Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

Children Who Have Difficult Relationships with Their Mothers are Clingy Towards Their Early Teachers – NYU News

Children who experience dependent or clingy relationships with their preschool teachers tend to also have difficulties in their relationships with their mothers finds researchers at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. The new research, published in peer-reviewed academic research journal Attachment and Human Behavior, went even further to find that later in elementary school, these children were prone to being anxious, withdrawn, and overly shy.

Our research suggests that preschool teachers have the potential to play a pivotal role for children who are more dependent, said Robin Neuhaus, lead researcher and doctoral student in NYU Steinhardts Department of Teacher and Learning. By being warm and supportive, and by encouraging children to explore, preschool teachers may be able to reset the trajectories of children who may otherwise struggle with anxiety in elementary school.

Analyzing data from 769 children collected by the National Institute of Healths Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Neuhaus and her colleagues looked at assessments of mother-child attachment patterns from families across the United States. The sample looked at attachment at 36 months, 54 months, first, third and fifth grades, and examined dependency, closeness, conflict and other behaviors between children and their mothers, as well as children and their teachers.

Results from multilevel models showed that clingy behavior with preschool teachers was associated with higher levels of anxious behaviors when children were in fifth grade. Clingy behavior also partially mediated the link between a difficult type of mother-child attachment and anxiety in fifth grade, continued Neuhaus.

In addition to Neuhaus, the research was co-authored by NYU Steinhardt Professor of Education Erin OConnor and Meghan McCormick, a research associate in the Family Well-Being and Childrens Development Policy Area at MDRC. The full research article can be viewed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616734.2020.1751989. A description and more information about the findings can also be found at Neuhaus and OConnors website: https://www.scientificmommy.com/clingy-teacher-child-relationships.

About the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human DevelopmentLocated in the heart of New York Citys Greenwich Village, NYUs Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development prepares students for careers in the arts, education, health, media and psychology. Since its founding in 1890, the Steinhardt School's mission has been to expand human capacity through public service, global collaboration, research, scholarship, and practice. To learn more about NYU Steinhardt, visit steinhardt.nyu.edu.

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Children Who Have Difficult Relationships with Their Mothers are Clingy Towards Their Early Teachers - NYU News

Human Behavior

Are Bots Exploiting Coronavirus Fears? – CXOToday.com

By Nikhil Taneja

Coronavirus is a pandemic that the world has not witnessed in quite some time. International borders are closed. Major sports leagues have suspended their games. Employers have asked their workers to work from home. Normal life has been upended and will remain so for the foreseeable future, as the world struggles to get ahead of the deadly COVID-19 virus.

As the information on the novel virus deluges WhatsApp inboxes and social media feeds, the WHO recently warned of a different type of outbreak in regard to coronavirus: the overabundance of information makes it difficult for people to differentiate between legitimate news and misleading informationwhich could be disastrous. EU security services have also warned that Russia is aggressively exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to push disinformation and weaken Western society using its bot army.

An Infodemic

Regular monitoring of internet traffic is being processed by bot managers to track the infodemic that WHO and the EU security services have warned of. Data shows that bots have upped their game. Organizations from social media, e-commerce, and digital publishing industries have witnessed an unexpected surge in bad bot traffic after the rise of the coronavirus pandemic. These bots were involved in executing various insidious activities, including spreading disinformation, spam commenting, etc.

IT was also found earlier this year that nearly 60% of bots could mimic human behavior. This means they can disguise their identity and can create fake accounts on social media sites to post their masters propaganda as a genuine user. With such advanced bots, spreading disinformation becomes easy for countries such as Russia.

Gaining from the pandemic is not limited to Russia and social media. Given the attention that the coronavirus keyword is receiving, cybercriminals and scammers are more vigilant than ever to profit. For example, our research shows there has been an exponential rise in automated attacks on e-commerce and media industry as well. Lets take a detailed look at it.

Coronavirus Related Articles being scraped by Cybercriminals

Malicious actors are always in search of opportunities to scam people. So much so, they wont let go of any significant event, whether its a natural calamity, a pandemic, or a celebration.

Coronavirus is, in this respect, no different than other events. Fear and a continuous need for latest news provide an excellent breeding ground for automated attacks. A lot of phishing campaigns on the internet today are aimed at luring people with the promise of essential or breaking news on COVID-19, enticing them to click on malicious links or open infected attachments.

Research also suggests that cybercriminals are targeting media and digital publishing sites to scrape their unique content, publish scraped content on malware-ridden shady websites, and scam visitors. Over one-fourth of traffic on media sites was bad bot involved in automated activity, including scraping in February.

Search for Sanitizers and Face Masks by Bots

Bots quest to gain from the coronavirus pandemic doesnt end with media sites; they are also targeting e-commerce websites. With around one-third of traffic comprised of bad bots, e-commerce was the second most targeted industry by bad bots in February alone. The sector witnessed an unexpected surge in bad bot traffic after the rise of the coronavirus pandemic.

Lets take a detailed look at how cybercriminals are targeting e-commerce firms through a real-world case study. We monitored the traffic of a top European e-commerce site that has hand sanitizers and face masks listed on its portal. As coronavirus fear increases, bots ramp up their search for face masks and sanitizers.

These automated attacks could be aimed at performing denial of inventory attacks, hoarding these essential products to sell in black markets, or even scraping product details to list similar products on malware-ridden sites to scam people.

As the coronavirus threat intensifies, bots will drive the infodemic much further, continuing to be an efficient tool for cybercriminals, nation-state actors, and conspiracy theorists alike. The impact of information true or false especially in times of fear, uncertainty and confusion is greater. Because communication channels are diverse, authorities have very little control of Bot activity. In the coming months, we expect the use of bots to accelerate due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the US presidential election.

(The author is Managing Director-India, SAARC & Middle East, Radware)

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Are Bots Exploiting Coronavirus Fears? - CXOToday.com

Human Behavior

Run is too twisty for its own good – The A.V. Club

TV ReviewsAll of our TV reviews in one convenient place.

The funny thing is that Chase has some of Runs best sequences so far. Director Kate Dennis makes good use of the train set, emphasizing its narrow aisles while having Ruby, Billy, and Fiona constantly cross past each other, especially in the homestretch after Fiona retrieves Billys bag of cash. Dickon Hinchliffes propulsive score amplifies the tension of scenes featuring people doing nothing more than walk to and from train compartments and bathrooms. Theres a clever bit of plotting involving how Fiona cunningly obtains Laurences phone number from Ruby, helping her seal a blackmail scheme. (Archie Panjabis dastardly vibe combined with her calm, collected delivery deserves praise as well.) Wever does some great flustered phone acting when shes talking to Laurence and her son, Scooter, who recently broke his arm at a trampoline park while out with a new nanny. The episode isnt a total wash.

Still, Run pulls the rug out from under the audience in an unexpected and slightly sour way that feels neither productive nor earned. After Ruby and Billy barely make their train headed to Los Angeles, they independently discover that Fiona (or Alice, as Ruby knows her from the department store) is also on board. Ruby continues to overshare with Fiona/Aliceabout Billy, like that he carries around a big bag of cash, all while Fiona taunts Billy via text and tries to find him on the train. Fiona eventually catches up to Billy and tries to persuade him, once again, to give up on running away, claiming that this is just a phase and that hell get sick of Ruby, which will leave her in the lurch. Then she drops a bombshell: Im really glad that she doesnt know the real reason you texted her. Fiona shows Billy a promotional video in which he explains the Run idea directly into the camera. Its partially implied that Billy pulled the trigger to generate material for a new book.

Billy concealing his true motives isnt exactly the problem. Its more about how Run has so far concealed expository information and then provided it to the audience piecemeal. Sometimes it works well, like Ruby detailing her mental health history, and other times it can be slightly maudlin, like Billys explanation for why he abandoned his book tour. (Generally speaking, Run handles Rubys characterization better than Billys.) Yet, Vicky Jones and her writers started from a place of portraying their twin protagonists as desperate, somewhat selfish people who are genuinely drawn to each other, which has so far grounded each new piece of background material weve received so far. This revelation suggests that one embarked on this journey sincerely while the other didnt, which is fine, but Run doesnt treat this like a breach of trust or anything in the ballpark of momentous. Its just another twist, another info point, even though it fundamentally changes how we see Billy. If youre going to play that card, its worth doing it with more consideration.

Of course, the revelation will almost certainly be mitigated by what the situation implies: Billy might have sparked the journey for crass professional reasons, but he fell back in love with Ruby for real while on the train. While thats not an impossible sell, it demands at least some recontextualization of previous scenes to justify the reasoning. (If none of that actually happens, Ill gladly eat crow.) But on top of that, Chase ends up negating some of the nuance from Fionas motivation established in the previous episode. Its appropriate to claim that $10,000 isnt satisfactory compensation for essentially authoring Billys material while remaining uncredited, but Fiona quickly becomes the person who jumps off a moving train with a bag of money after blackmailing her former employer and what amounts to a complete stranger. Though Panjabi has fun with the character, Fionas transformation is a little compressed. She goes from an unseen presence to a righteously determined partner to a train jumper in just too little time.

Its all a little slapdash and signals that Run might be moving away from its best elements, mainly Wever and Gleesons chemistry. The scenes with them this week are mostly small-scale and fun: Ruby and Billys post-coital check-in, which had to be deferred to the cab ride to Union Station because they were late, is an awkward minefield in which Billy says every conceivably wrong thing, but the tension prematurely evaporates when Billy, on the train, sheepishly admits hes a dick. The other good moment occurs when Billy further confesses to Ruby about his on-stage behavior after being confronted by the audience member whose husband died, i.e. he called everyone in the room a bunch of cunts. Moments earlier, however, Fiona tells Ruby that Billy will never be entirely honest with her, and sure enough, Billy doesnt tell her about his true motivations behind sending the Run text.

That isnt flashy stuff, but they feel real and within spitting distance of human behavior, which, theoretically, is supposed to be what remains consistent even if the high-concept premise drives the bus. Instead, those scenes feel more and more like afterthoughts. Now, Fiona and the stolen cash has taken narrative precedence. Its certainly possible that Run has more positive surprises in store, but it could just as easily be the end of the line.

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Run is too twisty for its own good - The A.V. Club

Human Behavior

Tiger suspected of fatal attacks on humans removed from Riau – The Jakarta Post – Jakarta Post

A Sumatran tiger was captured by the Riau Natural Resources Conservancy Agency (BKSDA Riau) and removed to the Dharmasraya Sumatran Tiger Rehabilitation center (PRHSD) in West Sumatra on Saturday as it was deemed to pose a danger to local people.

The tiger was captured by a joint BKSDA-police team on the grounds of PT Riau Indo Agropalma in Tanjung Simpang village, Pelangiran district, Indragiri Hilir regency, Riau province at 9 a.m. local time on Saturday.

According to Indragiri Hilir Police spokesperson Adj. Comr. Warno, it took approximately nine hours to secure the tiger, which was captured in a box trap.

BKSDA Riau head Suharyono said that the tiger had to be captured because of recurring conflict between tigers and humans in the area since 2018 in which several residents were killed or injured.

The response has taken a long time because the removal efforts must be conducted very carefully to avoid hurting the animal, he sai

He said that a joint team had been deployed to oversee the human-wildlife conflicts in the area since November 2019 and that a camera had been placed to observe the behavior of the tigers there. Finally, we found the tigers habitat and identified an individual tiger that we suspect has attacked humans, often with fatal results.

Suharyono added that the joint team had done a lot of research and made trap modifications in order to make sure the tigers capture and removal went off without a hitch.

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Tiger suspected of fatal attacks on humans removed from Riau - The Jakarta Post - Jakarta Post

Human Behavior

Local leaders weigh ‘Back to Business’ risks of reopening badly – The Daily Memphian

Local COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations suddenly and surprisingly spiked last week.

Officials debated whether to reset the clock on easing social-distancing restrictions, and not reopen the economy until mid-May at the earliest.

Business owners and suburban mayors pushed back. Memphis and Shelby County mayors asked the health department to take another look.

Your quick list of what can open on Monday

Conflicting reopening plans poised to end countywide alliance on pandemic

Medical experts analyzed the numbers and agreed the spikes were easily explained and anomalous.

The sudden rise in COVID-19 cases was the result of an outbreak at the Shelby County Jail. It was serious but contained and not a sign of increasing community transmission.

The surprising rise in virus-related hospitalizations was the result of a new policy. Patients bound for nursing homes must wait at the hospital until they test negative for COVID-19.

The clock kept moving.

Were at a good place right now, Dr. Jon McCullers of UTHSC said Friday. We have a stability in the situation with the pandemic. It is currently under some degree of control. But well be watching this on a daily basis.

The Institute for Public Service Reporting is based at The University of Memphis and supported financially by U of M, private grants and donations made through the University Foundation. Its work is published by The Daily Memphian through a paid use agreement.Follow the Institute on Facebook or Twitter @psr_memphis.

Thats the sort of daily data analysis that will be required to keep a lid on the virus as business restrictions begin easing Monday, officials say.

Its also a preview of the challenges officials face in the days and weeks ahead.

As the local economy gets Back to Business Monday, officials say their biggest concern isnt reopening too soon. Its reopening badly.

Weve done a good job, so far, but the job isnt over. The virus is still spreading, said Dr. Jeff Warren, a physician, City Council member and local COVID-19 Task Force member.

Jeff Warren

If we go back to business as usual, well just feed the virus and well be right back where we were six weeks ago.

Six weeks ago, the challenge was to flatten the lethally upward curve of the COVID-19 pandemic and not destroy the economy.

Starting Monday, the challenge will be to flatten the dangerously downward curve of the economy and not reignite the virus.

Officials are trying to limit the risks by allowing local businesses to reopen in carefully controlled stages with rules that maintain social distancing and other protective measures.

But a growing number of variables could make those rules more difficult to maintain and the risks more difficult to control.

Conflicting policies that allow surrounding suburbs and rural counties to reopen sooner and faster.

Inconsistent policies that allow close-contact businesses such as hair and nail salons to reopen sooner in some places than others.

Unpredictable efforts to allow churches and other houses of worship to resume larger gatherings.

Insufficient testing and tracing that fails to identify and contain outbreaks at prisons, nursing homes or other high-density settings.

The biggest variable is human behavior and a general complacency that the most dangerous part of the pandemic has passed.

On the contrary, local officials warn. The coronavirus isnt gone. It lurks. On surfaces we touch, in the air we breathe, in people we encounter. It thrives on social interaction.

Social distancing worked. We flattened the curve, but we cant go back to business as usual, said Dr. Manoj Jain, the local infectious disease specialist, told members of the Memphis Medical Society in a Zoom conference call Thursday.

Manoj Jain

Things are different now. We have to be careful and cautious without being paralyzed or paranoid. We cant reduce the risk to zero, but we can keep the risk as low as possible and function.

On April 2, 83 people were in Memphis area hospitals with COVID-19 issues. Six days later, that number had increased 50% to 125.

If that trajectory had continued, local hospitals would have been overwhelmed by the end of the month.

Instead, daily COVID-19-related hospital admissions began to stabilize -- and are down down slightly -- since April 8.

Thats a significant date. It came two weeks after the mayors March 23 Safer at Home order began.

The daily rate of new cases also has stabilized since April 8.

Symptoms of COVID-19 appear within two to 14 days after exposure.

The first phase of Back to Business begins Monday, but the timing of the second and third phases will depend on the success of the first.

Over the next two weeks, local officials will keep a close eye on the number of new COVID-19 cases reported every day and the number of people being hospitalized as a result.

And for the first time since the virus was detected in Memphis, local officials will be watching to see where the patients are coming from.

In January and February, local doctors assumed that flu-like symptoms were caused by the flu unless someone had been to China recently or been with someone who had.

The first local COVID-19 cases were people who had traveled to New Orleans and Florida.

Then community transmission began and people here in Shelby County were infecting each other, Jain said. But we may be seeing COVID-19 become a sort of travel-related disease if we start seeing more cases from surrounding rural counties.

So far, about one in four people who have been admitted to Memphis area hospitals for COVID-19 are from counties other than Shelby.

Officials are concerned that could grow and that Memphis area hospitals will bear the brunt of conflicting policies that allow surrounding rural counties and suburbs to reopen sooner and faster.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee began easing coronavirus restrictions on businesses in rural West Tennessee counties a week ago.

In Mississippi, retail stores reopened last week with limited capacities, but Gov. Tate Reeves said Friday he would not reopen more businesses this week due to a spike in new cases.

Gyms and fitness centers are reopening Monday in Arkansas, and hair salons probably later this week.

Medical experts have pushed the city not to allow barber shops, beauty shops and other close contact businesses to reopen until the second phase begins at least two weeks from now.

But owners of those businesses are pushing politicians to allow them to reopen this week.

Gov. Lee relented Friday and agreed. Mayors in Arlington and Collierville said Friday they plan to follow state guidelines and allow them to reopen later this week.

Its been tough for those businesses throughout this process, and I feel its important to allow them to open, even if under reduced capacity and strict guidelines, Arlington Mayor Mike Wissman said Friday.

The health risk of reopening the local economy Monday wont be known for at least nine days.

Thats generally how long it takes for someone who is infected with the coronavirus to show symptoms, get concerned, get tested and get the test results back.

By then, of course, an infected person who doesnt self-isolate might infect dozens of others, who can infect hundreds more and so on.

Thats why COVID-19 spread so quickly from Chinese villages, Mardi Gras festivals, Florida beaches and New York City subways.

Testing has shown that about .05% of the general population is infected with the virus at any given time.

Thats one in every 200 people.

As weve seen in cruise ships and choirs, nursing homes and jails, that one person can spread the virus to dozens of people, Jain said.

Thats why the first phase of the Back to Business plan prohibits the gathering of purposeful groups of more than 10.

That restriction was going to include local houses of worship. But on Friday, Lee issued an executive order that prevents local governments from regulating crowd sizes at places of worship.

Both Lee and Strickland are encouraging religious leaders to exercise caution and have their staffs and members wear masks and maintain social distancing while gathering in person.

Rev. Dr. Scott Morris, founder of Church Health, is being more direct.

We would make a mistake if we went straight back into in-person worship, he wrote Friday on behalf of Memphis Clergy COVID-19 Response.

Scott Morris

God, who created our intellect, expects we will use it. Our first priority as faith leaders is to keep Gods people safe.

Limiting large gatherings is one way local officials are trying to prevent outbreaks.

Broad, rapid, accurate and targeted testing is another.

The joint COVID-19 Task Force is working on a plan to expand symptomatic and asymptomatic testing with new self-administered tests.

Current testing methods require health care workers draped in personal protective equipment to collect samples from deep inside a patients nasal cavity.

National Guard medics collect nasal swabs as hundreds of Memphians line up for COVID-19 testing at the Christ Community testing site in Frayser on April 25, 2020. For the first time, testing is being made available to residents not showing symptoms of the disease. (Jim Weber/Daily Memphian file)

The new tests allow patients to swab their own noses and the samples to be tested 10 at a time.

That would make it easier, and a lot less expensive and painful, to test high-risk populations such as hospital and nursing home workers once a week.

More testing will require more efficient and effective contact tracing. Local and state officials are working on plans to bolster the health departments capacity to do that.

Public health departments across the country have been defunded in recent years, Alisa Haushalter, executive director of the Shelby County Health Department, said Friday.Shelby County is always in need of adding resources to our infectious disease control.

The moment they heard Shelby County had confirmed its first COVID-19 case March 8, Paul Martin and Jeff Warren, medical leaders of Trezevant Manor, began locking the place down.

Visitors to the 14-acre retirement community, which includes a nursing home, rehab center and assisted living, had to wear masks. Then visitors were prohibited.

Group gatherings and outside trips were canceled. Residents who went to the doctor or hospital had to quarantine for 14 days when they returned.

All staff wore masks and sanitized everything all the time. Residents ate all meals in their own rooms.

As of Friday, there have been no suspected or confirmed cases of COVID-19 at Trezevant Manor, officials say. More than 400 employees have been tested and all results were negative.

We were lucky, but we also were very proactive and aggressive, said Warren, the City Council member who is Trezevants medical director.

State and local officials are pushing all nursing homes to follow the same procedures, even as the economy begins to reopen.

Meanwhile, Warren is pushing the Council to pass an ordinance this week to require Memphians to wear masks in all public places during a public health emergency.

I wear my mask to protect you, and you wear a mask to protect me, Warren said. Thats the intent. Were all going to have to be very careful for a very long time.

The Back to Business plan will require just as much coordinated care and daily discipline as the Safer at Home orders issued March 23, local officials say.

Itrequires or encourages employees in various work settings to wear masks and gloves.

It requires or encourages employees to stay home and quarantined if theyre showing any flu-like symptoms, or if theyve tested positive for COVID-19.

It requires or encourages employees and customers to maintain social distance of at least six feet in stores, restaurants, houses of worship and other public places.

And it limits the size of purposeful public gatherings to no more than 10 -- except for houses of worship.

Just because you can go out doesnt mean you should go out, Strickland told the public Friday. If we dont abide by the social distancing requirements. We could see a surge in the virus that could result in rolling back the opening and losing the progress weve made so far.

Reopening badly could be devastating for public health and the local economy.

Over the last month, we have entered into the COVID-19 depression with the depth and duration still in doubt, said Dr. John E. Gnuschke, director of the Sparks Bureau of Business and Economic Research at the University of Memphis.

The costs are massive increases in unemployment and economic hardship. Even with federal subsidies for businesses and newly unemployed people, the costs will linger long beyond the initial reopening. Reopening with caution is the best policy and the caution shown by most of our political leaders is warranted.

Gnuschke has been advising the local task force. He told them that political, business and medical leaders must keep working together to assess and balance the risks of reopening with the risks of closing down again.

He also told them they cant do it without the publics cooperation.

It is like a three-legged stool for milking cows, but someone cut off the legs, he said.

Medical, political and economic all three are far too short.People in Memphis can only count on the help of others in Memphis.

Editors Note: The Daily Memphian is making our coronavirus coverage accessible to all readers no subscription needed. Our journalists continue to work around the clock to provide you with the extensive coverage you need; if you can subscribe, please do.

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Local leaders weigh 'Back to Business' risks of reopening badly - The Daily Memphian

Human Behavior

Editorial: Like it or not, we helped the virus find us – The Columbus Dispatch

This editorial represents the opinion of the Dispatch editorial board, which includes the publisher, editor, editorial page editor and editorial writers. Editorials, like opinion columns, represent a particular viewpoint and are not to be confused with news stories.

Thinking about how interconnected the natural world is how our every action can have consequences we never dreamed of can be uncomfortable.

Environment and biology researchers around the world are separately confirming a doozy of an example: Our fondness for a nice cut of beef helped unleash the viral pandemic that is ravaging the globe and its likely to cause more.

The chain involves several links, but it isnt mysterious: Production of beef cattle and the grains to feed them uses up way more land and water and produces way more carbon than just about anything else we could eat. That hastens climate change, which is rendering more of the world too hot or wet to support crops.

That forces people in developing nations to move farther into forests and jungles, destroying habitat for various animals and plants.

Once you have a rainforest chopped up into fragments, you get encounters between people and animals that would not otherwise bump into each other. Sometimes the people are in search of the same foods the animals like to eat. Sometimes the animals venture onto the humans fields in pursuit of those tasty crops.

Heres the critical link: Disturbed, changing habitats are especially good for weedy species such as bats and rats, which happen to be really good at hosting viruses. Often theyve infected other wildlife with those viruses. So when those human/animal encounters lead to a bite or a scratch or making a meal of the animal, a virus that has never before been in humans can jump to a human host, kicking off an outbreak against which humans have no immunity, vaccine or even experience.

Hence the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has sickened 3.1 million people and killed 218,000 across the globe since December. Scientists still are studying its exact origin, but believe it found its first human at a wet market in Wuhan, China, possibly via a pangolin that was bitten by a bat.

The newest study to address this came from Stanford University last month. Researcher Laura Bloomfield studied people carving out farms at the edge of Ugandas Kibale National Park and found that those searching the fragmented forest edges for building materials were most likely to have contact with wild primates, known carriers of disease.

Scientists believe a primate was the source from which HIV, the virus that causes AIDs, found its first human. The Ebola virus is transmitted by various bat species and might have originated with one. In all cases, humans were venturing farther into wilderness areas.

It doesnt take a science denier to shrink from hearing this. Most Americans are used to eating plenty of meat, driving every day, turning up the A/C when its hot and other perks of our prosperity. We dont feel were immoral for enjoying these things.

But that doesnt change the effect that these behaviors, so familiar and innocuous to us, have on the larger world.

Some environmental activists lament the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has distracted public attention from the urgent need to counter climate change, but the two arent entirely separate problems.

Human behavior consuming resources and producing waste has an impact that cannot be denied. Changing our behavior, particularly as the richest-living society on earth, is hard. Perhaps the frightening power of the coronavirus pandemic can make more people consider that change is necessary.

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Editorial: Like it or not, we helped the virus find us - The Columbus Dispatch

Human Behavior

Get outside, but respect the natural world – Opinion – Cape Cod Times

A couple of years ago, during the longest government shutdown in American history, the caretakers of numerous national parks reported an uptick in vandalism and other careless human behavior, with people trampling over restricted areas, killing wildlife, littering, dumping trash and damaging natural habitats. Now, in the midst of a national emergency that has largely brought the country to a halt, more people are rediscovering the great outdoors, taking the time to enjoy visits to natural resources and to get out into nature. All of this is good, as it fosters a deeper connection with the world around us and reminds us that we are all closely linked to the environment. At the same time, it is crucial that, even as we enjoy and embrace the world of which we are an inextricable part, we do not directly or indirectly damage it.

Such is the problem at the Cape Cod National Seashore. A popular destination for decades, the Seashore routinely attracts between 3 million and 4 million visitors every year, and as in past springs, the warmer weather has brought a corresponding rise in the number of people visiting the park.

This spring, however, is proving to be like no spring in recent memory, and Park Service personnel are living with what appears to be one of the unforeseen consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak; that is, a rise in a variety of illegal activities, including dumping and vandalism on the Seashore grounds, as well as the more pedestrian problems of a spike in the number of dogs being walked off leash as well as the number of ATVs, which are banned from the Seashores many trails.

In an interview with Deputy Chief Ranger Ryan White, Cape Cod Times reporter Denise Coffey discovered that although many of these types of incidents are traditional problems for the Seashore, there has been a rise in the number of incidents in recent weeks. White spoke about instances where household trash was dumped at Wellfleets Great Island and construction debris was left at Easthams Doane Rock area.

The problem is not simply one of people leaving a mess for others to clean up, although that is in and of itself bad enough; this carelessness can also negatively affect the endangered wildlife that calls the Seashore home. White pointed specifically to terns and piping plovers, both of which are beginning to nest.

The issue here is not with the vast majority of visitors who come to the National Seashore and use the resources respectfully, follow the rules, and cart out all of the trash they produce. No, the problem is with the few who have decided that because the parks lands are extensive and that all of the public buildings are closed, this somehow grants them license to treat this precious jewel with neglect and selfishness, using it as both their trash can and their personal park.

Compounding the issue is the fact that many people are home with additional time on their hands. White said he believes this may have led to a surge in the number of home remodeling projects, and a consequential increase in the amount of trash produced. Also adding to the problem is the fact that as the number of coronavirus cases continued to grow, some towns temporarily shut down their building waste disposal areas to protect their employees, leaving homeowners and builders with the dilemma of what to do with their construction debris.

Given that the states order closing nonessential services remains in place, and the fact that the number of COVID-19 cases in the commonwealth continues to grow, there is little certainty as to when the Seashore shutdown might be lifted. Even in times without a global pandemic going on, park officials could not hope to fully monitor the more than 43,600 acres that make up the Seashore.

Now, perhaps more than ever before, it is up to all park visitors to help monitor the grounds, keeping an eye out for those who have decided to not follow the rules, and, where appropriate, perhaps reminding them that the Cape Cod National Seashore belongs to everyone. In times where discretion may be more appropriate than confrontation, informing Seashore personnel about a problem will go a long way toward helping preserve this unique treasure.

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Get outside, but respect the natural world - Opinion - Cape Cod Times

Human Behavior

Game theory and COVID-19: Major defense project pivots to explore how to coordinate safe behavior – University of Michigan News

ANN ARBORShedding light on how officials at different levels of government can work together to maximize COVID-safe behavior is a new goal of a multiscale game theory project funded with $6.5 million from the Department of Defense.

Mingyan Liu

Mingyan Liu, leader of the project and the Peter and Evelyn Fuss Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering, presented her teams work at a recent Call to Arms virtual conference, held by the National Science Foundations Networking Technology Systems group.

When human behavior is competitive, we dont use resources in the way that is most efficient for the communityas seen in behaviors like mask, sanitizer and toilet paper hoarding. But most of our decisions about how to behave arent entirely individualistic. We make them as part of a community. We are swayed both by leadershipand the incentives and disincentives that they can offeras well as altruism.

Most of the literature in game theory examines individual behavior, but Liu and her colleagues are exploring what happens when decisions are made at multiple scales. This is particularly relevant during the current COVID-19 pandemic, when decisions are made by individuals, local governments, state governments and nations. Do we act for the common good, or do we do what we perceive as serving our individual interests?

An example, in the present context, is someone who ignores shelter-at-home orders and essentially benefits from other peoples decision to comply with the order. This is whats called freeriding, Liu said.

Freeriders are protected from the virus through the decrease in transmission brought about by everyone who stays at home. This principle also applies to local and state officials making their own calculations about mitigating the risk of COVID-19. One state with a high COVID-19 case load may decide to shut down, while a neighboring state with a smaller case load may have the advantage of staying open, again benefiting from the free rider effect.

The global pandemic is the most salient threat we face at the moment, said Purush Iyer, program manager at the Army Research Office, an element of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Commands Army Research Laboratory.

While the U.S. Armys interest in network games includes understanding the impact of the adversarial groups in a host population, electronic warfare, and distributed weapon systems, we fully support exploring the impact of measures to control the spread of disease.

To begin with, the team is exploring how to model compliance or lack of compliance regarding COVID-19 orders and recommendations in their game-theory framework. The protective behaviors include not going out, wearing a mask when going out, and handwashing and sanitizer use when returning from being out.

The factors that may influence compliance often include the prevalence of COVID-19 in the local community, a persons vulnerability or proximity to vulnerable individuals, and general awareness. But they may also be affected by the timing of the order and even the words and phrases chosen to give the justification and restrictions. This aspect of the analysis will allow the team to then investigate communitywide behavior as a result of high-level policies.

Liu plans to connect behaviors identified from such data with COVID-19 case data to discover which restrictions and recommendations are most effective.

Were also interested in understanding what additional mechanisms or policies could be introduced to make the overall system more efficientfor instance, enabling more collaboration among communities rather than competition, Liu said.

She cited the way that states are currently fighting one another for federal supply of medical equipment even as some come together on a plan to begin reopening the economy.

For now, Lius team is best equipped to model strategic decisions associated with social distancing at the individual and community levels, but they have plans to include economic concerns as well. The state that is able to remain open because its neighbors are closed is a free rider in the sense of limiting virus spread, but it may also play an important economic role in manufacturing and distribution, helping to head off shortages.

The project is titled Multi-Scale Network Games of Collusion and Competition.

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Game theory and COVID-19: Major defense project pivots to explore how to coordinate safe behavior - University of Michigan News

Human Behavior

Children of the pandemic: How will kids be shaped by the coronavirus crisis? – Science Magazine

By Joel GoldbergApr. 30, 2020 , 11:15 AM

Sciences COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center.

Health professionals face a massive challenge in responding to the coronavirus. Child psychologists are no exception as they deal with mental crises in children caused by the pandemics upheaval. Some scientists see the outbreak asa natural experimenta time when a real-life event can be used to track and study changes in everything from ecosystems to human behavior. Events such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, China, have already helped mental health researchers see how young people typically react during a crisis. Now, two studiesone in Toronto andanother in Baltimorewill monitor the emotions and behaviors of children and teens through this pandemic. What they reveal may teach parents and other adults how to help children in later waves of the coronavirusor during the next major crisis.

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Children of the pandemic: How will kids be shaped by the coronavirus crisis? - Science Magazine

Human Behavior

Want to Be an Instant Expert on Film Noir? Watch This Drama – The New York Times

Maybe its our gloomy national mood, the programming on Turner Classic Movies or the Columbia Noir series currently streaming on the Criterion Channel. But cinephiles have been chattering again about film noir, a category that is notoriously difficult to define but about which every movie lover has an opinion. Say youve heard the term, but you dont know quite what it means well, you have good company. Heres a quick rundown.

To rehash an old, inevitably circular set of arguments: Noir cant simply be a genre because it transcends genre. There are noir mysteries, noir melodramas, noir costume pictures, even noir-tinged westerns and science fiction. If noir is a style, its hallmarks might include terse dialogue, an interest in seamy aspects of human behavior and black-and-white cinematography. But a cataloging would have to embrace exceptions. (Leave Her to Heaven, the ne plus ultra of femme fatale movies, is in Technicolor.)

Noir might be a mood, but thats a bit amorphous, like Justice Potter Stewarts definition of hard-core pornography: I know it when I see it. Or perhaps noir was a temporary wave rooted in anxieties about World War IIs destabilization of American home life. According to this theory, noir-like work made later than the 1950s requires a separate category, the neo-noir. And if thats the case, the neo period has gone on longer than the original.

When the French critics Raymond Borde and tienne Chaumeton tilted at an early definition in 1955, they distinguished noirs from police procedurals, which, they said, explored crime from the outside, rather than within. In the early 1970s, Paul Schrader, a critic at the time and soon to be a screenwriter and director, took a stab at a survey, arguing that noir was primarily a matter of tone. Almost every critic has his own definition of film noir, he wrote, and a personal list of film titles and dates to back it up.

Im in favor of a big tent: If you can explain why its a noir, its a noir. But dont you dare name any movie with insufficient subtext, psychological complexity or an atmosphere that doesnt chill the soul.

There are many places you might start. The gimmes include Billy Wilders much-imitated Double Indemnity with Fred MacMurray as an insurance salesman who plots with Barbara Stanwyck to kill her husband and Edgar G. Ulmers B-movie Detour, with Tom Neal as a pianist who, while hitchhiking, ends up in a car with a dead man and then beholden to a merciless blackmailer (Ann Savage). The film epitomizes noirs grim sense of fate, and the cheap production values only add to the sordid ambience.

But there may be no better place for getting a handle on what noir is and isnt than Nicholas Rays In a Lonely Place, conveniently screening in Criterions Columbia Noir series. If you enjoy it, less-revived gems (like Pushover, with a post-Indemnity MacMurray embroiled in another lust-struck scheme) are nearby for the watching.

Stream it on the Criterion Channel or rent it on Amazon, FandangoNow, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.

Even trying to categorize In a Lonely Place is tricky: It has elements of murder mystery, melodrama and Hollywood insider scoop. Yet it is certainly one of the most forthright films to deal with domestic abuse ever to come from a major production company, let alone in the early 1950s. Here is a movie so rough-minded, so willing to be unsympathetic that it opens with its protagonist, a screenwriter named Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart), threatening to get into a brawl with a stranger.

Dix takes home a hat-check woman from a movie-industry haunt, on the pretense that she can tell him about a novel that he is supposed to read and potentially adapt. Ray seals our identification with the antiheroic Dix by filming the woman, Mildred (Martha Stewart), staring straight at him and the camera as she regales him with the narrative. The Bogart who had already given moviegoers Sam Spade of The Maltese Falcon, Rick of Casablanca and Philip Marlowe of The Big Sleep still has a charm, but also a sneer and a temper.

Sometime after leaving Dixs, Mildred turns up dead in the early-morning hours. Laurel Gray even the name suggests shades of uncertainty a new neighbor who saw Dix from her balcony that night, gives the police information that helps with his alibi. Then Laurel (played by Gloria Grahame) falls in love with Dix, knowing theres a chance he may be a murderer.

Part of what makes In a Lonely Place a great example of noir is that it only sounds like a whodunit; the sleuthing, which occurs mainly offscreen, is tangential to the movies true subject.

Regardless of whether Dix is the wrong man for the murder, he is a wrong man in every other sense. The police have records of fights. An actress charged that he beat her up then changed her story and said she broke her nose running into a door. Under interrogation about Mildreds death, he engages in bizarre self-sabotage, responding flippantly to questions. His death wish extends to a capacity for road rage.

His success as an artist is far behind him: We hear that he hasnt written a hit since before the war (although Laurels presence in his life jump-starts his productivity). He seems fascinated by violence, even for a dramatist. At a dinner, he uses a detective, who served under him during the war, and his wife as players in a re-enactment of the crime, imagining it in more detail than the investigators, and with such vividness that, for a moment, it almost becomes real.

And as he tightens his psychological grip on Laurel, who runs the emotional gamut of infatuation, defensiveness and terror, In a Lonely Place builds to a devastating finale. There is even an acknowledgment that tidy answers cant bring peace to the relationship: Yesterday, this wouldve meant so much to us, Laurel says. Now it doesnt matter. It doesnt matter at all. (There may be some subtext here: Those eager to learn more about Grahames marriages to Ray and eventually to Rays son apparently a teenager when the two began their affair should listen to the You Must Remember This podcast on the actress.)

Any noir recommendation right now is going to be subject to the vagaries of streaming. To Schrader, Kiss Me Deadly (1955), which came late enough in the noir period to show self-consciousness and is suffused with atomic paranoia, was the masterpiece of the form. But its only on DVD. So is Nightmare Alley (1947), with Tyrone Power as a carnival worker who tries to make it as a mentalist and is brought low by aiming too high. Its being remade by Guillermo del Toro. Who said noir is over?

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Want to Be an Instant Expert on Film Noir? Watch This Drama - The New York Times