntax.

The research, Gardner said, delivers a new way to study the principles of short-term memory.

If you reflect on the nature of speech, the choice of what to say next is guided by working memory that integrates over many timescales, from the overall aim of the communication episode to the local rules required for proper grammatical form, Gardner said. Canary song is much simpler, but it follows long-range syntax rules such as sing syllable D only if five seconds ago I sang A rather than B.

This deep structure, he said, contains simple similarities to speech where the ending of a sentence is dependent on how the sentence began. In both systems, correlations between past and future parts of the vocalization require a form of short-term memory.

What is clear is that a lot of cellular rules that underlie learning and memory are highly conserved, Gardner said. For example, there are cells in the basal ganglia in songbirds that have incredibly similar patterns of activity to what has been seen in rodents. While brain architecture may differ, the fundamental computations expressed at a cellular level are the same.

Gardner will continue to use the tools used in the study for his work in his Knight Campus lab. Ideally, he said, it could lead to not just to improved understanding of complex behaviors but also to enhanced machine-learning methods.

A lot of what we see in the canary resembles computational models that have been used for speech recognition and general artificial intelligence algorithms, he said. Speech algorithms used in Siri and Google Assistant networks use these types of hidden states seen in the canaries.

Eventually, Cohen said, studying the neural basis of canary song production may make it possible to understand how working memory mechanisms adapt to new conditions or fail when brain circuits are damaged. Developing such a model, he added, may point to new therapies for speech and comprehension deficits that come with aging and in neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinsons and Alzheimers.

Five grants from the National Institutes of Health supported the research team, which in addition to Gardner and Cohen included seven other members drawn from Boston Universitys biology department and medical school.

By Jim Barlow, University Communications

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Birdsong offers clues to the workings of short-term memory - AroundtheO

Human Behavior

HILLEL’S TECH CORNER: Making the eyes the windows of disease diagnostics – The Jerusalem Post

Ive covered eye-tracking technology many times over the years, which has since grown to become a saturated market that never ceases to amaze me. After all, we all grew up seeing such futuristic technology in sci-fi movies. Yet here we are life is mimicking art in a way never done before.Eye-tracking technology has been known to detect the identity/presence, attention levels and focus of the user. The information collected from the eyes grants unique insights into human behavior, and it has helped pave the way to the creation of a broad range of vitrual-reality devices and augmented-reality applications.They say the eyes are the windows into the soul, which begs the question: What else can they reveal about us?I recently discovered that eye-tracking technology offers up more than just the cool sci-fi stuff. It can also serve as the basis to address something more serious: disease diagnostics. Allow me to introduce you to AEYE Health.AEYE Health uses advanced machine learning and artificial-intelligence technologies to develop algorithms that can detect a variety of retinal conditions in seconds. This test can be performed in various places such as primary care clinics during the annual check-up, and only the patients that are diagnosed with an eye disease or have suspicious findings are referred to the ophthalmologist for treatment. The company was founded roughly two years ago by two experienced, successful entrepreneurs. It set out to diagnose diseases from retinal images, and is now approaching a crucial milestone: diagnosing images of the fundus.The fundus is the area toward the bottom of the eye that is exactly opposite the lens. Images from it can be used to detect a variety of illnesses, some of which are vision threatening, such as diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Retinal images can also be used to diagnose systemic diseases: hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, some forms of cancer and Alzheimers disease, to name a few.The diagnosis of fundus images is still primarily conducted by highly skilled and experienced humans, which makes the availability of this crucial procedure extremely limited. That leaves many patients with sight threatening conditions to suffer from entirely preventable blindness and vision impairment, or even premature death.The numbers are staggering, especially when you go beyond vision-related issues. There are an estimated billion people world-wide who are at high risk, out of which about half a billion are diagnosed with diabetes. In the US alone, about 75 million people are considered high risk and should be screened annually. THE VAST majority, however, does not get screened, in part because the procedure is impractical, expensive and because the number of professionals certified to diagnose is limited. This is where AEYE Health comes in.AEYE Healths algorithms are the only ones that can detect a variety of conditions at the highest known degrees of accuracy (specificity and sensitivity), and are designed to work with a variety of cameras, including low-cost, portable hand-held cameras. They are now in the final stages of a multi-site clinical trial required to get the FDAs clearance. The clearance will enable the deployment of their technology commercially, which will make screening patients eyes much more accessible, thus saving them from preventable blindness.AEYE Health was founded by two experienced entrepreneurs: CEO Dr. Zack Dvey-Aharon, an expert in machine-learning who has founded a number of companies in the field, and COO Danny Margalit, who was the co-founder of Aladdin Knowledge System, which went public on the NASDAQ in 1993 and was acquired in 2009.There are currently 14 people working for AEYE Health, and the majority of them are mathematicians and software engineers located in the R&D center in Tel Aviv, while the HQ is located in New York. They are backed by Boston based venture-capital funds Falcon and R-Cubed, and a number of angel investors from Israel and the US, including Club 100 from Israel. To date, the company has raised $3 million.AEYE Health is part of a growing wave of advanced technology companies that use the combined power of neural networks, artificial intelligence, and machine-learning algorithms to make medical treatment much more accessible and cost-effective than it currently is. There are some other giants battling in the same arena, notably Google and IBM. However, in true start-up fashion, AEYE Health is more advanced and widely respected for its under-a-minute noninvasive procedure.Many family doctors and endocrinologists are already using the technology in their clinics, and have expressed great satisfaction. After all, in addition to saving lives and improving quality of life, AEYE Healths technologies also encourage current practitioners to become more specialized and perform more intricate tasks for their patients.I never imagined that in my lifetime such a technology would come into existence; one that would be able to scan eyes for diseases by using almost any camera, from cheap manual scanners to large complicated machines worth tens of thousands of dollars.AEYE is solving a challenge we have all experienced in one way or another: diagnosing medical conditions effectively. The fact that this company is able to do this using our eyes alone is just mind-boggling, and gives me real hope for the future of diagnostics and healthcare in general.

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HILLEL'S TECH CORNER: Making the eyes the windows of disease diagnostics - The Jerusalem Post

Human Behavior

FAMILY MATTERS: Playing to the traits we are born with – Andover Townsman

Dear Doctor,

Our two young children are as different as daylight and darkness. While they are both still young, they are not alike at all.Our son is 8 and our daughter is 6. He is thoughtful and slow to speak or act. She, on the other hand, is talkative, quick to do what she wants, and knows her mind even when its not appropriate. Do behaviors come as inherited? Both children are ours, but we wonder where their differences come from.

Curious

Dear Curious,

Children come as their own package of likely behaviors.

There was a time in behavioral and educational theory that it was believed the mind was a tabula rasa (blank slate) on which could be writ whatever a parent ordained. That theory is not widely accepted today.

Think about it. As you consider your friends and neighbors, do you not have an amazing range of gifts and variability in behavior? Isnt this what makes our species so rich and different? All human behavior is on a curve. Some have less of a trait and others more. Many are average with one trait or another.

Trait psychology is here to stay. Any parent or grandparent will tell you children come with unique and sometimes welcome or unwelcome behavioral tendencies and styles.

For example, in the same family, one may see one child who is giving and unselfish. Another may make Scrooge look generous. Why? The unique inheritance of different neurologies and consequent traits results in variability. What would the world be without variance? It would be colorless indeed.

Now comes the troublesome part. Some traits are much less desirable than others. Thus, it is important to consider a basic trait and the life experiences of any person. The difference between a great artist and a destructive force is less than we might think.

How to enhance the positive and not reinforce the less desirable is, in my opinion, the consummate skill of an effective parent. That will be the topic of another column.

Dr. Larry Larsen is an Andover psychologist. If you would like to ask a question, or respond to one, email him at lrryllrsn@CS.com.

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FAMILY MATTERS: Playing to the traits we are born with - Andover Townsman