Full Episode Description Yoooo, welcome my friend to another episode of the Chasing Poker Greatness podcast! Im your host, founder of EnhanceYourEdge.com Brad Wilson and todays guest is the only 4-time WPT champion on the planet, the one and only Darren Elias.Darren has over $7.5 million in career live cashes to go along with a pretty, pretty, pretty good $3.8 million in lifetime online career winnings all despite being a low-volume player. His career highlights include:- The aforementioned FOUR WPT titles, including: the WPT Bobby Baldwin Classic, 2017 WPT Fallsview, season 16 WPT Tournament of Champions, and (Darrens personal favorite win) the 2014 WPT Borgata Open.- Winning the 2012 World Championship of Online Poker high roller event for a cool $574k.- And a 2009 FTOPs gold medal for $126k.Our conversation covers a ton of ground from how Darren got his start playing cards in a way thats very near and dear to my own heart playing Yahoo! Hearts, to his first tournament bink and subsequent bankroll explosion to over $500k.There are too many greatness bombs to count headed your way, including:- How human beings are driven by personal interests and incentives that skew their opinions.- Darrens thoughts on the re-entry vs. freezeout debate. - Why AI is an existential, imminent threat to the present and future of online poker.- Why Darren spends most of his time studying human behavior and analyzing patterns to improve his poker game.- And much, much more!So, without any further ado, I bring to you the great Darren Elias.
Category Archives: Human Behavior
How to break up with your phone, explained by a phone addiction researcher – The Next Web
TNW Answers is a live Q&A platform where we invite interesting people in tech who are much smarter than us to answer questions from TNW readers and editors for an hour.
On average, people spend four hours on their phone every day, were addicted to our phones, but its not all our fault. Apps are designed to manipulate our brain chemistry to make us stay on their platform for as long as possible because thats what benefits their bottom line. Everything you see in an app is a result of a human decision and is carefully designed to keep you hooked for hours on end.
While it may not be entirely our fault, Catherine Price, the author of How to Break up with Your Phone, recently hosted a TNW Answerssession and provided some actionable advice on how to create a healthierrelationship with your phone.
[Read: Google wants to reduce your screen time with an envelope?]
Price suggests signing up for the free 7-day phone breakup challenge on Screen Life Balance. This is the introduction to a longer program outlined in How to Break up with Your Phone, which gives you daily assignments designed to jump start a new relationship including switching your phone to black and white.
For the time being, one thing you can do right now is identify a few things that you WANT to be spending time on but supposedly never have time for, such as reading, exercising, meditating, etc. Then, identify a few ways in which your phone habits are standing in the way. Your goal isnt to spend less time on your phone; its to spend more time on your LIFE. This shift in thinking can be a powerful motivator for change.
Most unhealthy phone habits are fueled by FOMO and mindless scrolling on addictive sites like Instagram and Facebook you may even notice a pattern in your own habits where you put down your phone and pick it up again, for no reason, minutes later.
To break this habit, Price suggests incorporating a speed bump, a small obstacle that snaps you out of autopilot and makes you realize that youve just reached for your phone. You could simply put a rubber band or hair tie around your phone to start. Then, when you reach for your phone on autopilot youll have a quick moment of wondering why theres a band around your phone thats the moment when you can ask yourself what you picked up your phone to and what else you could do instead.
Ever since the first picture was uploaded to Instagram, scientists have been researching the consequences of living our lives through a smartphone. In recent years, its been argued that excessive screen time among young people can have numerous negative effects such as depression and anxiety.
But among all the research comes inconsistent results, or even contradictory findings. In an op-ed published in the Nature journal last week, it was argued that screen time is too vague of a metric to truly understand human behavior.
I think that screen time can be a good starting place, but I dont love it because it lumps all time in together, and makes it seem as if any use of your phone is bad. But thats not true our phones are amazing tools.
Also, it doesnt take into account how your phone time fits into your overall screen time. For example, if I were to spend 20 minutes on my phone one day, it might seem great on Screen Time but what if I spent 13 hours on my laptop that day? Is that a healthy day? And the opposite would also be true: if I spent 5 hours on my phone, that might seem bad, but it could mean that I didnt spend any time at all in front of my computer.
As far as time trackers go, Price recommends Moment, an app that allows you to exclude particular apps so you can focus on monitoring the apps that you are actually concerned about and not worry about the rest. For example, youre probably not concerned about the amount of time you spend using Lyft or Google Maps.
Its worth noting that breaking up with your phone doesnt mean completing removing it from your life, its about learning new habits to create a healthier relationship, and providing you more time to spend less time scrolling and more time IRL.
You can read Prices entire TNW Answers session here.
Read next: This AI can perfectly dub videos in Indic languages -- and correct lip syncing
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How to break up with your phone, explained by a phone addiction researcher - The Next Web
Feed.fm Fitness And Wellness Customers Innovate With Music – PR Web
Music has the ability to affect both behavioral change, like pushing harder during a workout, and physiological change, like rewiring neural connections. - Lauren Pufpaf, COO Feed.fm
SAN FRANCISCO (PRWEB) February 14, 2020
Feed.fm today announced a new set of leading fitness and wellness brands are leveraging the platform to help customers and clients heal faster and exercise better. Feed.fm provides the know how for a wide variety of businesses to overcome difficult licensing, curation and technological challenges to integrate popular music into their brand experiences.
Musics power to heal and motivate has been known for millennia, but were only recently seeing a broader understanding of the wide range of benefits, said Lauren Pufpaf, COO of Feed.fm. Music has the ability to affect both behavioral change, like pushing harder during a workout, and physiological change, like rewiring neural connections. Were excited to make music work for our latest fitness and wellness partners as they seek to improve their customers mental and physical wellbeing.
New partners on the platform include:
Commercial-Grade Fitness Equipment Paired with Expert CoachingMyxFitness- Positioned as the Un-Peloton, Myx Fitness is designed to meet users wherever they are on their personal wellness journeys. Myx Fitness offers hundreds of classes ranging from cycling, HIIT, cardio dance and barre to yoga, mindful movement, meditation and everything in between. With commercial-grade equipment and a 21.5 HD touchscreen, the company aims for a truly immersive home training experience.
High Quality Video WorkoutsFitOn - Employing unique, innovative technology, FitOn boosts motivation and accountability through a one-of-a-kind social experience that allows users to interact and compete with friends inside and outside of class. FitOn has a roster of top trainers and recently added celebrity partners Jonathan Van Ness and Gabrielle Union.
Community and Wellness99 walks - While 90% of moms want to lose weight and improve fitness, the company also found that 73% of moms feel lonely and isolated. Their simple but powerful mission is create community, improve wellness and inspire happiness through the simple act of walking together.
Innovating Health CareMayo Clinic The number one hospital in America is dedicated to inspiring hope and providing the best care to every patient. With the addition of Feed.fm powered in-room music, the team continues to innovate on behalf of the patient.
A.I. Improvements to Re-envision Home WorkoutsNeuralx World-class technologists, scientists, physiologists and fitness experts are creating a revolutionary, remote workout experience. More to come soon.
Regardless of the health, wellness or fitness experience, Feed.fm is able to help any brand avoid legal gray areas thanks to the companys expertise and commitment to music licensing simplification. Feed.fms team of curators use a proprietary blend of algorithms combined with human expertise to curate music that best matches a brands experience. They understand the nuances of how music impacts human behavior, and have amassed millions of points of proprietary metadata to take a scientific approach to create the best possible soundtrack for users.
About Feed.fmFeed.fm is a technology platform that makes it easy for brands to legally and seamlessly harness the power of music to engage and retain their customers. Feed.fms team handles the licensing and technical integration of curated music stations to help brands increase key growth and customer retention metrics. Based in San Francisco, Feed.fm was co-founded by Jeff Yasuda (CEO), Lauren Pufpaf (COO) and Eric Lambrecht (CTO), and is backed by investors that include Crunchfund, Core Ventures Group, KEC Ventures, and Fyrfly. For more information, visit https://feed.fm/.
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Feed.fm Fitness And Wellness Customers Innovate With Music - PR Web
Genetic Secrets of How a Strange Marine Animal Produces Unlimited Eggs and Sperm Over Its Lifetime – SciTechDaily
Piwi1-positive spermatogonia are shown in yellow; cell nuclei are in turquoise. Germ cell induction and all stages of gametogenesis can be visualized in these clonal animals. Credit: Timothy DuBuc, Ph.D. Swarthmore College
National Human Genome Research Institute-supported research of Hydractinia could provide clues to human reproductive conditions.
A little-known ocean-dwelling creature most commonly found growing on dead hermit crab shells may sound like an unlikely study subject for researchers, but this animal has a rare ability it can make eggs and sperm for the duration of its lifetime. This animal, called Hydractinia, does so because it produces germ cells, which are precursors to eggs and sperm, nonstop throughout its life. Studying this unique ability could provide insight into the development of human reproductive system and the formation of reproductive-based conditions and diseases in humans.
By sequencing and studying the genomes of simpler organisms that are easier to manipulate in the lab, we have been able to tease out important insights regarding the biology underlying germ cell fate determination knowledge that may ultimately help us better understand the processes underlying reproductive disorders in humans, Dr. Andy Baxevanis, director of the National Human Genome Research Institutes (NHGRI) Computational Genomics Unit and co-author of the paper. NHGRI is part of the National Institutes of Health.
Piwi1-positive oocytes are shown in yellow; cell nuclei are in turquoise. Germ cell induction and all stages of gametogenesis can be visualized in these clonal animals. Credit: Timothy DuBuc, Ph.D. Swarthmore College
In a study published in the journal Science, collaborators at NHGRI, the National University of Ireland, Galway, and the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience at the University of Florida, Augustine, reported that activation of the gene Tfap2 in adult stem cells in Hydractinia can turn those cells into germ cells in a cycle that can repeat endlessly.
In comparison, humans and most other mammals generate a specific number of germ cells only once in their lifetime. Therefore, for such species, eggs and sperm from the predetermined number of germ cells may be formed over a long period of time, but their amount is restricted. An international team of researchers have been studying Hydractinias genome to understand how it comes by this special reproductive ability.
Hydractinia lives in colonies and is closely related to jellyfish and corals. Although Hydractinia is dissimilar to humans physiologically, its genome contains a surprisingly large number of genes that are like human disease genes, making it a useful animal model for studying questions related to human biology and health.
Hydractinia colonies possess feeding polyps and sexual polyps as a part of their anatomy. The specialized sexual polyps produce eggs and sperm, making them functionally similar to gonads in species like humans.
Timing of germ cell formation in Hydractinia versus most animals. Credit: Timothy DuBuc, Ph.D. Swarthmore College
During human embryonic development, a small pool of germ cells that will eventually become gametes is set aside, and all sperm or eggs that humans produce during their lives are the descendants of those original few germ cells. Loss of these germ cells for any reason results in sterility, as humans do not have the ability to replenish their original pool of germ cells.
In a separate study, Dr. Baxevanis at NHGRI and Dr. Christine Schnitzler at the Whitney Lab have completed the first-ever sequencing of the Hydractinia genome. In this study, researchers used this information to scrutinize the organisms genome for clues as to why there are such marked differences in reproductive capacity between one of our most distant animal relatives and ourselves.
Having this kind of high-quality, whole-genome sequence data in hand allowed us to quickly narrow down the search for the specific gene or genes that tell Hydractinias stem cells to become germ cells, said Dr. Baxevanis.
The researchers compared the behavior of genes in the feeding and sexual structures of Hydractinia. They found that the Tfap2 gene was much more active in the sexual polyps than in the feeding polyps in both males and females. This was a clue that the gene might be important in generating germ cells.
The scientists next confirmed that Tfap2 was indeed the switch that controls the process of perpetual germ cell production. The researchers used the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique to remove Tfap2 from Hydractinia and measured the resulting effects on germ cell production. They found that removing Tfap2 from Hydractinia stops germ cells from forming, bolstering the theory that Tfap2 controls the process.
The researchers also wanted to know if Tfap2 was influencing specific cells to turn into germ cells. Their analysis revealed that Tfap2 only causes adult stem cells in Hydractinia to turn into germ cells.
Interestingly, the Tfap2 gene also regulates germ cell production in humans, in addition to its involvement in myriad other processes. However, in humans, the germ cells are separated from non-germ cells early in development. Still, despite the vast evolutionary distance between Hydractinia and humans, both share a key gene that changes stem cells into germ cells.
Reference: Transcription factor AP2 controls cnidarian germ cell induction by Timothy Q. DuBuc, Christine E. Schnitzler, Eleni Chrysostomou, Emma T. McMahon, Febrimarsa, James M. Gahan, Tara Buggie, Sebastian G. Gornik, Shirley Hanley, Sofia N. Barreira, Paul Gonzalez, Andreas D. Baxevanis and Uri Frank, 14 February 2020, Science.DOI: 10.1126/science.aay6782
This article describes a basic research finding. Basic research increases our understanding of human behavior and biology, which is foundational to advancing new and better ways to prevent, diagnose and treat disease. Science is an unpredictable and incremental process each research advance builds on past discoveries, often in unexpected ways. Most clinical advances would not be possible without the knowledge of fundamental basic research.
The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) is one of the 27 institutes and centers at the NIH, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services. The NHGRI Division of Intramural Research develops and implements technology to understand, diagnose and treat genomic and genetic diseases.
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Genetic Secrets of How a Strange Marine Animal Produces Unlimited Eggs and Sperm Over Its Lifetime - SciTechDaily
Last Call: What do you feed a very good boy or girl? – The Takeout
Joe, a very good boyPhoto: Aimee Levitt
I have very mixed feelings about the Westminster Kennel Club Show. The other night, I was reading the coverage online and was trying to explain it to my dog Joe, a puppy who is still learning all the ways of the world. (He sometimes still stands and watches in wonder as the el train rolls by.) Its a contest, Joe, I said. Theyre trying to determine the best dog... He was napping with his head on my lap, fighting for space with the laptop, but as soon as I said that, he opened one big brown eye and looked at me in a way I might have said was resentful, except that Joe is still pure of heart and hasnt learned about resentment yet. I know, youre the best dog. And also the best-looking dog. I thought for a moment. Joe closed his eyes and shoved the computer a few inches. Okay, Joe, I said. Theyre trying to figure out which dog fulfills some arbitrary standards of dog beauty and behavior, which is really dumb because all dogs are beautiful and perfect, especially you, and, yes, yes, youre right, lets go back to looking at things that are more important, like Bachelor recaps. (Not that Joe is very interested in any human behavior that doesnt involve either food or himself, but at least The Bachelor doesnt question one of his core life beliefs, e.g., that he is the best dog in the world. And some of these recaps are works of comic genius.)
Still, theres something about Westminster that gets to me every year, and this year I am very pissed that Daniel the golden retriever got beat out by Siba, the standard poodle. (Sibas haircut also disturbs me. Its a real villain haircut.) But I also cant stop thinking about how Siba refused to eat her ceremonial victory dinner at Sardis because it was steak and she will only eat chicken, even if its in McChicken sandwich form. But Siba was hand-fed that chicken from a silver platter! I guess thats a pretty good reward.
Joes more of a bacon dog himself. I think thats what I would feed him if he won something very important like Westminster, or, lets be honest, just for existing for another day, because we all know that we dont deserve dogs and one of the reasons they put up with our idiocy is because we feed them.
What do you feed your dog for being a very good girl or boy?
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Last Call: What do you feed a very good boy or girl? - The Takeout
The Father of Siri Has Grown Wary of the Artificial Intelligence He Helped Create – Willamette Week
As a psychologist, Tom Gruber is in awe of Facebook. As a computer scientist and citizen of the earth, it scares the crap out of him.
Facebook runs experiments on human behavior that psychologists can only dream about, Gruber says. The trials are done on millions of people, a sample size that's impossible in academia. Dozens of times a day, Mark Zuckerberg tweaks his artificial intelligence to see what will keep his 2.5 billion subscribers scrolling through Facebook, and to make them confuse advertising with news so they click on the ads, Gruber says.
"They have the world's largest psychology experiment at their disposal every single day," Gruber says. "They can do experiments that science can't do, at scale."
Gruber, who speaks at TechfestNW this April, is hardly a bomb-thrower. He is a pioneer in artificial intelligence and the co-inventor of Siri, the digital assistant on the iPhone that uses AI and speech recognition to answer billions of questions each year.
Since selling Siri to Apple in 2010, though, Gruber has become one of a small group of technologists who have grown wary of the AI they helped create. He plans to talk about the dangerand promiseof artificial intelligence at TechfestNW.
Facebook and YouTube have more than 2 billion users each, making them as big as the world's two biggest religions, Christianity and Islam, Gruber says.
"And I would add that even the people who pray to Mecca five times a day, only do it five times a day," Gruber says. "Our millennials check their phones 150 times a day."
Gruber has deep roots in techdom. He earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and psychology from Loyola University in New Orleans, got his Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Massachusetts, then did research at Stanford University for five years.
Siri grew out of a Stanford spinoff called SRI International. Gruber consulted at SRI in 2007, and, soon after, he and two others, Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, spun off newer digital-assistant technology that went beyond the DARPA work. They named the new company Siri, which means "beautiful woman who leads you to victory."
Siri is actually a collection of powerful neural networks: mathematical formulas running on computers that analyze huge amounts of data and learn the patterns within them. Turn a neural net loose on a million samples of spoken language, and it will start to recognize words and their meaning. No longer do programmers have to tell computers what to do, logic step by logic step.
Steve Jobs persuaded Gruber and his partners to sell to Apple in 2010 for some $200 million, according to Wired magazine.
Gruber retired from Apple in 2018 and founded Humanistic AI, a firm that helps companies use machine intelligence to collaborate with humans, not replaceor terrorizethem.
Unlike some AI doomsayers, including Tesla inventor Elon Musk and podcasting neuroscientist Sam Harris, Gruber thinks AI can be tamed. Right now, it's a science experiment gone wrong. Frankenstein never meant for his monster to become a killer, and Zuckerberg, he says, never intended Facebook to set us at each other's throats, over politics or anything else.
"My argument is that this is an unintended consequence," Gruber says. "We'll give them a pass on being evil geniuses. Maybe some of them are. But let's assume good intentions."
When it comes to Zuckerberg, assuming good intentions is controversial. In July, Facebook agreed to pay a record $5 billion fine to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission that it abused users' personal information.
So call Gruber an optimist. He thinks the same algorithms that prey on our bad habits can be used to encourage good ones.
Tech companies make excuses for why they can't police their networks, and most involve money. So far, humans are better at sorting lies from truth, and hate from news. That means you have to hire a lot of humans, which is anathema to the tech monopolies. Gruber says they need to suck it up.
"It's like when the auto industry said, 'Air bags are going to put us out of business, so don't impose this onerous thing on us,'" Gruber says. "It's all bullshit."
And there's more. Why not run all these vast experiments on human behavior to improve human life, instead of wrecking it? Why not use AI to change the habits that lead to type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and suicide?
"We have weak theories about what makes people tick, and what to do to help them do better things," Gruber says. "But AI has shown that if you want to get 2 billion people addicted to something that's not good for them, you can do it."
AI doesn't know if it's operating for good or evil, Gruber says. Someday it may, but for now, it's up to humans to direct it.
So far, we've been crappy shepherds.
GO: TechfestNW is at Portland State University's Viking Pavilion, 930 SW Hall St., techfestnw.com. Thursday-Friday, April 2-3. Visit the website for tickets.
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The Father of Siri Has Grown Wary of the Artificial Intelligence He Helped Create - Willamette Week
The Illusion of Genetic Romance – Scientific American
Genetic matchmaking is entering the mainstream. The prospect of meeting and selecting potential romantic partners based upon purported DNA compatibilityuntil very recently the subject of science fiction from films like The Perfect 46 to independently published romances by Clarissa Lakehas increasingly garnered both scientific and commercial attention. Earlier this year, Nozze, a well-established Japanese dating service, established a DNA Matching Course and hosted a related DNA Matching Party, both first-time offerings in that nation. For 86,400 yen ($790), men are paired with prospective dates based upon 16,000 variations in HLA gene complexes.
Nozze joins a market commercializing the science of attraction that already includes Swiss pioneer GenePartner, Houston-based Pheramor and services that combine genetic and non-genetic profiles like Instant Chemistry and SingldOut. Considerable media attention has been devoted to investigating the science behind these services; unfortunately, both the ethical and sociological implications have received relatively short shrift.
The underlying science itself is hardly convincing. Since the 1970s, researchers have found that variations in the genes of the major histocompatability complex (MHC) play a role in mate selection in mice. Similar patterns have subsequently been found in fish, pheasants and bats, but not in sheep. The possibility that MHC plays a role in human mate selection first arose as a result of a well-known experiment by Swiss biologist Claus Wedekind that is colloquially known as the sweaty T-shirt study. Researchers had men wear T-shirts for extended periods of time before placing the shirts in boxes; then they had women sniff the shirts to rate the former wearers sexual attractiveness. They found an inverse correlation between MHC similarity and attraction score.
Since that time, studies in human beings have yielded mixed results. The most persuasive data come from an investigation of Hutterite couples in North America who appear to display nonrandom MHC assorted mating preferences. But this correlationgiving genetic matchmaking the benefit of the doubtestablishes at most a natural preference, and a natural preference is a far cry from connubial compatibility. To our knowledge, nobody has actually surveyed married Hutterite couples to determine whether MHC compatibility plays a role in their levels of marital bliss, or the quality of their dinner conversation, or the frequency of their escapades between the sheets. On a more global scale, no data have yet established a relationship between MHC compatibility and lower divorce rates.
One must ask precisely what we mean by compatibility. At the most fundamental level, couples with MHC-dissimilarity (and thus more so-called mating compatibility) demonstrate lower rates of spontaneous abortion. The dissimilarity may also increase genetic polymorphism, which in turn may lower the manifestation of recessive diseases. However, the impact of MHC-dissimilarity on either of these phenomena is likely to prove relatively small, and therefore should not be expected to play a significant role in the marital happiness or cohesion of many couples.
In addition, genetic polymorphism may help species survive environmental challengesyet evolutionary advantage is probably not a major variable that most couples consider when seeking romantic bliss. One cannot also ignore the unknowns: Matching couples based on MHC markers may pose some survival benefits, but nobody knows at what cost; it is theoretically possible that the offspring of such couples are also more aggressive or less creative, just to name two traits arbitrarilyand magnifying these effects artificially might prove significantly deleterious to our civilization in the long run.
Harvard geneticist George Church has championed another version of compatibility. Using whole genome sequencing, he hopes to match couples so as to reduce or eliminate many recessively inherited diseases. In Ashkenazi populations, the Committee for Prevention of Jewish Genetic Diseases (better known as Dor Yeshorim) already uses a voluntary testing and matching system to prevent disorders such as Tay-Sachs, Canavan and Niemann-Pick. Church hopes to implement a variation of this program for couples everywhere, claiming it could end some 7,000 genetic diseases and save 50 million lives a year.
The ethical implications of Churchs proposal are complex. If couples are encouraged to use his pairing system, then those who find love outside the realm of genetic matchmaking and produce offspring with genetic disorders may be unfairly stigmatized. At a more practical level, even if the elimination of recessive illnesses is a social good, it is clearly not the sort of compatibility most daters seek in a matchmaking service.
When most people speak of romantic compatibility, the odds are that they mean factors like temperament, tastes and interests. To date, no study has connected these with any genetic variable. MHC-dissimilarity is as likely to lead to partners with temperamental and aesthetic difference as to those with similarities. Ironically, even compatibility appears to have minimal impact on satisfaction in relationships. Multiple studies have shown that universal traits such as kindness, rather than similarities, are the keys to marital happiness.
Genetic matchmaking reflects two concerning trends in modern society. The first is the pandemic loneliness and search for connection that has arisen in the wake of the breakdown of traditional community structures. To use a metaphor first introduced by political scientist Robert Putnam, we are a society bowling alone. We are increasingly willing to shell out a few hundred dollars or a few thousand yen for anything that smacks of a cure.
Genetic matchmaking also manifests the misguided belief that science can solve all of our problems. Unfortunately, we cannot discover, pay or invent our way out of our isolation. Science may ultimately provide tools that help us rebuild societal cohesion, but without meaningful changes in social policy and human behavior, science alone has little to offer. In this case, the science in question is, at best, being misusedand arguably not science at all.
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The Illusion of Genetic Romance - Scientific American
Study looks into how neurons function in adults with young-onset Parkinson’s – Daily Bruin
Adults with young-onset Parkinsons disease may be born with malfunctioning brain cells, a new Cedars-Sinai study found with assistance from UCLA researchers.
This suggests factors other than environmental exposure likely contribute to neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinsons.
Young-onset Parkinsons disease, a type of Parkinsons that develops before the age of 50, accounts for about 10% of all Parkinsons cases. Young-onset Parkinsons is a neurodegenerative disease, meaning it damages the central nervous system and results in a loss of proper motor function.
More than a million people are affected by this in the United States alone, said Zhan Shu, a postdoctoral scholar at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior who participated in the Cedars-Sinai research.
To model the neurons involved in Parkinsons disease, the researchers used induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs adult red blood cells that have been converted into stem cells that can give rise to any type of cell in the body. They converted iPSCs from individuals with young-onset Parkinsons disease into neurons that produce dopamine.
iPSC cells from patients with young-onset Parkinsons showed the signature changes seen in neurons in the brains of those with Parkinsons. Their findings were published in Nature Medicine in January.
Dopamine plays a large role in neural functions, and a lack of regulation of dopamine production causes many neurodegenerative diseases, Shu said. In individuals with Parkinsons disease, neurons that produce dopamine die off, which impairs motor regulation.
This will usually start with a tremor, Shu said. Its pretty obvious for family to see. Once you start to show symptoms, they move from the hands to the legs to the nonmotor parts as well.
The use of iPSCs allows researchers to determine how the disease progresses in absence of external environmental factors, said Alexander Laperle, a co-author of the study from Cedars-Sinai. iPSCs are important for this research because they simulate how diseased neurons form during human development.
Laperle compared the current research technique to a car crash. Researchers can see the impacts and physiology of the disease, however they cant see any of the development, similarly to how seeing a crashed car doesnt tell an observer how the crash occurred.
We dont know anything about how (neurodegenerative diseases) originated or progressed, he said. You cant directly observe this in a person.
Many of Parkinsons neurodegenerative symptoms occur many years before obvious symptoms can be detected, said Nigel Maidment, a professor at the Semel Institute who also participated in the research. Many of the symptoms are not as visible or obvious, Maidment said. Other symptoms can include cognitive issues, digestive tract issues and sleep disturbances.
There are many nonmotor symptoms that patients often describe as more distressing, Maidment said.
Detecting the presence of Parkinsons disease and malfunctioning neurons before major symptoms develop could assist researchers in potentially finding ways to slow or stop the diseases progression, Maidment added.
If we are to halt the progression of the disease it will be necessary to identify such changes early, Maidment said.
Many of the genetic causes of Parkinsons disease are still unknown. Laperle added that if any cases are genetic, it is likely that many genes interact to cause Parkinsons disease. The illness has no cure, but different treatment options can help individuals manage the symptoms.
Approximately 15% of Parkinsons disease patients have a family history of the illness, Shu said. It is still unclear how genetic causes contribute to the risk of developing the disease, he added.
Shu said the iPSC research at Cedars-Sinai will give researchers new models for drug development. He said he hopes to expand research territories beyond preclinical animal models.
Using human iPSCs instead of animal cells has the potential to make the search for treatment more effective, he added.
Thats the whole purpose of the paper, to find a platform for people to test (drugs), Shu said.
Many treatments that work in animal models cannot be translated to people, Laperle said. Part of this reason is because animals dont have neurodegenerative diseases the way humans do, he said.
If I give a drug to a mouse, I can have a positive impact on that animals symptoms, but its not a great predictor of when you give that drug to a person, he said.
Many of the drugs currently on the market only address the symptoms, Laperle said. For example, the drug levodopa helps replace missing dopamine in the central nervous system. However, patients can develop a tolerance to the drug and its efficacy eventually decreases.
Laperle said he hopes this research may allow for the development of more effective drugs that slow or stop the progression of this disease.
There arent any good approaches yet to slow this (progression) down or restore function, he said.
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Study looks into how neurons function in adults with young-onset Parkinson's - Daily Bruin
Vectra Empowers Organizations to Detect and Stop Office 365 Breaches – AiThority
As Account Takeovers Continue for Office 365, Controlling Risk Remains the Top Concern for Organizations Adopting SaaS Models
Cyber risk is becoming an escalating concern for organizations around the world, and Office 365 data breaches are at the forefront. Even with the rising adoption of incremental security approaches like multi-factor authentication, access controls continue to be circumvented. In fact, 40% of organizations suffer from Office 365 account takeovers. As these data breaches make headlines with growing consistency, the resulting financial and reputational costs mount.
It is far too easy for an attacker to manipulate human behavior and gain high privilege access to business-critical SaaS resources. According to Microsofts Q3 FY19 earnings call, there are more than180 millionmonthly users on Office 365.With so many users, 100% cyber hygiene becomes impossible. To make matters worse, teams continue to struggle to keep up with weekly vendor-driven configuration changes and new best practices. And once an initial foothold is gained in a SaaS application, it is just a matter of time before they laterally move and cross into other parts of the infrastructure.
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Against this backdrop, amassive number of alerts are flooding Security Operations Centers (SOCs), forcing analysts to spend time manually analyzing and prioritizing which ones deserve attention. This is overwhelming security analysts time and organizations security budgets. As threat actors become more efficient at dodging and targeting the enterprise, most analysts simply cant keep up.
Attackers will follow a path of least resistance and the convergence of these elements makes exploiting the cloud easy for them.In no other construct is it fair to expect a person, or security team, to be correct 100% of the time. This is an unacceptable expectation and entirely unfair to security teams, said Vectra CEOHitesh Sheth. The last thing we want is to create more work for security teams. What is needed is technology that removes the dependency on human behavior and human error and brings control back to the security team. This is what Vectra can provide.
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Credential abuse is the leading attack vector in SaaS, especially for Office 365. In an effort to help organizations securely and successfully protect their applications,Vectra AI, the leader innetwork threat detection and response (NDR), is announcing the launch of Cognito Detect for Office 365. Backed by new detection models focused on credentials and privilege in SaaS applications, Vectra expands cloud coverage from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and extends the ability totrack attacker activity pivoting between on-premise, data center, IaaS and SaaS. Given that attackers dont operate in silos, a security solution shouldnt either. Vectra delivers the complete visibility across your deployment footprint that leaves attackers without a place to hide.
Prevention technology has long been available and continues to evolve, however, it doesnt guarantee that data is safe. The real growth has been in detection and response capabilities, which have been long missing from most organizations resources, continued Sheth. We are the first and only NDR to apply privilege-based detections in SaaS applications. Our AI-driven solution seamlessly ties into your existing Office 365 deployment, and detects privilege-based attacker behaviors, giving you full visibility into your SaaS deployments. We continue to be at the forefront of security by detecting privilege abuse behaviors across the entire lifecycle of an attack in the cloud.
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Vectra Empowers Organizations to Detect and Stop Office 365 Breaches - AiThority
Sticking to Your New Year’s Resolutions: Brown Alpert Medical School Expert LIVE at 4 PM – GoLocalProv
Wednesday, February 12, 2020
Smart Health on GoLocalProv
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Dr. Dale Bond PHOTO: Warren Alpert Medical School
Studies show that only 8% of Americans who make a New Year's resolution actually keep them all year and 80% have failed by the start of February Bond, a Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at The Miriam Hospital and Brown Alpert Medical School, will talk about setting a workout habit, and when the best time to workout is.
About Bond
Bond received M.S. andPh.D. degrees in Health Promotion and Education at Purdue University and the University of Utah, respectively, and completed postdoctoral training in behavioral medicine at Brown Alpert Medical School.
His research involves twoprincipal areas: (1) assessing and intervening on energy balance behaviors and related mechanisms in the context of bariatric surgery and obesity; and (2) assessment and treatment of behavioral risk factors and comorbidities among individuals who have a migraine.
Dr. Bond has been awarded grants from NIH and other organizations to conduct prospective studies and randomized trials pursuant to advancement of these areas. He also sits on the editorial boards for multipleobesity-relatedjournals, is a member of severalAmerican Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery (ASMBS)and Obesity Society (TOS) committees, was a recent member ofthe NIH Behavioral Interventions and Outcomes study section, and is a research mentor within the NHLBI T32 Postdoctoral Training in Cardiovascular Behavioral Medicine Program at The Miriam Hospital and Brown University.
Warren Alpert Medical School
Since granting its first Doctor of Medicine degrees in 1975, the Warren Alpert Medical School has become a national leader in medical education and biomedical research. By attracting first-class physicians and researchers to Rhode Island over the past four decades, the Medical School and its seven affiliated teaching hospitals have radically improved the state's health care environment, from health care policy to patient care.
"Smart Health" is a GoLocalProv.com segment featuring experts from The Warren Alpert Medical School GoLocal LIVE.