Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

Prefer tea over coffee? It could be your genes, study finds – CNN

To examine genetic associations with food preferences, researchers from the Riken Center for Integrative Medical Sciences (IMS) and Osaka University in Japan studied the genetic data and food preferences of more than 160,000 people in Japan.

The research, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, found genetic links for 13 dietary habits including consumption of alcohol, other beverages and foods, and also complex human diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

"We know that what we eat defines what we are, but we found that what we are also defines what we eat," said Yukinori Okada, Senior Visiting Scientist at Riken IMS and professor at Osaka University, in a press release.

This involves grouping thousands of people together depending on whether they have a disease and looking at DNA markers called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, which can be used to predict the presence of that disease. If researchers find a SNP that is repeatedly associated with the disease group, they can assume that people with that genetic variation might be at risk for the disease.

Rather than looking at diseases, the Riken team examined dietary habits to find out if there were any markers that made people "at risk" for typically eating certain foods.

The researchers used data of more than 160,000 Japanese people from the BioBank Japan Project, launched in 2003 with a goal to provide evidence for the implementation of personalized medicine. The project collects DNA and clinical information, including items related to participants' lifestyles such as dietary habits, which were recorded through interviews and questionnaires.

They found nine genetic locations that were associated with consuming coffee, tea, alcohol, yogurt, cheese, natto (fermented soy beans), tofu, fish, vegetables and meat.

Variants responsible for the ability to taste bitter flavors were also observed. This association was found among people who liked to eat tofu; while those without the variant consumed less alcohol or none at all.

Those who ate more fish, natto, tofu and vegetables had a genetic variant that made them more sensitive to umami tastes, best described as savory or "meaty" flavors.

The main ingredients of the foods mattered, too -- for example, there were positive genetic correlations between eating yogurt and eating cheese, both milk-based foods.

In order to find whether any of these genetic markers associated with food were also linked with disease, the researchers conducted a phenome study.

The phenome comprises all the possible observable traits of DNA, known as phenotypes. Six of the genetic markers associated with food were also related to at least one disease phenotype, including several types of cancer as well as type 2 diabetes.

Nature vs. nurture: Food edition

Since the research studied only people native to Japan, the same genetic variations associated with food preferences are likely not applicable to populations across the globe. However, similar links have been discovered in different groups.

The study authored by Okada also didn't measure environmental factors. Our environment, demographics, socioeconomic status and culture -- such as whether we eat food from work or home; our age; how much money we make; and what our families eat -- are some of the biggest drivers of our food choices.

"These factors would weigh more than the genetics in some cases," said Dr. Jos Ordovs, director of Nutrition and Genomics at Tufts University in Massachusetts, who was not involved in the study.

"Something that sometimes we have felt is that the nutrition field has been focusing too much on nutrients rather than on foods," Ordovs said.

"Previous studies have been looking at genes that were associating with higher protein intake or higher fat intake or higher carbohydrate intake," Ordovs said. "But this study is more aligned with the fact that people eat foods. They don't just eat proteins, carbohydrates and fats. People tend to eat within a specific pattern."

Further research is needed to explain an exact balance between genetic predisposition and volition when it comes to food choices in different groups of people, but Okada suggests that by "estimating individual differences in dietary habits from genetics, especially the 'risk' of being an alcohol drinker, we can help create a healthier society."

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Prefer tea over coffee? It could be your genes, study finds - CNN

Human Behavior

Why Tennant Stock Tumbled Today – The Motley Fool

What happened

Shares ofTennant(NYSE:TNC) slipped on Monday, falling 10.7% by the time the market finally closed at 4 p.m. EDT. Driving down the industrial cleaning equipment company's stock was a significant sell-off in the stock market.

Today's market plunge, resulting from the COVID-19 outbreak and ahistoric sell-off in oil prices, didn't spare too many stocks. While the S&P 500 closed down 7.6% on the day, many stocks finished even lower, including Tennant.

Image source: Getty Images.

One of the drivers of the decline in the stock market is increasing concerns that the outbreak will cause a global economicrecession. If that happens, companies won't make as much money as expected this year, which makes their stock's less valuable.

In Tennant's case, it initially expected that 2020 would be a good year thanks to its strategic accomplishments in 2019. CEO Chris Killingstad stated in the company's fourth-quarter earnings release that "we are looking ahead with a real sense of excitement and anticipation amid the changes we have set in motion with our new enterprise strategy." That optimism led the company to forecast sales growth of 1.5%-2.5% this year, along with adjusted earnings-per-share growth of about 8% at the midpoint of its outlook.

However, a lot has changed since the company issued that guidance on Feb. 20. With the economy potentially heading into a recession over the outbreak, Tennent's results could come in at or below the low end of its outlook.

The market is pricing in the potential for a recession from the impact of the outbreak. However, it's unclear what impact the epidemic will have on the economy and human behavior. Tennant's stock, along with the rest of the market, might still have some more difficult days ahead.

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Why Tennant Stock Tumbled Today - The Motley Fool

Human Behavior

Many dogs are prone to anxiety, study finds – Medical News Today

Research assessing the behavior of dog breeds common in Finland has found that a significant proportion of our canine best friends live with some form of anxiety.

According to recent statistical reports, as many as 89.7 million dogs provided companionship to their human friends in the United States in 2017, the latest year for which data are available.

Dogs are some of the most popular pets around the world, and no wonder. Anecdotally, they are loyal, loving friends and a constant source of boundless affection and good fun.

Yet, much like humans, our canine pals can also face troubles such as stress and anxiety.

In fact, according to a new study from the University of Helsinki in Finland, dogs are particularly prone to a wide range of anxiety-like traits.

In the recent study, first author Milla Salonen and her colleagues analyzed the behaviors that 13,715 pet dogs from Finland belonging to 264 different breeds exhibited. Their findings appear in Scientific Reports.

The researchers asked the dogs owners to fill in questionnaires surveying behaviors that related to seven anxiety-related traits. These were noise sensitivity, general fear, fear of surfaces, impulsivity or lack of attention, compulsive behaviors, aggression, and behaviors relating to separation anxiety.

By looking at the survey data, the investigators found that 72.5% of the dogs expressed anxiety-like behaviors, according to their owners.

Of the total number of dogs, 32% had noise sensitivity, meaning that they were frightened of at least one noise. Among noise-sensitive dogs, the most common fear was that of sounds associated with fireworks this fear had a prevalence of 26%, the researchers write.

General fearfulness affected 29% of the dogs in the study. Specifically, 17% of dogs showed fear of other dogs, 15% fear of strangers, and 11% fear of novel situations, the authors write.

The least common anxious behaviors, according to the surveys, were separation-related behaviors, which affected 5% of dogs, and aggression, which owners reported in 14% of dogs.

Some anxiety-like behaviors, the researchers also found, seem to become more pronounced as dogs age. These include noise sensitivity especially being frightened of thunder as well as fear of heights and anxiety around walking on certain types of surfaces, such as metal grids.

However, judging by their owners reports, younger dogs were more likely to have problematic behaviors relating to separation anxiety, such as urinating on the floor or damaging furniture.

Younger dogs also appeared to be more likely than older canines to be impulsive.

There were also differences between the two biological sexes, with males being more likely to show aggression and signs of impulsivity and females having a higher tendency to display fear.

Different dog breeds were also likely to display different types of anxiety-related behaviors.

The researchers stated that much in accordance with what previous studies have suggested Lagotto Romagnolos, Wheaten terriers, and mixed breed dogs had the highest prevalence of noise sensitivity, while miniature schnauzers and Staffordshire bull terriers were less sensitive to noises.

Spanish water dogs, Shetland sheepdogs, and mixed breed dogs were the canines in which fearfulness was most common. More specifically, fear of surfaces and fear of heights were most prevalent in rough collie and mixed breed dogs.

Large breeds and small breeds also differed in terms of anxiety-like behaviors. For example, among the miniature schnauzers in this study, 10.6% showed aggression toward strangers, compared with only 0.4% of Labrador retrievers.

But why are such anxious behaviors so common in dogs? The researchers cannot say for sure, but they hypothesize that the dogs genetic makeup may have something to do with their predisposition to different types of anxiety.

Behavior has a major genetic component, they write, adding that [s]ome genomic areas and loci are associated with problematic behavior, including compulsion, fear, and noise sensitivity.

Yet they note that environmental factors, such as the training that dogs receive, most likely interact with genetic predispositions, leading to or suppressing certain behaviors.

As anxiety can impair welfare, and problematic behavior may be an indication of poor welfare, efforts should be made to decrease the prevalence of these canine anxieties, the researchers point out in their study paper. They go on to suggest that:

Breeding policies may help to improve dog welfare, as could changes in the living environment.

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Many dogs are prone to anxiety, study finds - Medical News Today

Human Behavior

‘Devs’: Here’s why it is important to comprehend a universe without free will to understand the Fx series – MEAWW

Can everything be explained? Is everything we do, every action we have taken up until this very point (and beyond it) be necessitated by antecedent events and conditions? Is there no free will; only the mere illusion of it? Alex Garland (of Annihilation, and Ex Machina fame) grapples with these questions in his new Fx series Devs.

In an interview last year, Garland had said, One was getting my head around this principle of determinism, which basically says that everything that happens in the world is based on cause and effect. So nothing happens that isnt the result of a prior cause. And that has all sorts of implications for us. One is it takes away free will, but it also means that if you had a computer powerful enough you would be able to use cause and effect and use determinism in order to not just predict the future but also understand the past.

And that, essentially, is what is at the core of the plot of Devs -- the principle of determinism and a futuristic Silicon Valley company that is using this principle and advanced technology to possibly predict and even control human behavior. Does it sound a little bit like an extended Black Mirror episode? Only if one takes a shallow look at it. Yes, the very basis of the show, if it has to be boiled down to a reduction, is technophobia. Unlike the Charlie Brooker anthology series, however, the fear here is not just human intent and capabilities in the time of powerful technology. Nor is it lukewarm tales of the same human failures and flaws over and over again. Rather, its a more philosophical look at the potential of such technology and the pragmatism of fearing something like that.

Consequently, determinism and fatalism are very important to understand. Essentially, the roots of the notion of determinism surely lie in the idea that everything can, in principle, be explained, or that everything that is, has a sufficient reason for being and being as it is, and not otherwise.

Pierre-Simon Laplace, the French polymath and scholar, wrote in 1820: We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes.

In the eyes of Garland, this core philosophy is what makes everything dangerous. If every decision flows in a fixed path, and free will is a lie, then surely someone with appropriate means would take advantage of that. But there lies the philosophical sinkhole of fatalism. If determinism holds in our world, then there are no probabilities. In which case, the technological dominance the show promises in its plot is essentially inevitable. Mind-bending, isnt it?

Devs airs exclusively on FX on Hulu, every Thursday at 12 am.

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'Devs': Here's why it is important to comprehend a universe without free will to understand the Fx series - MEAWW

Human Behavior

CDC recommends not touching your face to stop spread of COVID-19. It’s harder than it looks. – Fox17

ALLENDALE, Mich. Washing your hands is important. The CDC recommends 20 seconds of scrubbing to prevent the spread of illnesses such as Coronavirus.

Health officials are also recommending people try to stop touching their faces.

Its just a nervous habit I guess, Grand Valley State University student Alexa Philbrick said

Stopping touching your face is easier said than done. Sunday, FOX 17 tested it for ourselves. We observed two groups of Grand Valley State University students for 20 minutes each to see just how often they touched their faces without realizing.

Yeah, I know I do. I mean, I even do it when Im driving. So its just a habit, GVSU student Adrian Hall said.

We told the students we were observing them looking for "a certain human behavior," but didn't tell the students what specifically we were looking for.

The coronavirus has been all over the news and stuff, so I assumed it had something to do with sickness, Alexa Philbrick said.

It happened again, and again, and again. Nearly every student we watched touched their face. It's a hard habit to break. But the first step is to realize you're doing it.

Ive been a lot more conscious of it, now, just because of whats going on, GVSU student Viviana Rubio said.

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CDC recommends not touching your face to stop spread of COVID-19. It's harder than it looks. - Fox17

Human Behavior

Why robotic process automation (RPA) is the perfect technology for logistics – FreightWaves

Consider the time you spend reading an email, combing through it to harvest relevant information to put into an operating system, and then taking the resulting data from the operating system to craft a response. Email is tedious and requires a significant commitment of time time that brokers could use to cultivate relationships with customers and think strategically about business growth.

Technology is flooding the freight industry, leveraging apps to streamline singular tasks like load matching, and checking in and paying carriers tasks that not too long ago were completed manually. The apps are coded to perform specific, limited functions, but when you consider a task like email, theres more nuance and variation. Frankly, its more human.

A fast-growing technology that imitates human behavior and has taken root in the financial services and hospitality industries is slowly making its way into logistics. Robotic process automation (RPA) is an intelligent automation software that uses machine learning, natural language processing and artificial intelligence to mimic the rote tasks a human performs on a daily basis, whether its reading email or quoting rates. Eventually, RPA technology could provide every broker an assistant to perform lower-level tasks so they can so they can focus on high-level strategy.

RPA is a rapid development environment, so what we can do with RPA that is different than any kind of automation in the past or robotics in the past is apply rapid development tools to fairly quickly build a bot, said Joel McGinley, managing director at Hubtek, a staffing and technology company based in Miami and Medellin, Colombia. We can create a bot in less than a day depending on the complexity of the bot. That same automation, using other tools, would take maybe a month with lots of training and testing.

RPA can integrate with any existing technology infrastructure, regardless of its sophistication or whether the multiple systems it interfaces with integrate with one another. For Amit Bhutani, sales director at Automation Anywhere, an RPA platform based out of San Jose, California, this is one of RPAs biggest advantages.

You tell the bots to go retrieve information from five different systems, they will do it, Bhutani said. Bots dont need systems talking to each other in order to operate. Large companies might have two or three TMS systems at least, and most of the time, they dont integrate with one another, but it does not matter to RPA. Also, users dont need to know Java or C++, this is all user-friendly interface, drag-and-drop functionality.

Not only can RPA be built and implemented quickly, it allows a company to grow while maintaining and enhancing the existing workforce. So RPA can be thought of as a tool for workforce optimization, rather than workforce replacement.

Data entry can be very laborious and the human being is prone to errors, especially with high volume, McGinley said. A robot can handle that entry very efficiently, very quickly and never makes an error. The robot works 24 hours, 7 days a week, never asks for a raise, never has any office drama. So theyre kind of an assistant. Imagine if we could give every worker in this industry an assistant to increase their productivity.

Companies within the logistics industry are positioned well for RPA technology, not just because theyre striving for competitive advantage, but also because of the industrys sophisticated interdependencies. RPA can help the labor pool, particularly the new, tech-inclined generation of workers, pursue work of higher value, reducing busy work and the training it entails. The end result: greater employee satisfaction and higher retention rates for companies. RPA could also improve other areas of the industry, including shipment scheduling, inventory tracking, customer visibility and invoicing.

RPA enablescompaniesto offer a better quality of service while freeing up labor capacity to engage more closely with their customers says Anubhav Saxena, Executive Vice President and Chief of Global Alliances at Automation Anywhere.Shipping and logistic companies can nowofferpremium services to more customers whileprovidingbetter customer satisfaction which helps raise their top line.

McGinley says many logistics companies worry their scale wont support a technology like RPA, but once they see the capabilities and costs of the program, the resistance dissipates. Hubtek has recently partnered with Automation Anywhere to make automation more cost-accessible to logistics companies.

While Automation Anywhere has been innovating its business for 16 years and has deployed 1.8 million bots, Hubtek is one of Automation Anywheres first partners in transportation. Utilizing a partnership like this prevents companies from taking on the cost of licensing, so $10 million-$30 million companies can compete with billion-dollar companies that can invest heavily in technology.

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Why robotic process automation (RPA) is the perfect technology for logistics - FreightWaves

Human Behavior

Why Is The Stock Market Slipping? – TheStreet

On February 19 it looked like the stock market would break a new ceiling. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was headed to 30,000 and nothing could stand in its way.

Then the coronavirus stood in its way.

Over one week of trading, between February 21 and February 28, the market lost 3,500 points. Since then stocks have rallied and slipped depending largely on the day of the week. On two separate days (Thursday, Feb. 27 and Thursday, March 5) the market posted its largest single-day losses since the Great Recession. The question is why?

The connection between COVID-19 and stock market prices is not immediately obvious. The industries most likely to suffer, such as airlines and hospitality, will almost certainly bounce back once the crisis has passed. Others have little, if any, apparent connection to infectious disease. Consumers arent immediately likely to need fewer computers or drink less orange juice in the wake of the coronavirus. Yet traders have sold those stocks anyway, unloading them at bargain-bin prices.

This happens. Sometimes.

A major crisis can have unpredictable effects on the stock market. Sometimes traders shrug off the event like it never happened. When Hurricanes Katrina and Maria made landfall in 2005 and 2018, respectively, the stock market largely didnt notice. On the other hand, shortly after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti the S&P 500 lost 6.6% of its value, and the attacks on September 11, 2001 led to a 11.6% decrease.

At times, the market seems to ignore the headlines. Other times it seems to react with fear and panic, surging money out of stocks and into safe assets. Behind this unpredictability, often enough, is fear. Fear of unpredictability; fear of changing fundamentals; and, perhaps more than anything else, simple human fear for personal safety.

Its about uncertainty, said Randy Frederick, Vice President of Trading and Derivatives at Charles SchwabCorporation(SCHW) - Get Report. Its about not knowing.

In a broad, general sense, its that human nature is such that when were surprised by anything that we didnt expect, our natural reaction is to react in a negative fashion. When something happens, and it can be anything really, our natural reaction is to hit the sell button The coronavirus may or may not be any more dangerous, any more contagious, than the common flu, but its new,Frederick said.

Investors, especially the professional and institutional investors who hold most of the stock markets assets, try to trade on certainties. They rarely like to gamble, instead preferring to move based on a sense that they know where the market is going and how it will get there. This is why firms invest so much money in technical analysis. Modern traders work with numbers, assessing risk and reward based on enormous amounts of data.

Uncertainty undermines all of this.

When natural or political disasters strike, they create questions. Will supply chains remain stable and predictable? Will consumers still go out and spend money, or will they have jobs at all? Will lending tighten up? How will this affect property values and, as a result, the investments of both individuals and lending institutions? Economic conditions that, before, had been relatively well known suddenly become unclear.

In turn, that can make any investment position far less clear than it was before.

Why do we buy stocks? said Frederick. We buy stocks on the prospect that the company will be profitable, and more specifically that it will be profitable in the future. If the coronavirus keeps people out of restaurants and out of stores where they might buy a brand of soda, its possible that companys stock will go down over the next quarter, so maybe I dont want to hold that stock anymore.

Thats the rational for any stock. You look at the prospects for the future and, if youre optimistic, you own the stock.

Uncertainty in a stock is measured by what investors call volatility. High volatility means that traders just dont know whats going to happen. Prices could go up or down; the only confidence they have is that something will probably change.

Volatility means movement, said Lubos Pastor, a professor with the University of Chicagos Booth School of Business. It does not mean movement up, or movement down. It means movement in both directions, and I think the last three or four days are a perfect example of that.

In times of high volatility investors tend to look for one of two things: more safety, or more rewards. Its a trading metric called the discount rate; how much do they discount the present value of the stock based on the risks of holding it. That discount rate drives risk premiums, how much return do investors want in order to hold what they now consider to be a riskier asset?

Basically in times of trouble people tend to apply higher discount rates [when they] value stocks, Lubos said. Its a combination of two things. One is our attitudes toward risk, and the other is our perception of risk. The perception of risk is now higher. We now perceive stocks to be riskier than before because we just dont know how stocks are going to play out.

As to changes in attitude toward risk, Lubos said, people often become more risk averse when they hear about major things like a virus.

When the stock market falls in the wake of a political event or natural disaster, it reflects simple uncertainty on the part of traders. They dont feel like they know whats going to happen next, so they change their risk/reward calculations. Stocks that made sense previously no longer meet the new discount rates that firms apply to their position.

This is part of whats going on.

Its not that bloodless though. At the same time as investors run the new reality through their models and numbers, theyre also human beings. They tend to react just as emotionally as anyone else when frightened.

You have to think about human behavior, said Mark Hamrick, senior economic advisor with Bankrate.We tend to think that a lot of this is scientific, and the scientific piece is the sort of unknowable role that algorithms and machines play But with respect to where human behavior is involved, we know that its not an exaggeration to say that fear and greed help to drive a fair amount of market activity.

Here we are with what is truly the textbook example of a black swan, which ultimately is an event that was not largely expected and certainly wasnt on the radar screens for anyones stock forecasts for 2020, Hamrick said. Ultimately, its an emotional response. I think that those of us that do step back from all of this try to remind ourselves, this too shall pass.

Investors get scared when a new virus appears. They get scared when a hurricane flattens communities, when an earthquake shakes apart buildings or when a terrorist attack threatens their homes. Ultimately, even more than the technical analysis of risk vs. reward, short term positions vs. long, this may be the clearest explanation for why the stock market dips and when.

Like the rest of us, traders seek safety when theyre afraid.

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Why Is The Stock Market Slipping? - TheStreet

Human Behavior

Timeline: Singing – The First Art – Vermont Public Radio

In the beginning was the voice. Voice is sounding breath, the audible sign of life. Those beautiful words were written by Otto Jespersen, an early 20th century Danish linguist, in the book Language, Its Nature, Development and Origin. Jespersen was on to something with that statement, voice as the audible sign of life. It reminds me of another popular quote by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Music is the universal language of mankind.

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On Timeline weve been discovering all the ways in which music has changed world and focusing quite a bit on how musicality has shaped us as a species. Weve already talked about how music and language are connected, and weve discussed the physical, cognitive and emotional benefits making music has on our bodies and our minds. In this episode, lets explore music as the universal language of humanity.

Ancient Hindus called singing The first art. They marked playing instruments as the second and dancing the third. That phrase though, Singing: The First Art is the title of a popular textbook on Bel Canto, or beautiful-singing style, written by Dan H. Marek. The first lesson in that textbook on operatic technique uses a popular quote in Italian, Chi sa ben respirare e sillibare sapra ben cantare, those who know how to breathe and pronounce well, know how to sing well.

Theres not a culture on this planet that doesnt sing. Let me put that statement into perspective. Not every culture wears clothes, especially our Western idea of clothing. Not every culture has developed writing or mathematics. There are even cultures that dont kiss! However, every culture uses their voice in song.

In 2018, Harvard University conducted a study that seems to lend credence to Longfellows words. 750 online participants from 60 different countries were played short, 14-second clips of songs from cultures around the world. The participants were able to identify whether a song was a lullaby, a dancing song or a healing song regardless of where the music came from or their familiarity with the culture. You can take the same quiz yourself at the website of The Harvard Gazette.

The findings of this study run counter to what most ethnomusicologists, psychologists and other experts would have predicted. It has been assumed that the understanding and appreciation of music is a learned trait, tied to our cultural identity. But this study begins to paint another picture; the possibility of an innate human ability to understand music and song. Samuel Mehr is one of the researchers behind the Harvard study. Mehr states that, This kind of basic, cross-cultural fact-finding about human behavior is the first step in developing a new science of music.

Weve always believed that music has the power to cross boundaries and bring people together. It seems that science is starting to catch up as well.

Find out when and how music changed us and the world and follow the Timeline.

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Timeline: Singing - The First Art - Vermont Public Radio

Human Behavior

When You Hate Your Neighbor, and Then Your Kids Start Dating – The New York Times

In his essay Everybodys Protest Novel, James Baldwin lambastes Harriet Beecher Stowes one-dimensional portrayal of Uncle Tom. The protest novel, he writes, becomes something very closely resembling the zeal of those alabaster missionaries to Africa to cover the nakedness of the natives to reduce all Americans to the compulsive, bloodless dimensions of a guy named Joe. Stowes Uncle Tom, her only black man, has been robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex.

Much like Uncle Tom, Xavier, the perfect biracial teenager, is presented as a nonthreatening fantasy for the books white audience. When a girl sexts Xavier, inviting him for a repeat of an encounter theyve had together, he mechanistically thinks, What straight cis male wouldnt? But Xavier wouldnt, because when it came to hookup culture, hed figured out fast he wasnt built for that. An absurd amount of real estate is given to Xaviers good grades, good work ethic, good recommendations. Before eating an apple, he shines it on his shirt.

Just as Brad Whitman functions as a testimony against flamboyant spending, Xavier operates as a paragon of humility. His car? A paint-flaking Honda. His guitar? He saved up for it by working a minimum-wage job, without a lot of complaint. His matriculation at an elite private college? By means of a substantial scholarship. Xaviers bootstrapping is matched with an active rejection of surface symbols of blackness and hip-hop. I hate cornbread, he says. Out loud. To himself. The idea of wearing diamond earrings? Xavier says, As if. When things turn dire for Xavier, his respectability politics are all he has to cling to: He wasnt just some random black perp, a thug from the hood. He was half white (not that it should matter). Upon discovering the apostrophe in front of the word hood, I was overcome and placed the novel down. As far as Fowlers black characters are concerned, to quote Baldwin, We have only the authors word that they are Negro and they are, in all other respects, as white as she can make them.

A Good Neighborhood is a pitch-perfect example of how literary endeavors of allyship not to be confused with indictments of systemic oppression can limit a novels understanding of human behavior. It provides the same frustration one feels at Thanksgiving, when your self-described open-minded aunt wont shut up about the beautiful gay couple she waves to at the gym. Is it possible to enjoy a work of art with bad politics? Absolutely. Ive seen Pretty Woman nine times, minimum. But when a story is presented as art and activism, it becomes the readers responsibility to take the novel at its repetitive word. Here, in this good neighborhood, it is not a tragedy that violence happens to black men, but rather, that it can happen to one of the good ones. If America is a house on fire, A Good Neighborhood is mostly concerned with exiting quietly, in a single-file line.

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When You Hate Your Neighbor, and Then Your Kids Start Dating - The New York Times

Human Behavior

The Big Problem With Top-Down Office Design – Propmodo

After enough study of human behavior, it becomes apparent that, oftentimes, leaders dont always act in ways that benefit their followers. Economists and political scientists call this the agency problem. What is a leader if not an agent of the people? They are supposed to lead. They are obligated to consider their principles best interest. This problem has bled into every aspect of how our financial and political systems operate.

Urban planning is a place where agency problems are blindingly obvious to spot. There are notable failures around the world, from poor zoning policy to insufficient planning for growth to legacies of racism and classism, particularly around housing. While the fault gets placed on professional urban planners the disciplines integrative nature, taking cues (and following orders from) other principles, like economics and politics, means that it is particularly vulnerable to being negatively impacted by external forces.

Someone has to make the hard decisions when it comes to space planning, making it a top-down process. This can create opportunities for leaders to focus on the wrong things when it comes to helping the people who use it. A great (horrible) example is Brasilia. The federal capital of Brazil, Brasilia was built in five short years to be the perfect Brazilian city. Rigidly-planned buildings housed governmental offices or living quarters, while expansive parks offered open space. The master-planned portion of the city, with its sweeping highways, long parks and copy-pasted buildings, looks like artwork from the satellite perspective.

This appearance hides a number of major challenges facing the city. The rigidly-planned housing available within the city was unable to absorb the impacts of the construction workers who actually constructed the buildings, as well as the subsequent waves of transplants to the area. Designer Lucio Costas aggressively car-centric design allowed plenty of space for streets and exit ramps of all sorts, but shorthanded the pedestrian in a major way. While Brasilia is loved by some, it has failed to evolve organically as a city, largely the result of its prescriptive design.

The downfalls of top-down design dont just show up at the city level. Take a look at your local architecture and development website, and youll inevitably see tons of people, NIMBY or not, complaining about the newest urban planning initiatives. At an even smaller scale, consider the dynamics of design within office buildings, where spaces are generally expected to be used as-is regardless of the particular needs of their rank and file occupants. If there are cubicles, the employees will get cubicles, even if they primarily need to collaborate. If there are private, enclosed offices, thats what the employees are going to get, even if they were less productive in the privacy of separate workspace.

This is a huge challenge facing open offices today, as well. In our most recent research report, we investigated the studies and media surrounding the increasingly-common open office, the vast majority of which is overwhelmingly negative. This makes sense, since there are a lot of different types of employees who wouldnt like the open office layout: people who have been used to enclosed offices or cubicles for their entire professional lives, people who are easily distracted by noise, people who dont want or need to collaborate, and people who make a lot of calls. For fun, think about the workspace in the television show The Office. Is it any wonder that the employees of Dunder Mifflin waste seemingly 90% of every workday? Its an office full of phone-centric salespeople and concentration-heavy accountants, and the majority of them work in the same open space without even a semblance of privacy or room to focus. Of course, they spend all day planning parties and bothering each other. Theres no way youre buckling down to knock out an expense report or close a big sale in that kind of environment.

As in Brasilia, one of the fundamental challenges of the modern open office (or really, the office in general) is that it prescribes the use of space instead of providing a spatial canvas for employees to use as they see fit. There is no flexibility. Of course, companies have size parameters and budgets to work within, but it doesnt excuse the vast majority of offices that simply tell their employees to sit down at their desk and power through the day, especially in an age when workplace flexibility has been shown to increase productivity. Solutions for these inadequate spaces dont even need to be tech-centric. Urban planners and designers have been using design charrettes to gain stakeholder input for years.

CBREs Peter Andrew, the senior director of workplace strategies in Asia Pacific, mentioned using a similar approach. According to Peter, CBRE has been finding success with rapid two-day workshops where we bring a large group of senior leaders into a room and facilitate a debate and discussion around how [the office space] works, as well as the underlying design principlesin the last 18 months of experimentation, Ive seen more creativity in the completion of work environments than Ive ever seen before.

Whether the scale at hand is the office or the city, spatial planners cannot afford to design from the top down without user buy-in. Imagine taking a software project from alpha to public launch, completely skipping the beta test. What a disaster that would be! The same can be said for physical spaces. Brasilia may have been built half a century ago, but its lessons, and its car-centric streets, live on.

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The Big Problem With Top-Down Office Design - Propmodo