Its not often that a fossil truly rewrites human evolution, but the recent discovery of an ancient extinct ape has some scientists very excited. According to its discoverers, Danuvius guggenmosi combines some human-like features with others that look like those of living chimpanzees. They suggest that it would have had an entirely distinct way of moving that combined upright walking with swinging from branches. And they claim that this probably makes it similar to the last shared ancestor of humans and chimps.

We are not so sure. Looking at a fossilized animals anatomy does give us insights into the forces that would have operated on its bones and so how it commonly moved. But its a big leap to then make conclusions about its behavior, or to go from the bones of an individual to the movement of a whole species. The Danuvius fossils are unusually complete, which does provide some vital new evidence. But how much does it really tell us about how our ancestors moved around?

Danuvius has long and mobile arms, habitually extended (stretched out) legs, feet which could sit flat on the floor, and big toes with a strong gripping action. This is a unique configuration. Showing that a specimen is unique is a prerequisite for classifying it as belonging to a separate, new species that deserves its own name.

But what matters in understanding the specimen is how we interpret its uniqueness. Danuviuss discoverers go from describing its unique anatomy to proposing a unique pattern of movement. When we look at living apes, the relationship between anatomy and movement is not so simple.

The Danuvius find actually includes fossils from four individuals, one of which is nearly complete. But even a group of specimens may not be typical of a species more generally. For instance, humans are known for walking upright, not climbing trees, but the Twa hunter-gatherers are regular tree climbers. These people, whose bones look just like ours, have distinctive muscles and ranges of movement well beyond the human norm. But you could not predict their behavior from their bones.

Every living ape uses a repertoire of movements, not just one. For example, orangutans use clambering, upright or horizontal climbing, suspensory swinging, and assisted bipedalism (walking upright using hands for support). Their movement patterns can vary in complex ways because of individual preference, body mass, age, sex, or activity.

Gorillas, meanwhile, are knuckle-walkers and we used to think they were unable to stand fully upright. But the walking gorilla Ambam is famous for his humanlike stride.

Ultimately, two animals with very similar anatomies can move differently, and two with different anatomies can move in the same way. This means that Danuvius may not be able to serve as a model for our ancestors behavior, even if its anatomy is similar to theirs.

In fact, we believe there are other plausible interpretations of Danuviuss bones. These alternatives give a picture of a repertoire of potential movements that may have been used in different contexts.

For example, one of Danuviuss most striking features is the high ridge on the top of its shinbone, which the researchers say is associated with strongly developed cruciate ligaments, which stabilize the knee joint. The researchers link these strong stabilizing ligaments with evidence for an extended hip and a foot that could be placed flat on the floor to suggest that this ape habitually stood upright. Standing upright could be a precursor to bipedal walking, so the authors suggest that this means Danuvius could have been like our last shared ancestor with other apes.

However, the cruciate ligaments also work to stabilize the knee when the leg is rotating. This only happens when the knee is bent with the foot on the ground. This is why skiers who use knee rotation to turn their bodies often injure these ligaments.

We have not seen the Danuvius bones in real life. But, based on the researchers excellent images and descriptions, an equally plausible interpretation of the pronounced ridge on the top of the shinbone could be that the animal used its knee when it was bent, with significant rotational movement.

Perhaps it hung from a branch above and used its feet to steer by gripping branches below, rather than bearing weight through the feet. This could have allowed it to capitalize on its small body weight to access fruit on fine branches. Alternatively, it could have hung from its feet, using the legs to maneuver and the hands to grasp.

All of these movements fit equally well with Danuvius bones, and could be part of its movement repertoire. So there is no way to say which movement is dominant or typical. As such, any links to our own bipedalism look much less clear-cut.

Danuvius is undoubtedly a very important fossil, with lots to teach us about how varied ape locomotion can be. But we would argue that it is not necessarily particularly like us. Instead, just like living apes, Danuvius would probably have displayed a repertoire of different movements. And we cant say which would have been typical, because anatomy is not enough to reconstruct behavior in full.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

More:
New fossils provide evidence about the evolution of walking - Quartz

Heres whats on tap under the Gold Dome on Monday (December 16th):

SENATE SESSION 1:00 PM Senate Chambers

Voting Session:

A268 [Kean, Sean T./Egan, Joseph V.+2], P.I.C.K. Awareness Act-authorize special license plate to support recovery

A442 [Schaer, Gary S./Freiman, Roy+4], Revenue Advisory Board-establish, provide consensus revenue forcasting advice

A790 [Andrzejczak, Bob/Land, R. Bruce+13], Combat to College Act-mil service memb/vets-grant priority course registration

A791 [Andrzejczak, Bob/Land, R. Bruce+11], Military service-requires higher education institution award appropriate credit

A1212 [McKeon, John F./Gusciora, Reed+12], Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative-clarify intent

A1220 [McKeon, John F./Vainieri Huttle, Valerie+9], Drama Therapists and Dance/Movement Therapists Licensing Act

A1305 [Greenwald, Louis D.+1], William H Fauver Youth Correctional Facility-renames Mountainview Youth Facility

A1478 [Chaparro, Annette/Gusciora, Reed+3], Theater liquor license-revises law

A1582 [Conaway, Herb/Moriarty, Paul D.+9], Dietetics and Nutrition Licensing Act-establish

A1992 [Sumter, Shavonda E./Eustace, Tim+8], Call Center Jobs Act-concerns relocation to a foreign country

A2431 [Benson, Daniel R./Jimenez, Angelica M.+13], Prescr. drug coverage-health insurers prov plans that limit patient cost-sharing

A3101 [Jones, Patricia Egan/Benson, Daniel R.+24], Arts, historical heritage & tourism-incr. minimum amount from hotel fee revenues

A3160 [Lampitt, Pamela R./Giblin, Thomas P.], Cosmetology school clinics-permits charging fees for services rendered to public

A3979 [Lopez, Yvonne/Vainieri Huttle, Valerie+10], Dignity for Incarcerated Primary Caretaker Parents Act

A4493 [Pinkin, Nancy J./Conaway, Herb], Sexually transmitted disease-expedite partner therapy for treatment

A4608 [Zwicker, Andrew/Downey, Joann+3], Applied Behavior Analyst Licensing Act

A5037 [Pintor Marin, Eliana/Speight, Shanique+4], Drugs, counterfeit-enhance penalties

A5070 [Speight, Shanique/Tucker, Cleopatra G.+2], Parking tax-mun. impose, to fund projects to improve access to mass transit

A5098 [Pintor Marin, Eliana/Chaparro, Annette+5], Personal care services-establishes $18 hourly Medicaid reimbursement rate

A5263 [Tully, P. Christopher/Armato, John+4], Firefighters, complete courses at county fire academies-award college credits

A5277 [DeAngelo, Wayne P./Houghtaling, Eric], Professional Boards-eliminates term limits for members

A5509 [Mosquera, Gabriela M./Timberlake, Britnee N.+8], Breastfeeding support-requires health benefits and Medicaid coverage

A5624 [Pintor Marin, Eliana/Munoz, Nancy F.+5], Gubernatorial transition-State employee serve as EEO/Affirmative Action officer

A5625 [Pintor Marin, Eliana/Munoz, Nancy F.+5], Gubernatorial transition positions-payment req, background investigation expense

A5626 [Pintor Marin, Eliana/Munoz, Nancy F.+6], Criminal investigations-disclosure required by applicants for State employment

A5627 [Pintor Marin, Eliana/Munoz, Nancy F.+4], Human resource management of employees-grants authority to Civil Service Comm.

A5628 [Pintor Marin, Eliana/Munoz, Nancy F.+5], Civil Service Comm-estab standardize recordkeeping w/regards to unclassified emp

A5629 [Pintor Marin, Eliana/Munoz, Nancy F.+5], Discrimination or harassment complaints-clarify provisions concerning disclosure

A5630 [Pintor Marin, Eliana/Munoz, Nancy F.+5], Discrimination & harassment-Civil Service Commission estab/maintain hotline

A5631 [Pintor Marin, Eliana/Munoz, Nancy F.+5], Discrimination complaint in the workplace-State agency review

A5632 [Pintor Marin, Eliana/Munoz, Nancy F.+6], Discrimination or harassment complaints-employees receive add training to manage

A5801 [Coughlin, Craig J./Houghtaling, Eric], Wage claims against subcontractors-concerns responsibility of owners

A5802 [Greenwald, Louis D./Downey, Joann+16], Family planning services-makes FY2020;$9.5M

A5817 [Mazzeo, Vincent/Armato, John], Casino key employee license & regis.-concerns drug offense disqualification

S244 [Connors, Christopher J./Andrzejczak, Bob+6], Combat to College Act-mil service memb/vets-grant priority course registration

S247 [Singleton, Troy/Andrzejczak, Bob+8], Arts, historical heritage & tourism-incr. minimum amount from hotel fee revenues

S469 [Singer, Robert W./Gopal, Vin+1], P.I.C.K. Awareness Act-authorize special license plate to support recovery

S611 [Sweeney, Stephen M./Smith, Bob+1], Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative-clarify intent

S618 [Gordon, Robert M./Oroho, Steven V.+3], State revenue estimating and reporting processes-reforms annual

S761 [Cunningham, Sandra B./Ruiz, M. Teresa+19], Earn Your Way Out Act-devel. inmate reentry plan; establish information database

S974 [Singleton, Troy/Kean, Thomas H.+3], Spinal muscular atrophy-requires newborn infants be screened

S993 [Vitale, Joseph F.], Sexually transmitted disease-expedite partner therapy for treatment

S1618 [Van Drew, Jeff/Brown, Chris A.+3], Veterans cert.-requires higher education institution, grant academic credit

S1648 [Diegnan, Patrick J./Kean, Thomas H.+5], Theater liquor license-revises law

S1751 [Beach, James+1], Cosmetology school clinics-permits charging fees for services rendered to public

S1780 [Diegnan, Patrick J./Turner, Shirley K.+3], Call Center Jobs Act-concerns relocation to a foreign country

S1865 [Weinberg, Loretta/Kean, Thomas H.+1], Prescr. drug coverage-health insurers prov plans that limit patient cost-sharing

S2173 [Weinberg, Loretta/Vitale, Joseph F.], Student, mandatory immunizations-clarifies statutory exemptions

S2448 [Diegnan, Patrick J./Singleton, Troy+2], Veterans and their spouses-waives certain prof. and occupational licensing fees

S2449 [Diegnan, Patrick J.+2], Veterans and their spouses-waives commercial driver license fees

S2540 [Greenstein, Linda R./Cruz-Perez, Nilsa+1], Dignity for Incarcerated Primary Caretaker Parents Act

S2625 [Weinberg, Loretta/Ruiz, M. Teresa], Dietetics and Nutrition Licensing Act-establish

S2930 [Bucco, Anthony R./Beach, James+1], Insurance producer licensing fee-exempts honorable discharged mil veterans

S3099 [Weinberg, Loretta/Kean, Thomas H.+1], Behavior Analyst Lic Act-produce socially significant human behavior improvement

S3170 [Cryan, Joseph P./Pou, Nellie+3], Plant closings, mass layoffs-incr. prenotification time & requires severance pay

S3229 [Vitale, Joseph F./Cryan, Joseph P.+5], Drivers licenses & ID cards-creates 2 categories; MVC increase certain fees

S3457 [Sweeney, Stephen M./Andrzejczak, Bob+5], Hooked on Fishing-Not on Drugs Program;$450K

S3471 [Andrzejczak, Bob/Greenstein, Linda R.+2], Drugs, counterfeit-enhance penalties

S3507 [Ruiz, M. Teresa/Rice, Ronald L.+1], Parking tax-mun. impose, to fund projects to improve access to mass transit

S3519 [Corrado, Kristin M.+3], Firefighters, complete courses at county fire academies-award college credits

S3622 [Rice, Ronald L.], William H Fauver Youth Correctional Facility-renames Mountainview Youth Facility

S3734 [Greenstein, Linda R.], Professional Boards-eliminates term limits for members

S3741 [Weinberg, Loretta/Vitale, Joseph F.], For-profit hospitals-report certain information to DOH

S3759 [Addiego, Dawn Marie/Corrado, Kristin M.+1], Special education unit-create within Office of Admin. Law; require annual report

S3763 [Addiego, Dawn Marie/Bateman, Christopher+1], Joint meetings-renames as regional service agencies; grandfathers existing

S3805 [Ruiz, M. Teresa/Pou, Nellie+2], Breastfeeding support-requires health benefits and Medicaid coverage

S3888 [Ruiz, M. Teresa], Economic Redevelopment & Growth Grant Program-extends submission deadlines

S3920 [Pou, Nellie], Manufacturing fac-concern provisions of energy by prov cert energy related taxes

S3975 [Weinberg, Loretta/Corrado, Kristin M.+1], Gubernatorial transition-State employee serve as EEO/Affirmative Action officer

S3976 [Weinberg, Loretta/Corrado, Kristin M.+1], Gubernatorial transition positions-payment req, background investigation expense

S3977 [Weinberg, Loretta/Corrado, Kristin M.+1], Criminal investigations-disclosure required by applicants for State employment

S3978 [Weinberg, Loretta/Corrado, Kristin M.], Human resource management of employees-grants authority to Civil Service Comm.

S3979 [Weinberg, Loretta/Corrado, Kristin M.+1], Civil Service Comm-estab standardize recordkeeping w/regards to unclassified emp

S3980 [Weinberg, Loretta/Corrado, Kristin M.+1], Discrimination or harassment complaints-clarify provisions concerning disclosure

S3981 [Weinberg, Loretta/Corrado, Kristin M.+1], Discrimination & harassment-Civil Service Commission estab/maintain hotline

S3982 [Weinberg, Loretta/Corrado, Kristin M.+1], Discrimination complaint in the workplace-State agency review

S3983 [Weinberg, Loretta+1], Discrimination or harassment complaints-employees receive add training to manage

S3985 [Smith, Bob], Qualified offshore wind project-expands definition

S4024 [Pou, Nellie/Corrado, Kristin M.], William Paterson University;$2M

S4035 [Pou, Nellie/Singleton, Troy+1], Thomas Edison State University;$1.7M

S4064 [Singleton, Troy/Sweeney, Stephen M.], Wage claims against subcontractors-concerns responsibility of owners

S4066 [Pou, Nellie/Gopal, Vin], Health care service firms-revise requirements for financial information reports

S4103 [Sweeney, Stephen M./Weinberg, Loretta+1], Family planning services-makes FY2020;$9.5M

S4139 [Greenstein, Linda R.], Rutgers-New Brunswick for School of Dental Medicine;$250K

S4141 [Beach, James/Bateman, Christopher], Pauls Law-parent request individualized health plan, epilepsy/seizure disorder

S4154 [Cunningham, Sandra B./Sweeney, Stephen M.+1], Clean slate-revises expungement eligibility and procedures; render inaccessible

S4160 [Lagana, Joseph A./Cunningham, Sandra B.+2], Fair Play Act-allows collegiate student-athletes earn comp, use of name or image

S4162 [Smith, Bob], Climate Change Resource Center at Rutgers University-establish;$2M

S4200 [Ruiz, M. Teresa/Turner, Shirley K.], Breakfast or lunch, reduced price-State pay difference

S4254 [Cunningham, Sandra B./Weinberg, Loretta], Hospital finances-expands DOH oversight

S4255 [Cunningham, Sandra B./Weinberg, Loretta], Hospitals, certain-authorize DOH notify elected officials of financial distress

S4260 [Rice, Ronald L./Cunningham, Sandra B.+1], Paroled person convicted of indictable offense-remove prohibition on voting

S4263 [Cunningham, Sandra B./Sweeney, Stephen M.], Casino key employee license & regis.-concerns drug offense disqualification

S4285 [Sarlo, Paul A.], SPRS member, 9/11 WTC-provides death benefits to surviving spouses & children

S4287 [Pou, Nellie], Insurance group-submit Corporate Governance Annual Disclosure to DOBI

S4289 [Sweeney, Stephen M./Thompson, Samuel D.], Tax levy cap adjustment 2020-2021 thru 2024-2025-sch. districts losing State aid

Read more from the original source:
Here's What's On Tap Under The Gold Dome On Monday (The Last Session Day Of The Year) - InsiderNJ

Florida wildlife officials Wednesday backed a 10-year plan to manage the states growing black bear population, with the plan maintaining hunting as an option.

After nearly three hours of comments from activists, most opposed to hunting bears, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission agreed to advance a 209-page staff draft report that primarily stresses using education and non-lethal techniques of managing the animals.

The report keeps open the possibility of permitted hunting if interactions between bears and humans escalate amid the increasing number of people in the state.

Chairman Robert Spottswood, the only member who was on the commission when a controversial 2015 hunt was held, called the plan a balanced approach.

The idea of keeping (a hunt) there as a possibility for the future sounds like a sound and wise thing to do, Spottswood said during a commission meeting in Panama City. Who knows what is going to happen two, three years from now.

Vice Chairman Michael Sole said hunting is a tool that might not be warranted today but could be required in parts of the state over the next decade.

Commission Executive Director Eric Sutton said the bear population isnt at a critical juncture to rush into a revival of hunting. At some point soon, however, more control will be needed that includes hunting, Sutton said.

The question really is not if we need to do population management, its when and how, Sutton said. With the advantage of time, we should really prepare to develop our options on the question of how.

The plan outlines management strategies that include contracted shooting and trapping; fertility control; reducing vegetation near suburban and urban areas; regulated hunts; and relocating adult female bears and their 3- to 4-month-old cubs.

The effort also seeks to maintain the BearWise program, which started in 2016 and has used proceeds from sales of the states Conserve Wildlife license plates and legislative funding to assist local governments in providing residents and businesses with bear-resistant trash containers.

Another suggested technique involves working with the Florida Department of Transportation to reduce collisions between vehicles and bears.

Corey Davis, a member of the American Hounds Federation, said the commission should avoid simply calling for random hunts and should establish numbers to maintain the bear population.

We dont want a one-and-done bear hunt, like the last bear hunt, Davis said. There needs to be a determined number of bears to be taken over a course of three to five years, while also keeping the bear population at a sustainable level.

But critics said killing bears doesnt reduce bear-human interactions and that a 20 percent target that would be sought with a hunt is already reached each year through poaching, loss of habitat, nuisance kills and impacts with vehicles.

Some life forms need killing, regulated, ethically, responsibly, and that was my job and responsibility to defend the (U.S.) Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, said Steve Duresky, a veteran U.S. Air Force fighter pilot. Bears dont need killing in this situation. Certainly not this year. Probably not until a lot more thought was put into this.

Megan Sorbo, an Orlando teen who has been a leading advocate against reviving bear hunting, implored commissioners to increase education about reducing incidents between bears and humans.

Hunting does not reduce human-bear conflict, Sorbo said. We need to focus on improving human behavior, like securing trash and education. Just a couple of months ago, I spoke with someone my age that has always lived in Florida. He did not know that bears even live in Florida and thought that bears were these vicious killing machines that kill any humans for fun. Clearly, education needs to be a higher priority.

Samantha Gentrup, a teacher from Venice opposed to bear hunting, said the states water and wildlife is what makes Florida a unique tourist destination.

For our state to thrive, we need to preserve both, Gentrup said.

David Telesco, the agencys bear management program coordinator, said the goal of the plan is sustainable coexistence, meaning a healthy bear population of a minimum of 3,000 bears with limited human interaction.

We want to have bears on the landscape in suitable habitats to benefit both people and bears, Telesco said.

The plan is expected to replace a statewide bear-management framework created in 2012.

The states bear population has grown from 300 to 500 in the late 1970s to more than 4,000 following the 2015 hunt, which remains the only time hunting black bears has been permitted in Florida in more than two decades.

The October 2015 hunt resulted in 304 bears being killed in two days.

Over the last decade, calls to the commission regarding bears have increased 400 percent, from sightings and bears in garbage to incidents in which people and pets were injured, Telesco said.

According to state records, Florida has had 13 incidents of people requiring medical treatment because of encounters with bears since 2006. Eight of the incidents have occurred since 2012.

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Read the original post:
Florida's bear-control plan leaves hunting on the table - Orlando Weekly

APPLETON, Wis. (WFRV)

There are musicals, and there are MUSICALS.

(Watch Local 5 News at 10 p.m. Saturday, December 14 for the on-air story)

The MUSICAL visiting Fox Cities Performing Arts Centerarrived in 20 truckloads, brought a company of 64, took three 16-hour days toinstall and includes a dress weighing 80 pounds and a chandelier weighing 2,000pounds.

This MUSICAL The Phantom of the Opera has been runningfor more than 30 years on Broadway and in London.

It is an honor to protect such a great piece, Max Quinlan,resident director of the touring production, told especially interested studentsduring a workshop Friday afternoon.

The students are from 23 schools participating in the CenterStage High School Music Theatre Program. Part of the elaborate program is accessto various elements of shows behind the scenes.

Theres not common knowledge of what goes into this show,said Leland Bartikoski, a junior at Green Bay Preble High School.

As did others, he liked getting a glimpse into the process.

Pouring on the information was Quinlan in four spaces in thecenter a secondary theater, a lobby walkway, the main hall and back to thesecondary theater.

Quinlan said his widely encompassing job was part manager, part director and part therapist.

A prime question from a student was about his No. 1 piece ofadvice.

Be kind, Quinlan said.

Everybody in a show the scale of The Phantom of the Operahas to rely on one another, he said.

Collaboration and communication are part of that.

We become a team together in order to bring this to an audience,Quinlan said.

Answering a student, he said a favorite part of his job is bringingnew cast members into a production to help them feel they are individually contributingto what this show is.

Answering another student about pursuing a degree in theater,Quinlan said, Theater is valuable outside of being in theater (as a career).Theater helps anyone understand human beings and human behavior, he said.

On the lobby walkway, students heard Quinlan pour out his soul about his feelings for theater, acting and directing. Along with offering many technical details about the workings of the production, Quinlan offer to the students lessons in life.

He told of coming from performing family in the Chicago anddeveloping through acting and studies and experience. A key meeting was withCameron Mackintosh, producer of this reshaped production of The Phantom of theOpera and shaper of much about theater in his home country, England, and the UnitedStates.

I was liked, and that was it, Quinlan said.

He often returned to the theme.

Theater is all about relationships, he said.

And, what is needed to put on a show of this scale is respectingeverybody.

Quinlan also offered a tip on directing. Every player bringshis or her own self to a role, an individual quality, and he or she should begiven that space. Its not like, This is the way its done, he said.

A highlight of the workshop was Quinlan telling the ins andouts of the specially built chandelier. That included his descriptions as thechandelier was being checked and prepared for the evening show. In theperformance, the chandelier sparks and puffs flames and smoke, aside from eek! falling.

It is unbelievably safe, Quinlan said.

Students came from both onstage and backstage experience in their school productions. Most I spoke with from Fond du Lac, Mishicot, Pulaski, Kaukauna and Green Bay Preble said they hoped to come away with a broader knowledge of what theater takes, from a high-level pro.

One student boiled down his expectations to simply this: Enjoy. Anywhere Quinlan held forth, questions flowed from students.

Only one stumped him. He didnt know how many lights are used in The Phantom of the Opera.

Read the original here:
PREVIEW: Director of touring Phantom of the Opera offers insights in Appleton - WeAreGreenBay.com

The rapid advance of artificial intelligence (AI) begs a daunting question will we ever achieve human-like behavior in computational systems? SFU professorSteve DiPaolaand his research team are developing a solution called the AI Empathic Painter, using natural interaction methods to enable users to converse efficiently, while highlighting two major human qualities empathy and creativity.

DiPaolas team showcased its work at a major AI conferenceNeurIPS 2019 in Vancouver this past week. Their demo enables visitors to approach and converse with a 3D avatar chatbot, which creates an artistic portrait of the visitors inspired by their emotions and personality via the teams Empathy-based Affective Portrait Painter.

To achievethis, the researchers have combined their research in empathy-based modeling for AI character agents with machine learning models from the teams creativity artistic system.

With a host of gestural, motion and bio-sensor systems, the teams AI systems are designed to give coherent, empathy-based conversational answers via speech, expression and gesture.

Using our special system, the AI avatar can, through conversation, evaluate the user words, facial expression and voice stress to make an empathetic evaluationjust as a human would be able to, about someone they are talking to, says DiPaola, a professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT), whose team includes post-doctoral researcher Nilay Yalcin and PhD student Nouf Abukhodair.

Then the researchers take it a step furtherusing the Empathy-based Affective Portrait Painter to paint a unique portrait of the user, based on the empathetic evaluation.DiPaolas AI artwork has been showcased globally in such museums as New Yorks Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The growing success of dialogue systems research makes conversational agents a perfect candidate for becoming a standard in human-computer interaction, explains Yalcin. The naturalness of communicative acts provides a comfortable ground for the users to interact with. There have been many advances in using multiple communication channels in dialogue systems, simulating humaneness in an artificial agent.

DiPaolas and Yalcins extensive research on empathy in AI is also addressing issues in a variety of industries, including e-health. In a collaborative project with the national AGE-WELL initiative, a helper AI conversational bot is being developed to assist the elderly in staying independent at home. Other applications are geared to the entertainment industry.

After premiering at the NeuroIPS conference, the AI Empathic Painter system will travel to Europe to be showcased in Florence in May 2020.

Formerly from Stanford University, DiPaola lead SFUs Interactive Visualization Lab (iVizLab), which strives to make computational systems bend more to the human experience by incorporating biological, cognitive and behavior knowledge models. The lab creates computational models of human ideals such as expression, emotion, behavior and creativity typically for gaming, sciences, arts and health fields.

Link:
Conversing with chatbotsArtificial Intelligence research keeps it more 'human' - SFU News - Simon Fraser University News

The Decade, Reviewed looks back at the 2010s and how it changed human society forever. From 2010 to 2019, our species experienced seismic shifts in science, technology, entertainment, transportation, and even the very planet we call home. This is how the past ten years have changed us.

Bots are a lot like humans: Some are cute. Some are ugly. Some are harmless. Some are menacing. Some are friendly. Some are annoying ... and a little racist. Bots serve their creators and society as helpers, spies, educators, servants, lab technicians, and artists. Sometimes, they save lives. Occasionally, they destroy them.

In the 2010s, automation got better, cheaper, and way less avoidable. Its still mysterious, but no longer foreign; the most Extremely Online among us interact with dozens of AIs throughout the day. That means driving directions are more reliable, instant translations are almost good enough, and everyone gets to be an adequate portrait photographer, all powered by artificial intelligence. On the other hand, each of us now sees a personalized version of the world that is curated by an AI to maximize engagement with the platform. And by now, everyone from fruit pickers to hedge fund managers has suffered through headlines about being replaced.

Humans and tech have always coexisted and coevolved, but this decade brought us closer togetherand closer to the futurethan ever. These days, you dont have to be an engineer to participate in AI projects; in fact, you have no choice but to help, as youre constantly offering your digital behavior to train AIs.

So heres how we changed our bots this decade, how they changed us, and where our strange relationship is going as we enter the 2020s.

All those little operational tweaks in our day come courtesy of a specific scientific approach to AI called machine learning, one of the most popular techniques for AI projects this decade. Thats when AI is tasked not only with finding the answers to questions about data sets, but with finding the questions themselves; successful deep learning applications require vast amounts of data and the time and computational power to self-test over and over again.

Deep learning, a subset of machine learning, uses neural networks to extract its own rules and adjust them until it can return the right results; other machine learning techniques might use Bayesian networks, vector maps, or evolutionary algorithms to achieve the same goal.

In January, Technology Reviews Karen Hao released an exhaustive analysis of recent papers in AI that concluded that machine learning was one of the defining features of AI research this decade. Machine learning has enabled near-human and even superhuman abilities in transcribing speech from voice, recognizing emotions from audio or video recordings, as well as forging handwriting or video, Hao wrote. Domestic spying is now a lucrative application for AI technologies, thanks to this powerful new development.

Haos report suggests that the age of deep learning is finally drawing to a close, but the next big thing may have already arrived. Reinforcement learning, like generative adversarial networks (GANs), pits neural nets against one another by having one evaluate the work of the other and distribute rewards and punishments accordinglynot unlike the way dogs and babies learn about the world.

The future of AI could be in structured learning. Just as young humans are thought to learn their first languages by processing data input from fluent caretakers with their internal language grammar, computers can also be taught how to teach themselves a taskespecially if the task is to imitate a human in some capacity.

This decade, artificial intelligence went from being employed chiefly as an academic subject or science fiction trope to an unobtrusive (though occasionally malicious) everyday companion. AIs have been around in some form since the 1500s or the 1980s, depending on your definition. The first search indexing algorithm was AltaVista in 1995, but it wasnt until 2010 that Google quietly introduced personalized search results for all customers and all searches. What was once background chatter from eager engineers has now become an inescapable part of daily life.

One function after another has been turned over to AI jurisdiction, with huge variations in efficacy and consumer response. The prevailing profit model for most of these consumer-facing applications, like social media platforms and map functions, is for users to trade their personal data for minor convenience upgrades, which are achieved through a combination of technical power, data access, and rapid worker disenfranchisement as increasingly complex service jobs are doubled up, automated away, or taken over by AI workers.

The Harvard social scientist Shoshana Zuboff explained the impact of these technologies on the economy with the term surveillance capitalism. This new economic system, she wrote, unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data, in a bid to make profit from informed gambling based on predicted human behavior.

Were already using machine learning to make subjective decisionseven ones that have life-altering consequences. Medical applications are only some of the least controversial uses of artificial intelligence; by the end of the decade, AIs were locating stranded victims of Hurricane Maria, controlling the German power grid, and killing civilians in Pakistan.

The sheer scope of these AI-controlled decision systems is why automation has the potential to transform society on a structural level. In 2012, techno-socialist Zeynep Tufekci pointed out the presence on the Obama reelection campaign of an unprecedented number of data analysts and social scientists, bringing the traditional confluence of marketing and politics into a new age.

Intelligence that relies on data from an unjust world suffers from the principle of garbage in, garbage out, futurist Cory Doctorow observed in a recent blog post. Diverse perspectives on the design team would help, Doctorow wrote, but when it comes to certain technology, there might be no safe way to deploy:

It doesnt help that data collection for image-based AI has so far taken advantage of the most vulnerable populations first. The Facial Recognition Verification Testing Program is the industry standard for testing the accuracy of facial recognition tech; passing the program is imperative for new FR startups seeking funding.

But the datasets of human faces that the program uses are sourced, according to a report from March, from images of U.S. visa applicants, arrested people who have since died, and children exploited by child pornography. The report found that the majority of data subjects were people who had been arrested on suspicion of criminal activity. None of the millions of faces in the programs data sets belonged to people who had consented to this use of their data.

State-level efforts to regulate AI finally emerged this decade, with some success. The European Unions General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), enforceable from 2018, limits the legal uses of valuable AI training datasets by defining the rights of the data subject (read: us); the GDPR also prohibits the black box model for machine learning applications, requiring both transparency and accountability on how data are stored and used. At the end of the decade, Google showed the class how not to regulate when they built, and then scrapped, an external AI ethics panel a week later, feigning shock at all the negative reception.

Even attempted regulation is a good sign. It means were looking at AI for what it is: not a new life form that competes for resources, but as a formidable weapon. Technological tools are most dangerous in the hands of malicious actors who already hold significant power; you can always hire more programmers. During the long campaign for the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Putin-backed IRA Twitter botnet campaignsessentially, teams of semi-supervised bot accounts that spread disinformation on purpose and learn from real propagandainfiltrated the very mechanics of American democracy.

Keeping up with AI capacities as they grow will be a massive undertaking. Things could still get much, much worse before they get better; authoritarian governments around the world have a tendency to use technology to further consolidate power and resist regulation.

Tech capabilities have long since proved too fast for traditional human lawmakers, but one hint of what the next decade might hold comes from AIs themselves, who are beginning to be deployed as weapons against the exact type of disinformation other AIs help to create and spread. There now exists, for example, a neural net devoted explicitly to the task of identifying neural net disinformation campaigns on Twitter. The neural nets name is Grover, and its really good at this.

See the article here:
The Bot Decade: How AI Took Over Our Lives in the 2010s - Popular Mechanics

This color-coded map shows global surface temperature anomalies. Higher-than-normal temperatures are shown in red, and lower-than-normal temperatures are shown in blue.

The computer models used over the past five decades to predict the impact of future global warming have turned out to be very accurate so far, a new study has found.

Climate scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NASA evaluated climate models from the early 1970s into the late 2000s to see how well they predicted the actual global mean surface temperature, based on levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

They also looked at how well the models matched the relationship between warming and changes in levels of greenhouse gases.

Of the 17 climate projections examined, 14 effectively matched observations after they were published, according to the study published Wednesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Estimating how much greenhouse gas will be emitted in the future is difficult because it involves human behavior, how well the economy is doing and government policy. Rolling back emission regulations on new cars, for example, adds more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

"We did not focus on how well their crystal ball predicted future emissions of greenhouse gases, because that is a question for economists and energy modelers, not climate scientists," Zeke Hausfather, a UC Berkeley doctoral student and lead author of the study, said in a news release. "It is impossible to know exactly what human emissions will be in the future. Physics we can understand, it is a deterministic system; Future emissions depend on human systems, which are not necessarily deterministic."

So, according to Gizmodo's Earther blog, the researchers put the actual amount of global greenhouse emissions into the models to see if they would accurately predict global temperature rise since the models were created.

That found the models were quite accurate.

"The earliest models were so skillful because the fundamental science behind the greenhouse effect and global warming is well established and fairly straightforward," Henri Drake, a co-author of the study and an MIT doctoral student, told Mashable.

"The real message is that the warming we have experienced is pretty much exactly what climate models predicted it would be as much as 30 years ago," Hausfather said. "This really gives us more confidence that today's models are getting things largely right as well."

The Weather Companys primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.

Read this article:
Early Climate Models Have Accurately Predicted Effects of Global Warming: Study - The Weather Channel

Humans have both intelligent and "stupid" behavior, should self-driving cars be likewise?

When someone says that another person is intelligent, you pretty much assume that this is a praising of how smart or bright the other person might be.

In contrast, if someone is labeled as being stupid, there is a reflexive notion that the person is essentially unintelligent. Generally, the common definition of being stupid is that stupidity consists of a lack of intelligence.

This brings up a curious aspect.

Suppose we somehow had a bucket filled with intelligence. We are going to pretend that intelligence is akin to something tangible and that we can essentially pour it into and possibly out of a bucket that we happen to have handy.

Upon pouring this bucket filled with intelligence onto say the floor, what do you have left?

One answer is that the bucket is now entirely empty and there is nothing left inside the bucket at all. The bucket has become vacuous and contains absolutely nothing.

Another answer is that the bucket upon being emptied of intelligence has a leftover that consists of stupidity. In other words, once youve removed so-called intelligence, the thing that you have remaining is stupidity.

I realize this is a seemingly esoteric discussion but, in a moment, youll see that the point being made has a rather significant ramification for many important things, including and particularly for the development and rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Ponder these weighty questions:

Can intelligence exist without stupidity, or in a practical sense is there always some amount of stupidity that must exist if there is also the existence of intelligence?

Some assert that intelligence and stupidity are a zen-like yin and yang.

In this perspective, you cannot grasp the nature of intelligence unless you also have a semblance of stupidity as a kind of measuring stick.

It is said that humans become increasingly intelligent over time, and thus are reducing their levels of stupidity. You might suggest that intelligence and stupidity are playing a zero-sum game, namely that as your intelligence rises you are simultaneously reducing your level of stupidity (similarly, if perchance your stupidity rises, this implies that your intelligence lowers).

Can humans arrive at a 100% intelligence and a zero amount of stupidity, or are we fated to always have some amount of stupidity, no matter how hard we might try to become fully intelligent?

Returning to the bucket metaphor, some would claim that there will never be the case that you are completely and exclusively intelligent and have expunged stupidity. There will always be some amount of stupidity thats sitting in that bucket.

If you are clever and try hard, you might be able to narrow down how much stupidity you have, though nonetheless there is still some amount of stupidity in that bucket, albeit perhaps at some kind of minimal state.

Does having stupidity help intelligence or is it harmful to intelligence?

You might be tempted to assume that any amount of stupidity is a bad thing and therefore we must always be striving to keep it caged or otherwise avoid its appearance.

But we need to ask whether that simplistic view of tossing stupidity into the bad category and placing intelligence into the good category is potentially missing something more complex. You could argue that by being stupid, at times, in limited ways, doing so offers a means for intelligence to get even better.

When you were a child, suppose you stupidly tripped over your own feet, and after doing so, you came to the realization that you were not carefully lifting your feet. Henceforth, you became more mindful of how to walk and thus became intelligent at the act of walking. Maybe later in life, while walking on a thin curb, you managed to save yourself from falling off the edge of the curb, partially due to the earlier in life lesson that was sparked by stupidity and became part of your intelligence.

Of course, stupidity can also get us into trouble.

Despite having learned via stupidity to be careful as you walk, one day you decide to strut on the edge of the Grand Canyon. While doing so, oops, you fall off and plunge into the chasm.

Was it an intelligent act to perch yourself on the edge like that?

Apparently not.

As such, we might want to note that stupidity can be a friend or a foe, and it is up to the intelligence portion to figure out which is which in any given circumstance and any given moment.

You might envision that there is an eternal struggle going on between the intelligence side and the stupidity side.

On the other hand, you might equally envision that the intelligence side and stupidity side are pals, each of which tugs at the other, and therefore it is not especially a fight as it is a delicate dance and form of tension about which should prevail (at times) and how they can each moderate or even aid the other.

This preamble provides a foundation to discuss something increasingly becoming worthy of attention, namely the role of Artificial Intelligence and (surprisingly) the role of Artificial Stupidity.

Thinking Seriously About Artificial Stupidity

We hear every day about how our lives are being changed via the advent of Artificial Intelligence.

AI is being infused into our smartphones, and into our refrigerators, and into our cars, and so on.

If we are intending to place AI into the things we use, it begs the question as to whether we need to consider the yang of the yin, specifically do we need to be cognizant of Artificial Stupidity?

Most people snicker upon hearing or seeing the phrase Artificial Stupidity, and they assume it must be some kind of insider joke to refer to such a thing.

Admittedly, the conjoining of the words artificial and stupidity seems, well, perhaps stupid in of itself.

But, by going back to the earlier discussion about the role of intelligence and the role of stupidity as it exists in humans, you can recast your viewpoint and likely see that whenever you carry on a discussion about intelligence, one way or another you inevitably need to also be considering the role of stupidity.

Some suggest that we ought to use another way of expressing Artificial Stupidity to lessen the amount of snickering that happens. Floated phrases include Artificial Unintelligence, Artificial Humanity, Artificial Dumbness, and others, none of which have caught hold as yet.

Please bear with me and accept the phrasing of Artificial Stupidity and also go along with the belief that it isnt stupid to be discussing Artificial Stupidity.

Indeed, you could make the case that the act of not discussing Artificial Stupidity is the stupid approach, since you are unwilling or unaccepting of the realization that stupidity exists in the real world and therefore in the artificial world of computer systems that are we attempting to recreate intelligence, you would be ignoring or blind to what is essentially the other half of the overall equation.

In short, some say that true Artificial Intelligence requires a combining of the smart or good AI that we think of today and the inclusion of Artificial Stupidity (warts and all), though the inclusion must be done in a smart way.

Indeed, lets deal with the immediate knee jerk reaction that many have of this notion by dispelling the argument that by including Artificial Stupidity into Artificial Intelligence you are inherently and irrevocably introducing stupidity and presumably, therefore, aiming to make AI stupid.

Sure, if you stupidly add stupidity, you have a solid chance of undermining the AI and rendering it stupid.

On the other hand, in recognition of how humans operate, the inclusion of stupidity, when done thoughtfully, could ultimately aid the AI (think about the story of tripping over your own feet as a child).

Heres something that might really get your goat.

Perhaps the only means to achieve true and full AI, which is not anywhere near to human intelligence levels to-date, consists of infusing Artificial Stupidity into AI; thus, as long as we keep Artificial Stupidity at arms length or as a pariah, we trap ourselves into never reaching the nirvana of utter and complete AI that is able to seemingly be as intelligent as humans are.

Ouch, by excluding Artificial Stupidity from our thinking, we might be damming ourselves to not arriving at the pinnacle of AI.

Thats a punch to the gut and so counter-intuitive that it often stops people in their tracks.

There are emerging signs that the significance of revealing and harnessing artificial stupidity (or whatever it ought to be called), can be quite useful.

At a recent talk sponsored by the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California Berkeley, I chatted with MIT Professor Andrew Lo and discussed his espoused clever inclusion of artificial stupidity into improving financial models, which he has done in recognition that human foibles need to be appropriately recognized and contended with in the burgeoning field of FinTech.

His fascinating co-authored book A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street is an elegant look at how human behavior is composed of both rationality and irrationality, giving rise to his theory, coined as the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis. His insightful approach goes beyond the prevailing bounds of how financial trading marketplaces do and can best operate.

Are there other areas or applications in which the significance of artificial stupidity might come to play?

Yes.

One such area, I assert, involves the inclusion of artificial stupidity into the advent of true self-driving cars.

Shocking?

Maybe so.

Lets unpack the matter.

Exploiting Artificial Stupidity For Gain

When referring to true self-driving cars, Im focusing on Level 4 and Level 5 of the standard scale used to gauge autonomous cars. These are self-driving cars that have an AI system doing the driving and there is no need and typically no provision for a human driver.

The AI does all the driving and any and all occupants are considered passengers.

On the topic of Artificial Stupidity, it is worthwhile to quickly review the history of how the terminology came about.

In the 1950s, the famous mathematician and pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing proposed what has become known as the Turing test for AI.

Simply stated, if you were presented with a situation whereby you could interact with a computer system imbued with AI, and at the same time separately interact with a human too, and you werent told beforehand which was which (lets assume they are both hidden from view), upon your making inquiries of each, you are tasked with deciding which one is the AI and which one is the human.

We could then declare the AI a winner as exhibiting intelligence if you could not distinguish between the two contestants. In that sense, the AI is indistinguishable from the human contestant and must ergo be considered equal in intelligent interaction.

There are some holes in this logic, which I provide a detailed analysis of here, in any case, the Turing test is widely used as a barometer for measuring whether or when AI might be truly achieved.

There is a twist to the original Turing test that many dont know about.

One qualm expressed was that you might be smarmy and ask the two contestants to calculate say pi to the thousandth digit.

Presumably, the AI would do so wonderfully and readily tell you the answer in the blink of an eye, doing so precisely and abundantly correctly. Meanwhile, the human would struggle to do so, taking quite a while to answer if using paper and pencil to make the laborious calculation, and ultimately would be likely to introduce errors into the answer.

Turing realized this aspect and acknowledged that the AI could be essentially unmasked by asking such arithmetic questions.

He then took the added step, one that some believe opened a Pandora's box, and suggested that the AI ought to avoid giving the right answers to arithmetic problems.

In short, the AI could try to fool the inquirer by appearing to answer as a human might, including incorporating errors into the answers given and perhaps taking the same length of time that doing the calculations by hand would take.

Starting in the early 1990s, a competition was launched that is akin to the Turing test, offering a modest cash prize and has become known as the Loebner Prize, and in this competition the AI systems are typically infused with human-like errors to aid in fooling the inquirers into believing the AI is the human. There is controversy underlying this, but I wont go into that herein. A now-classic article appeared in 1991 in The Economist about the competition.

Notice that once again we have a bit of irony that the introduction of stupidity is being done to essentially portray that something is intelligent.

This brief history lesson provides a handy launching pad for the next elements of this discussion.

Lets boil down the topic of Artificial Stupidity into two main facets or definitions:

1)Artificial Stupidity is the purposeful incorporation of human-like stupidity into an AI system, doing so to make the AI seem more human-like, and being done not to improve the AI per se but instead to shape the perception of humans about the AI as being seemingly intelligent.

2)Artificial Stupidity is an acknowledgment of the myriad of human foibles and the potential inclusion of such stupidity into or alongside the AI in a conjoined manner that can potentially improve the AI when properly managed.

One common misnomer that Id like to dispel about the first part of the definition involves a somewhat false assumption that the computer potentially is going to purposefully miscalculate something.

There are some that shriek in horror and disdain that there might be a suggestion that the computer would intentionally seek to incorrectly do a calculation, such as figuring out pi but doing so in a manner that is inaccurate.

Thats not what the definition necessarily implies.

It could be that the computer might correctly calculate pi to the thousandth digit, and then opt to tweak some of the digits, which it would say keep track of, and do this in a blink of the eye, and then wait to display the result after an equivalent of human-by-hand amount of time.

In that manner, the computer has the correct answer internally and has only displayed something that seems to have errors.

Now, that certainly could be bad for the humans that are relying upon what the computer has reported but note that this is decidedly not the same as though the computer has in fact miscalculated the number.

Theres more to be said about such nuances, but for now lets continue forward.

Both of those definitional variants of Artificial Stupidity can be applied to true self-driving cars.

Doing so carries a certain amount of angst and will be worthwhile to consider.

Artificial Stupidity And True Self-Driving Cars

Todays self-driving cars that are being tried out on our public roadways have already gotten a somewhat muddled reputation for their stylistic driving prowess. Overall, driverless cars to-date are akin to a novice teenage driver that is timid and somewhat hesitant about the driving task.

For example, when you encounter a self-driving car, it will often try to create a large buffer zone between it and the car ahead, attempting to abide by the car lengths rule-of-thumb that you were taught when first learning to drive.

Human drivers generally dont care about the car lengths safety zone and edge up on other cars, doing so to their own endangerment.

Heres another example of such driving practices.

Upon reaching a stop sign, a driverless car will usually come to a full and complete stop. It will wait to see that the coast is clear, and then cautiously proceed. I dont know about you, but I can say that where I drive, nobody makes complete stops anymore at stop signs. A rolling stop is the norm nowadays.

You could assert that humans are driving in a reckless and somewhat stupid manner.

By not having enough car lengths between your car and the car ahead, you are increasing your chances of a rear-end crash. By not fully stopping at a stop sign, you are increasing your risks of colliding with another car or a pedestrian.

In a Turing test manner, you could stand on the sidewalk and watch cars going past you, and by their driving behavior alone you could likely ascertain which are the self-driving cars and which are the human-driven cars.

Does that sound familiar?

It should, since this is roughly the same as the arithmetic precision issue earlier raised.

How to solve this?

One approach would be to introduce Artificial Stupidity as defined above.

First, you could have the on-board AI purposely shorten the car's buffer distance settings to cause it to drive in a similar manner as humans do (butting up to other cars). Likewise, the AI could be modified to roll through stop signs. This is all rather easily arranged.

Humans watching a driverless car and a human-driven car would no longer be able to discern one such car from the other since they both would be driving in the same error-laden way.

Link:
Artificial Stupidity Could Be The Crux To AI And Achieving True Self-Driving Cars - Forbes

I've been thinking about suicide. Not for myself, mind you, but because it's such an evolutionary puzzle. After all, even though evolutionary biologists know full well that no complex human behavior is rigidly and unilaterally determined by genes alone, it remains a well established article of faith that even complex human behavior has at least some underlying genetic component. (Is it an oxymoron, by the way, to suggest that an "article of faith" can be "well established," given thata reasonable definition of faith is belief without evidence? Oh well, that's another question, for another time!)

The suicide puzzle is simple enough to state: any genetically influenced phenotype including behavior that leads to elimination of the genetic factors themselves should be strongly selected against. And yet, suicide appears to be a cross-culturaluniversal. According to the World Health Organization it is the 10th leading cause of deathworldwide, responsible for nearly 1.5 million annual fatalities.

Freud was convinced that the answer, essentially, was "Thanatos," which was among his most crackpot and biologically ignorant theories. Although the word doesn't appear directly in his writings, "death drive" (Todestrieb) does, and is ostensibly opposed to "Eros," the "life drive." In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud maintained that living things possess"an urge ...to restore an earlier state of things," specifically that inorganic simplicity from which all living things emerged. It is a force"whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death." This "explanation" is total BS, reminiscent of Henri Bergson's notion that life is due to an "lan vitale," which Julian Huxley caricatured as being equivalent to explaining the movement of a railroad train by its "lan locomotif."

It is plausible that natural selection could favor suicide if, by doing so, predisposing genes were benefiting identical copies of the same genes residing in other bodies namely, in genetic relatives andthus operating by the well-established phenomenon of kin selection, or inclusive fitness. This process hasalready been demonstrated to be a powerful explanation for "altruism" in many animals, both nonhuman and human. But what about cases where this explanation doesn't apply, namely individuals whose death benefits no one, genetic relative or not?

Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of sociology, made an important contribution in his classicbook, Suicide. In it, he identified five distinct social explanations for self-killing: egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic, each worth understanding, but none providing any reconciliation with evolution by natural selection.

Some biological coherence, on the other hand,appears to derivefrompathology. Many people die of heart disease or cancer, not because doing so is adaptive, but becausein various ways, our bodies arevulnerable, just like any organism. Similarly, there arealso mental pathologies,notably depresion, due to biochemical malfunctions, among other things. Powerful evidence for this and for not beingcavalier about suicide comes from the fact that antidepressant medications and/or psychotherapy often abolishsuicidality.

Beyond this, however, are cases in which suicide is not precipitated by depression per se. And that's where my hypothesis comes in. Start with pain,a biological warning signal that something isout of whack. Accordingly,living things, including people, have doubtless been selected to minimize painand to avoid it when possible. (For example, it is pain thathelps prevent us from embracing a hot stove.) Then add two consequences of our big, smart brains: knowledge of death, and of killing.

There is much debate about the evolutionary pressures that made us so clever, but no doubt that our species hasbecomevery, veryintelligent. And furthermore, it seems likely that at least some of ourmental abilities e.g., painting, composing symphonies, programming computers, playing the violin weren't selected for directly but arose as a by-product of a creative intellect that was favored because it conveyed other, more clear-cut benefits, such as social cooperation, complex communication, and so forth.

I suggest that as a byproduct, human beings perhaps alone among living things understand about death.(Shades of Ernest Becker.) We don't simply act in most cases to avoid death; our speciesunderstands that it means the cessation of life, and thus, of all sensation not just the end of pleasure, but also of pain. Finally, due once again to our big brains, we have figured out how to end life: not only the lives of prey or other people, but also, by simple extrapolation, our own.

Put these three observations together: (1) people are strongly predisposed to avoid pain, (2) our speciescomprehends that death meansthe end ofbodily sensation, and (3) we know how to kill, including how to kill ourselves. Couldn't the result then be that when individual Homo sapiens experience unrelenting and untreatable pain (physical or emotional)they, unique among living things, can be inclined to endthat pain? Other animals sometimes behave in a way that results in their death: Honeybees die when they sting an intruder to their hive, Pacific salmon die after spawning, and so forth. But there is no reason to think that they are intentionally killing themselves. We, on occasion, are different.

The above considerations are neither intendedto condone suicidenor to oppose it. Moreover,I am not proposing that myhypothetical triad explains more than a subset of suicide, which is doubtless multi-factorialand differs for different people. In addition, this difficult and complex topic is immense, such that perhaps thethree-part biologically based hypothesis presented here isn't even valid. Or new. But maybe it's at least worth thinking about.

David P. Barash is professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Washington. Among his recent books is Through a Glass Brightly: using science to see our species as we really are (2018, Oxford University Press)

See the rest here:
Thinking About Suicide: A Three-Part Hypothesis - Psychology Today

Sadly, despite the highest per-capita health care spending in the world, our statistical life expectancy in the U.S. is declining for three years running. It's past time to address the issues of chronic disease at the root of this trend. But to do so, health insurance needs to take a few lessons from auto insurance.

Auto insurance companies regularly offer discounts for safe driving. Conversely, traffic accidents and speeding lead to rate increases. In addition, Car Insurance.com reports that a DUI can increase an individual's auto insurance rates anywhere from 80% to 371%.

Without these potential auto insurance policy rate increases, our roads would be less safe while being more expensive for the habitual safe and responsible drivers. Interestingly, nobody ever decries these traffic law and auto insurance policies as "nanny state" techniques.

Auto insurance rewards healthy driving while penalizing poor driving.

On the other hand, health insurance fails this sustainability test.

Via commercial insurance, Medicaid, and Medicare rates and taxes rise for everyone because of the unhealthy behavior of some while offering insignificant rewards for healthy behavior. This is a perfect recipe for financial unsustainability in any health-care system, let alone within the most expensive one on the planet.

So what is the health insurance equivalent of speeding or driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol? More importantly, what happens to an individual's health insurance premium for avoidable and well established behaviorally related health problems? Other than some rate adjustments for smoking nothing happens. Worse yet, as the total cost of care for a population increases from avoidable chronic disease states, health insurance rates for everyone increase. Plus, we pay more in taxes to fund Medicaid and Medicare.

The challenge in health insurance is to find a method to reward healthy behavior without driving up health insurance premiums for the chronically ill and those with unfortunate health-related events of no fault of their own.

We could offer relatively inexpensive health insurance to a healthy cohort of patients. Unfortunately, this policy would drastically increase health insurance rates for the sick and chronically ill. Given the extraordinary cost of health care in the United States, it is necessary to spread the cost of care over the majority of the population.

So how does a community, state, or nation rise to the challenge and find a mechanism to reward healthy behavior while disincentivizing unhealthy behavior? An advanced society with affordable health insurance will boldly address this challenge.

The answer lies in the ability to utilize the health insurance equivalents of speeding or reckless driving. Fortunately for us, the Centers for Disease Control or CDC has already accumulated the necessary data. The CDC has identified the most costly behaviors relevant to health insurance: the use of tobacco, alcohol, and sugar-based beverages. As per the CDC, the United States' health care system spends over $700 billion per year treating acute and chronic disease related to the use of these products.

In effect, the "safe drivers" among us are paying this annual $700 billion tab. It's time for a refund. We must begin rewarding healthy behavior in health insurance. Currently, the cost of public and private health insurance includes the cost of caring for many chronic diseases caused by human behavior. The public can smoke, vape, drink, chew, eat and ingest a well-documented variation of unhealthy products. Correspondingly, the price of health insurance increases for everyone.

This is why the largest physician organization in the state of Colorado has enacted policy that could help Colorado lead the nation in addressing the chronic disease epidemic. In November, the Colorado Medical Society voted to support increased taxes on alcohol, tobacco, and sugar-based beverages as long as those taxes be used to address the high cost of health care by addressing chronic disease where it starts and by rewarding those who choose a healthy lifestyle. The Mesa County Medical Society led the charge.

The policy does not support taxes on these products if the revenue is allowed to go to the general fund. If revenue is used for prevention and reducing premiums, there is a healthy return on investment for a Colorado consumer who chooses a healthy lifestyle. It is a tax that is then returned to the well- deserved healthy consumer of health insurance.

This tax policy works like our traffic laws. Healthy living is rewarded while we simultaneously work to reduce the rate and ill effects of unhealthy behavior. And, at the same time, we preserve the insurance pools such that health insurance rates don't go up for the chronically ill with "no-fault" health problems.

With enough support, Colorado could pilot this innovative health policy design for a nation in desperate need of more value per health care dollar.

To learn more, view Dr. Pramenko's TED Talk: "Marketing Healthy Behavior."

Michael J. Pramenko M.D. is the executive director of Primary Care Partners. He is chairman of the Board of Monument Health and is a past president of the Colorado Medical Society.

See the rest here:
How can the health-care system reward healthy behavior? - The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel