Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

Aboitiz School of Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship hosts webinar on AI and Techs social influence – Manila Bulletin

The AIM Aboitiz School of Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship (ASITE), in partnership with the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), hosted a webinar titled Mind Hackers: How Technology and AI are Influencing your Mind on 25 November 2021 in honor of Science and Technology Week. The event covered a breadth of topics, including clickbait, e-commerce, distance education, and news and information. Several students from the Ph.D. in Data Science classes covered these topics throughout the webinar. The event opened with a discussion on clickbait and its effect on the consumption of information online by Gilbert Chua, President of the Master of Science in Data Science Class of 2020 and currently a Ph.D. in Data Science student. He explains that technology and informations massive influence on human behavior and psychology is closely linked to media and advertising. In the past year, Google and Facebook alone invested over $200B in advertising.

We want to look at the benefits and the side effects of technology and AI, Chua said. What we want to do is argue, to understand how technology is influencing your mind. Eloi Ventura, President of the Ph.D. in Data Science Class of 2023, cited some of the tangible benefits technology provides. Given the loads of information that are available out there, one of the benefits that these platforms give us is that they organize information for us, she says. E-commerce is a pertinent technology platform that helps many consumers discover new products. The use of technology organizes information so that consumers can make informed purchasing decisions. Crisis management is one other area that has primarily benefited from the integration of AI and technology. Organizations like the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS), The Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA), and The Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) have been able to send alerts and spread information to the public.

The Aboitiz School of Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship is committed to developing future-ready leaders who will change the data science landscape in the country and in Asia. To learn more about the Ph.D. in Data Science program, visit https://asite.aim.edu/programs/phd-in-data-science/.

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Aboitiz School of Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship hosts webinar on AI and Techs social influence - Manila Bulletin

Human Behavior

Are You Guilty Of These 3 Cognitive Biases In Decision Making? – Forbes

How decision intelligence can help fix three big cognitive biases

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors are huddled around a campfire when they suddenly hear the nearby bushes rustling. They have two options: investigate if the movement was caused by small prey such as a rabbit, or flee, assuming there was a predator such as a saber-tooth tiger. The former could lead to a nutritious meal, while the latter could ensure survival.

What call do you think our ancestors would have made?

Evolution ensured the survival of those who fled the scene on the margin of safety rather than those who made the best decision by analyzing all possible scenarios. For thousands of years, humans have made snap decisions in fight-or-flight situations. In many ways, the human race learned to survive by jumping to conclusions.

In modern context, such survival heuristics become myriad cognitive biases, said Eric Colson, Chief Algorithms Officer at Stitch Fix. Lets look at the most common biases or shortcut decisions that influence organizational leaders and how decision intelligence can come to their rescue.

Today, an average individual makes 35,000 decisions every dayfrom which side of the bed to get out of to which company to acquire. However, numerous biases plague each of these decisions.

Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless, said Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational. We make mistakes systematically and predictably because thats how our brains are wired.

While dozens of cognitive biases can trick us, here are the three most-wanted.

Ever prided yourself about that dinner you prepared from a meal-delivery kit or the furniture you assembled? We succumb to this bias when this pride in our creation becomes an obsession.

The IKEA effect occurs when someone overvalues things that they have done while discounting others efforts.

Businesses with founders helming the product roadmap often exert a disproportionate influence. While the founders vision shapes the product, it can create problems when the rest of the teams voice gets edged out.

If the last news article you read confirmed your expectations, it might not be a case of great intuition. You might just be another victim of confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is the convenient cherry-picking of information to confirm ones preconceived notions. Curiously, data dont help fight this bias but often deepen its damage. This happens when people use data not to inform their decisions, but rather twist the data to support their assumptions. It is humorously said that some people use data analytics the way a drunk person uses a lamp postfor support rather than illumination.

Imagine a marketing manager working on their advertising strategy. Believing Instagram to be the best channel for their company, they begin their market research by googling, How to use Instagram for business. This will lead the manager to evidence reinforcing their subconscious decision to use the channel. In other words, they are unlikely to discover anything that contradicts this expectation.

Did you sit through a terrible movie or push yourself to complete a badly written book? Youve experienced the sunk-cost fallacy.

This bias is all about putting up with past investments purely based on the effort already spent.

Leaders often cling to bleeding customer accounts that grow suboptimally or lose money for the business. They justify it based on the years of time and money invested. Failing to realize that such misaligned customer portfolios drain precious attention and resources, leaders end up neglecting more strategic initiatives.

To fight these cognitive biases, we must first realize that they are lurking in the background, waiting to destroy the value of our next decision. Lets now unpack the science of making good decisions and how it can overcome such biases.

Fixing the biases with decision intelligence

Its a misconception that data and analytics alone can improve decisions. Theres a lot more to decision-making. Decision intelligence combines principles and frameworks from the three disciplines of social science, data science, and management science to enhance organizational decisions.

Lets look at each of these three disciplines of decision intelligence and how they can help fight the three biases.

Our need to solve problems is the trigger for any decision. The branches of social science help contextualize the human aspect of decisions. Anthropology helps us understand human behavior, while psychology helps decode interpersonal interactions among humans. Human factors psychology is the field that studies how technology shapes human habits.

How can leaders avoid unconsciously overvaluing their own opinion? They must intentionally create an environment that values collaborative inputs, diversity, and curiosity. Heres how:

a) Tap into collective intelligence: Collective intelligence is the shared wisdom that emerges when groups of people collaborate. Onboard people, establish online platforms, and connect the groups to unlock this collective wisdom.

b) Build a diverse group: Diversity is a far better indicator of collective wisdom than the IQ of group members. For the best ideas, make every effort to promote diversity in the group.

c) Foster a culture of curiosity: A diverse group can contribute only when the environment fosters curiosity. Ensure an environment of open-thinking and empower people to speak up.

Using our earlier example, how can the founder ensure their ideas dont crowd out the teams inputs while framing the product roadmap? We can learn from internal prediction markets, a collective intelligence mechanism set up by Google in its early years. They let employees bet on probable outcomes using virtual money. Employees answered questions such as, Will a project finish on time? or How many users will Gmail have? This trading system helped the Google hierarchy discover employees uncensored opinions. The collective insights were far more accurate than the opinions of product managers.

Confirmation bias

With a strong understanding of peoples decision needs, data and analytics can offer insights to inform the right action. Data science combines techniques to prepare good quality data, apply pertinent analytics, and visually present insights to enable consumption. Data engineering, machine learning, and data visualization are some of the key enablers here.

To tackle this bias, we need to reexamine our beliefs critically. In many cases, our deep-rooted assumptions could be wrong. To fight confirmation bias, seek evidence based on your opinion but with the primary intent of disproving it. Heres how to implement this:

a) Look for unusual data: We often ignore specific data sources or entirely avoid others because they make us uncomfortable. Start collecting them.

b) Scout for unusual insights: Well-rounded data are useful only when used for hidden insights that challenge your beliefs. Look for big, useful, and surprising insights.

c) Craft unusual stories: Insights, however vital they may be, dont move people to action. Use visual stories to give the right conclusions the strongest impact.

In our earlier example, how can the marketing manager tackle confirmation bias when picking their advertising strategy? Starting with an intent to challenge their subconscious choice of Instagram, they must explore all options by collecting public data or paid market research data. The analysis should attempt to disprove the managers hypothesis by augmenting third-party data with internal A/B tests run on the various advertising channels. Finally, the manager must use story-telling to galvanize support for the recommended decision.

Arriving at the right decision is just half the job. Enabling stakeholders to adopt and act on the recommendations is tough, and institutionalization of this decision process within an organization is way more challenging. The discipline of management science helps do that by aggregating principles from fields such as operations research, decision theory, and organizational leadership.

To overcome this bias, avoid becoming a prisoner of the past by shifting the focus to future potential. Cut your losses, however late in the game it may seem. The only way to fight this bias is to learn to let go. Heres how management science can accomplish this systematically:

a) Define strategic outcomes and metrics: Reflect on your end goals and clarify whats of utmost importance for the organization. Choose one strategic metric that signifies this end state.

b) Pick business frameworks to simplify decisions: Select a management framework such as the 2x2 matrix to enable strategic and tactical decisions based on the targeted outcomes.

c) Plan leadership intervention to manage change: Leaders must play a crucial role in enabling change by selling the vision and empowering teams to embrace the new reality. Plan interventions to drive change and tackle organizational inertia.

In our earlier example, how can leaders prevent the organization from clinging to bleeding customer accounts? Lets say the CEO defines profitable growth as the companys strategic outcome, measured by quarterly revenue and gross margin. Plotting the customer accounts on a 2x2 matrix, with revenue growth on the x-axis and gross margin on the y-axis, makes the decisions clear: nurture fast-growing, profitable accounts in the top right quadrant while acting on the margin-gobbling laggards in the bottom left. The CEO must empower teams to act on this decision and intervene against organizational inertia.

Are we aware of our blindspots?

Did you imagine yourself to be relatively immune to the above missteps? You arent alone. This is precisely what 76% of respondents told researchers in a study.

This reaction is so common that theres a name for itblindspot bias. This bias occurs when we tend to recognize others mistakes rather than our own.

We imagine ourselves sitting in the drivers seat, with ultimate control over our decisions, said Ariely. But alas, this is just how we want to view ourselves and not the reality. Decision-makers who can perceptively recognize biases and are humble enough to admit fallibility will be in a much better position to tackle them.

Watch my recent talk for 500Startups where I share more examples of cognitive biases and how they can be tackled with decision intelligence - Video.

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Are You Guilty Of These 3 Cognitive Biases In Decision Making? - Forbes

Human Behavior

Impact of partial lockdown on breaking COVID-19 fourth wave in Bavaria – News-Medical.net

Study: Partial lockdown on unvaccinated individuals promises breaking of fourth COVID-19 wave in Bavaria. Image Credit: Lightspring/Shutterstock

However, a considerable fraction of the German population was unwilling to get vaccinated despite the availability of the vaccines. These unvaccinated individuals are at a higher risk of developing serious disease, protecting them from infection has therefore become a priority of the public health strategy.

Computer simulations have been used by epidemiologists since the beginning of the pandemic to meet the demands of decision-makers for the scientific assessment of political options and also to forecast the development of the pandemic. Agent-based models were found to be able to represent the complexity of the pandemic in some detail.

A new study published in the pre-print server medRxiv* used an agent-based epidemiological simulator, Covasim, to determine the historical course of COVID-19 in Bavaria and to analyze the effectiveness of partial lockdown on the unvaccinated population.

The study involved the creation of a synthetic population that statistically matched the real population of Germany concerning essential aspects, such as household composition or age structure. Since simulations for the entire population of Bavaria would take a long time, the researchers decided to scale up from a reduced sample.

Simulations were therefore carried out with 71,000 agents and all the absolute numbers were scaled by a factor of 185. Contact networks were set between agents for four typical environments that included school, home, work, and free time. The simulations calculated the probability of viral transmission from one agent to another given existing contacts.

Furthermore, non-pharmaceutical (public health) and pharmaceutical (vaccinations) interventions that were applied in Bavaria were integrated into the Covasim simulator and quantitatively modeled. Several aspects were accounted for in the model a few of which are base transmission probability was modeled, the crossover from the wild variant of COVID-19 to alpha and delta variants were modeled continuously, contact tracing by public health departments was modeled, working from home arrangement was simulated along with travel during summer vacations, the number of future vaccinations was assumed, and additional partial lockdown measures were simulated that affected different areas of the life of the unvaccinated people.

The free parameters of the model were fixed in such a way that the simulated curves that provided real data of the seven-day incidence and the critical cases from February 01, 2020, to November 24, 2021, matched well. Finally, the calibrated model of the pandemic was used as a starting point for simulating the future lockdown scenarios.

The results of the study indicated that the simulation was able to capture the first three waves of COVID-19 along with the beginning of the fourth wave. The model projects that in absence of any intervention, a 7-day incidence of just under 1,000 in the second last week of 2021 along with a requirement of more than 2,600 intensive care units during January 2021 in Bavaria can take place. However, the simulations also show that interventions starting from December 2021 can mitigate the fourth wave effectively.

Working from home and restricting leisure contacts of unvaccinated people was found to be beneficial in preventing transmission of infection while the exclusion of unvaccinated students from classes in schools was found to be least effective. No additional restrictions are required to be imposed on vaccinated individuals for the mitigation of the third wave.

However, it is observed that even without further interventions the number of infections and critical cases decreases before the turn of the year. This can be due to the ever-increasing immunization of the population through vaccination as well as infection. Therefore, it can be concluded that the populations immunization is progressing towards herd immunity which will make the infections less probable.

The study had certain limitations. First, data from only Bavaria or Germany have been included. Second, data on the actual implementation of public health orders was limited. Third, the study involved several assumptions which might have some influence on the simulations. Finally, the study is considered uncertain due to actual human behavior.

medRxiv publishes preliminary scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed and, therefore, should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or treated as established information.

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Impact of partial lockdown on breaking COVID-19 fourth wave in Bavaria - News-Medical.net

Human Behavior

Ernst Fehr: Loss Aversion is Another Example – finews.com

People weigh losses more than gains of the same size, economics professor Ernst Fehr says in an interview with finews.com. The idea behind this is that events or processes that are more readily available in our memory determine our decisions more strongly than memories that are less readily available.

Ernst Fehris always on the list of candidates for the Nobel Prize in Economics. The professor for microeconomics and experimental economics at the University of Zurich is renowned for his work on behavioral economics, which examines what people do in economic situations. We don't always act rationally, according to Fehr and other economists.

Professor Fehr, philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment said, habit guides us through life. People get up, go to the bathroom, have breakfast without giving it much thought. The emphasis on habit by the Scots was no accident. They wanted to distinguish themselves from French philosophers who emphasized that human actions were always preceded by reason-driven deliberation. Who was right? The Scots or the French?

Habits arent necessarily unreasonable. They often have a rational basis. We brush our teeth every evening without thinking because we know that this is good for our health. There are however also habits that are unreasonable. We might eat too late, which can affect our sleep negatively. Habit is not unreasonable per se.

In economics studies of the early 1990s, the homo economicus was the standard assumption. A reasonable, rational, self-interested being who attempts to maximize their utility for both monetary and non-monetary gains. Is this assumption tenable?

Not all teachers explain homo economicus correctly. By homo economicus is not meant that people run around with a utility meter that tells them which products bring the highest utility in their local supermarket. The approach is only useful as a way to map behavior.

Without the obligation to provide for the future more people would fall into poverty

If a consumer prefers an apple over a pear, then the apple is assigned a higher number, which we call utility. This has nothing to do with substantial utility maximization. But that is not the whole answer to your question. Individuals do not, in fact, always behave rationally. People may want to act rationally, but they can only do so to a limited extent. Hardly anyone is irrational on purpose. However, many things are too complex for fully rational decisions.

Can you give some examples of this?

If there was no government obligation to make financial provisions for old age, more people would fall into poverty in retirement. Who at the age of 28 thinks about what the world will look like when they are 70? Many people are deceived by promises of high returns in financial markets that cannot be kept. Although this does not apply to everyone, of course.

You talk about bounded rationality. What do you mean by this?

One example is availability heuristic. Behind this is the idea that events or processes that are more readily available in our memory determine people's decisions more strongly than memories that are less readily available. For example, most people believe more murders than suicides occur in Berlin or New York, even though usually there are more suicides than murders. Murders get a lot of media coverage, while suicides get hardly any.

People weigh losses more than gains of the same size

The whole advertising industry is based on this kind of bounded rationality. It wants to create these readily available memories. Another example is loss aversion. People weigh losses higher than equally large gains.

What does all this mean for economic policy?

Workers, for example, are more willing to accept real wage losses through inflation than through direct reductions in nominal wages. This means an employee is more likely to cope with wagedeterioration due to inflation than due to an employer imposing a wage cut.

The outcome however is exactly the same: loss of purchasing power. Such behavioral patterns also help to understand the euro crisis. Before the introduction of the euro, countries could lower the real purchasing power of wages by devaluing their currency and thus adapt to changing economic conditions. In a monetary union, however, this is no longer possible. Real wage reductions can only be achieved by nominal wage reductions.

People feel that imposed wage cuts are unfair. A devaluation of the currency, however, is more likely to be accepted, even if it also represents a loss of purchasing power.

Should the state take advantage of people's small weaknesses for the common good? U.S. economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein have called for such nudging. They say company pension plans are useful for society and everyone should get one unless they object. This leads to there being more company pension plans than if the employees had to actively go about setting them up.I welcome this kind of nudging.

But does it not encroach on our freedom?

I cannot understand this criticism, seeing as nudging restricts freedom much less than government bans or taxes. Besides, those who voice this criticism should first take a look at the marketing industry. It's one nudging event that doesn't always benefit the consumer, to say the least.

Human behavior is not determined by unchangeable external forces

When the state engages in nudging, it is based on a democratically legitimized process. If, on the other hand, companies engage in nudging, then this legitimacy is lacking and private corporate interests are at play.

Is there such a thing as freedom? Or are we slaves to our weaknesses?

Human behavior is not determined by unchangeable external forces. One can become aware of one's weaknesses. In tennis, players sometimes mourn lost points. However, nothing is worse than them doing so because it stops them from concentrating on the next point. On the same note, you can adjust your personal attitude to fully concentrate on the next point.

The Austrian-Swiss economist Ernst Fehr, studied economics at the University of Vienna. He has lectured at the University of Zurich since 1994. His research covers the evolution of human cooperation and sociality, in particular fairness, reciprocity, and bounded rationality (behavioral economics and behavioral economics, respectively).

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Ernst Fehr: Loss Aversion is Another Example - finews.com

Human Behavior

Why the Luster on Once-Vaunted ‘Smart Cities’ Is Fading – Yale Environment 360

Last February, the Toyota Motor Company broke ground on what it calls Woven City, a built-from-scratch futuristic urban center on 175 acres in the shadow of Mount Fuji. Woven City is a reference to the way the project plans to weave together cars, robots, data, and computers to create a city that the builders say, is highly efficient, pollution free, and sustainable.

The new city will be carbon neutral, Toyota says. Autonomous cars will run on non-polluting green hydrogen, while solar and wind provide other energy needs. And sensors embedded throughout Woven City will gather a range of metrics and process them with artificial intelligence to help the city constantly become cleaner and run more smoothly.

Woven City is one of a burgeoning number of smart cities that have been recently built or are now being planned or constructed. NEOM is a $500 billion sprawling futuristic city for a million people under construction in Saudi Arabia. Egypt is building a new smart capital near Cairo that planners say could eventually be home to 6.5 million people. Telosa, proposed by a former Walmart executive, would be a city of 50,000 in the western United States in a place yet to be determined. Numerous smart cities have been or are being built in China.

Theres no single concept of a smart city. But the basic definition is a city filled with sensors that monitor myriad aspects of life, from traffic to pollution to energy and water use. In the case of the Woven City, smart homes will feature sensors that will monitor the occupants health. All the monitors in these cities are connected to the backbone of these prototype communities, the Internet of Things (IoT), meaning the interconnection of tiny computers placed in everyday objects. The massive trove of collected data will be interpreted with artificial intelligence to make cities greener and more livable.

While proponents say these communities represent the future of a healthier planet, some prominent smart cities have faced serious obstacles to realizing their utopian visions. Masdar City in Abu Dhabi abandoned its smart city master plan because of financial problems that began in 2008 and continued because the cost of some aspects of the city was far more than forecast. Songdo is a completed smart city with a population of 170,000 in South Korea that has not been able to fill its buildings. Its sometimes described as a ghost town, or, variously, as cold, impersonal, homogenous, and dully predictable.

One recent paper on smart cites grappled with ways these cities can introduce serendipity into daily life to combat their monotonous nature.

There are a lot of good things that can come of smart city concepts, especially for the environmental applications, said Shannon Mattern, a professor of anthropology at The New School for Social Research and the author of A City is Not a Computer. But it really limits your [ways] of intervention to the types of things that lend themselves to quantitative measurement, she said. When you take messy ambiguous dimensions of human nature and try to find ways to algorithmicize them, there is always a failure there, something that slips through the cracks. History, culture, and the spiritual aspects of life are among those aspects that critics cite as missing from or are diminished in smart cities.

There has been criticism, as well, of smart cities being alien to the landscape on which they are built. In her book Spaceship in the Desert, about Masdar City, Gckc Gnel, an anthropologist at Rice University, said both Masdar City and Neom share the vision that the desert is an empty zone on which any kind of ideal can be projected, she said. Thats why I compared Masdar City to a spaceship insulated from the rest of the world.

A street view in Masdar City, United Arab Emirates, showing a tower that circulates cooler air. Hufton+Crow / View Pictures / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Despite the fact that trillions of dollars are being spent to create these spectacular, Oz-like, all-encompassing cities of the future, some leading analysts believe in a very different concept of smarter cities.

I hate almost every effort at building a greenfield smart city, said Boyd Cohen, a professor at EADA, a business school in Barcelona, who is one of the pioneers of the smart city concept and a longtime climate strategist. A smart city without people is a dumb city. You are building a smart city in the absence of people, in the absence of history, in the absence of culture. The developers say, We are going to build this great, amazing city and people will come, and they dont. People want to live in communities and have culture around them.

An alternative to a spanking new city rising on virgin land is to incorporate smart technologies into existing cities, Cohen said. Singapore, London, and Barcelona, are among the cities that lead the world in adopting smart technologies to more efficiently operate their infrastructure and become greener. In London, for example, sensors on light poles monitor air pollution and show particularly polluted spots that can be avoided. Because collecting trash is the most expensive part of the waste disposal process, Barcelona adopted smart bins that signal when they are full and ready for pick up. But technology is not always a be-all and end-all.

Cohen believes cities are on the front line of climate change and need to become smarter to survive it. In 2009 [at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen] everyone thought Obama and the United Nations were going to save the world with agreements to restrict CO2 emissions, he said. It didnt happen and still isnt happening. So I turned my attention to cities. Thats the place where we will get faster action on climate change.

Urban planning, says Cohen, may be the single most important way to reduce fossil fuel pollution and consumption. Effective urban design density, walkability, mixed use so people dont have to drive long distances, and efficient, clean electric or hydrogen public transportation is the foundation. Then you layer in tech, he said. Technology around renewable and distributed energy. And to make our buildings more energy efficient. If you tackle energy consumption and transportation and urban planning, you have gone a long way toward solving the climate problem.

Smart grids are a key component of smart cities. These power grids optimize the delivery of electricity by receiving information from users over the IoT. This data provides experts with information about how, where, and when energy is used. In some models, it interprets that data with artificial intelligence. But as energy sources are diversified solar and wind from large and small sources, even individual homes, as well as traditional sources it makes it harder for electrical systems to efficiently sense where power is needed and to allocate it. Because it can better manage available power, a smart grid avoids waste and can make the most of renewables.

A host of other smart applications are being used in cities. Parking is the bane of urban dwellers, so smart parking has gotten a lot of attention. Santander, Spain, for example, is considered one of the worlds smartest cities because it has 20,000 parking sensors connected to the IoT. Sensors under parking spaces can tell when they are empty and send that information to antennas that beam it to a control center. Signs guide drivers to the empty spots, limiting time spent driving around looking for a space and reducing fuel use, carbon dioxide and automobile pollution, and traffic congestion.

In Utrecht in the Netherlands, people ride sniffer bikes that measure three types of particulate air pollution, as well recording their location, speed, battery voltage, temperature and humidity, road conditions, and organic gases, which are sent to a central data hub. People can choose the cleanest route and are themselves de facto sensors, providing information to city managers.

A rendering of Woven City, which is planned for a 175-acre site in Japan. Toyota

Water use is another prime target of smart applications. A smartphone app, for example, can alert residents to an undetected leak in their plumbing and allows them to monitor consumption and quality.

Barcelona has pioneered a smart water irrigation system in its public spaces. Officials inventoried the species of plants in each park and determined precisely how much water they need. Water and humidity sensors, coupled with data from weather stations and rain gauges, provide information on how moist the soil and air are, and allow delivery of the right amount of water. The city says it saves 25 percent on its water bill more than 400,000 euros a year.

But smart cities have run into trouble over the issue of who owns the data that is collected and how it will be used. A Google affiliate called Sidewalk Labs had plans for a 12-acre smart city development, called Quayside, on Torontos lakefront. The project ran into a buzz saw of opposition, largely over whether it could be trusted to manage the data. Roger McNamee, a venture capitalist, wrote a letter to the city council and said the information technology behemoth could not be trusted. The smart city project on the Toronto waterfront is the most highly evolved version to date of surveillance capitalism, he wrote. The company will use algorithms to nudge human behavior in the direction that favors its business.

Sidewalk Labs CEO Daniel L. Doctoroff said the 2020 cancellation of the project was largely a result of the pandemic and economic uncertainty in the Toronto real estate market. It has become too difficult to make the 12-acre project financially viable without sacrificing core parts of the plan, Doctoroff wrote last year.

Its clear that the vision of what works as a smart city is still in the early stages, especially as technology and concepts continue to evolve. It will take time to scale up the most sustainable models across a city, let alone the world, said Cohen.

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Why the Luster on Once-Vaunted 'Smart Cities' Is Fading - Yale Environment 360

Human Behavior

Outdoor Pet Cats Are Spreading a Brain Parasite to Wildlife – Smithsonian

Cat owners can keep themselves, their pets, and wildlife safe by keeping their feline indoors. Gustavo Fabian Rubertoni via Getty Images

A new study suggests free-roaming cats could be to blame for the spread of a potentially dangerous brain parasite to wild animals. Researchers from the University of British Columbia found that both domestic and feral outdoor cats could be the driving mechanism behind infections ofToxoplasma gondii in surrounding wildlife and humans,reports George Dvorsky for Gizmodo.

Toxoplasma gondii is a brain parasite that can infect many warm-blooded animalslike cats and humansand can lead to the disease toxoplasmosis, or toxo. The single-celled parasite is too small to see with the naked eye and survives inside soil, water, raw meat, and animals bodies. Toxoplasma gondii is best known for hijacking the behavior of mice, causing them to lose their fear of feline predators.

Toxoplasma gondii is one of the most common parasites in the world and has infected approximately one-third of people globally, including some 40 million Americans. In humans, toxoplasmosis can cause flu-like reactions, but most people infected never develop symptoms. For pregnant people or those with compromised immune systems, toxoplasmosis may cause serious health problems and has been linked to nervous system disorders and cancers, per Brandon Sun for the Toronto Star.

Felines usually get toxoplasmosis from eating infected wild animals or raw meat, which makes outdoor pet cats particularly susceptible to the parasite. Once infected, a single cat can drop half-a-billion toxo eggs in just two weeks through their feces. The are tens of millions of free-roaming cats in the United States, which, in addition to killing huge numbers of birds and other wild creatures, host and excrete Toxoplasma gondii.

In the study published last month in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Science, researchers examined more than 45,000 cases of toxoplasmosis in wild mammals, pulling data from more than 200 studies, reports Jessica CheungforCBC News. The results suggested that cats were more likely to pass on the paradise to wildlife where human density is higher, like cities.

As increasing human densities are associated with increased densities of domestic cats, our study suggests that free-roaming domestic catswhether pets or feral catsare the most likely cause of these infections, saysveterinarian and ecologist, Amy Wilson from the University of British Columbia, who led the new research. According to their findings, Wilson says domestic cats are "the most consequential host for toxoplasma.

The researchers also found the parasite was more prevalent in warmer climatesand among animals with aquatic habitats. Climate change could beshifting how the parasite spreads,as the study concluded that healthy forests and other ecosystems can keep dangerous pathogens like Toxoplasma gondii at bay.

"Intense rainfall, for example, which might be expected to occur as a result of climate change in many regions of Canadathat could be a factor," saysDavid Lapen, a research scientist for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada who co-authored the study.

Wilson says the good news is that cat owners can keep themselves and their feline friends safe by doing one simple thing: keeping cats indoors. For owners that really want to give their kitty outdoor access, do so under close observationon a leash, or in a protected outdoor enclosure.

The message to cat owners is really to start transitioning your cat to a supervised outdoor access, Wilson said to Simon Little for Global News. We know that free-roaming cats suffer increased trauma, we know they suffer increased disease.

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Outdoor Pet Cats Are Spreading a Brain Parasite to Wildlife - Smithsonian

Human Behavior

Commentary: The thousands of vulnerable people harmed by Facebook and Instagram are lost in Meta’s ‘average user’ data – pressherald.com

Fall 2021 has been filled with a steady stream of media coverage arguing that Metas Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram social media platforms pose a threat to users mental health and well-being, radicalize, polarize users and spread misinformation.Are these technologies embraced by billions killing people and eroding democracy? Or is this just another moral panic?According to Metas PR team and a handful of contrarian academics and journalists, there is evidence that social media does not cause harm and the overall picture is unclear. They cite apparently conflicting studies, imperfect access to data and the difficulty of establishing causality to support this position.Some of these researchers have surveyed social media users and found that social media use appears to have at most minor negative consequences on individuals. These results seem inconsistent with years of journalistic reporting, Metas leaked internal data, common sense intuition and peoples lived experience.Teens struggle with self-esteem, and it doesnt seem far-fetched to suggest that browsing Instagram could make that worse. Similarly, its hard to imagine so many people refusing to get vaccinated, becoming hyperpartisan or succumbing to conspiracy theories in the days before social media.So who is right? As a researcher who studies collective behavior, I see no conflict between the research (methodological quibbles aside), leaks and peoples intuition. Social media can have catastrophic effects, even if the average user only experiences minimal consequences.Averagings blind spotTo see how this works, consider a world in which Instagram has a rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer effect on the well-being of users. A majority, those already doing well to begin with, find Instagram provides social affirmation and helps them stay connected to friends. A minority, those who are struggling with depression and loneliness, see these posts and wind up feeling worse.If you average them together in a study, you might not see much of a change over time. This could explain why findings from surveys and panels are able to claim minimal impact on average. More generally, small groups in a larger sample have a hard time changing the average.Yet if we zoom in on the most at-risk people, many of them may have moved from occasionally sad to mildly depressed or from mildly depressed to dangerously so. This is precisely what Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen reported in her congressional testimony: Instagram creates a downward spiraling feedback loop among the most vulnerable teens.The inability of this type of research to capture the smaller but still significant numbers of people at risk the tail of the distribution is made worse by the need to measure a range of human experiences in discrete increments. When people rate their well-being from a low point of one to a high point of five, one can mean anything from breaking up with a partner who they werent that into in the first place to urgently needing crisis intervention to stay alive. These nuances are buried in the context of population averages.A history of averaging out harmThe tendency to ignore harm on the margins isnt unique to mental health or even the consequences of social media. Allowing the bulk of experience to obscure the fate of smaller groups is a common mistake, and Id argue that these are often the people society should be most concerned about.It can also be a pernicious tactic. Tobacco companies and scientists alike once argued that premature death among some smokers was not a serious concern because most people who have smoked a cigarette do not die of lung cancer.Pharmaceutical companies have defended their aggressive marketing tactics by claiming that the vast majority of people treated with opioids get relief from pain without dying of an overdose. In doing so, theyve swapped the vulnerable for the average and steered the conversation toward benefits, often measured in a way that obscures the very real damage to a minority but still substantial group of people.The lack of harm to many is not inconsistent with severe harm caused to a few. With most of the world now using some form of social media, I believe its important to listen to the voices of concerned parents and struggling teenagers when they point to Instagram as a source of distress. Similarly, its important to acknowledge that the COVID-19 pandemic has been prolonged because misinformation on social media has made some people afraid to take a safe and effective vaccine. These lived experiences are important pieces of evidence about the harm caused by social media.Does Meta have the answer?Establishing causality from observational data is challenging, so challenging that progress on this front garnered the 2021 Nobel in economics. And social scientists are not well positioned to run randomized controlled trials to definitively establish causality, particularly for social media platform design choices such as altering how content is filtered and displayed.But Meta is. The company has petabytes of data on human behavior, many social scientists on its payroll and the ability to run randomized control trials in parallel with millions of users. They run such experiments all the time to understand how best to capture users attention, down to every buttons color, shape and size.Meta could come forward with irrefutable and transparent evidence that their products are harmless, even to the vulnerable, if it exists. Has the company chosen not to run such experiments or has it run them and decided not to share the results?Either way, Metas decision to instead release and emphasize data about average effects is telling.The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.

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Commentary: The thousands of vulnerable people harmed by Facebook and Instagram are lost in Meta's 'average user' data - pressherald.com

Human Behavior

Honda Unveils Safety Tech Aimed at 0 Fatalities by 2050 – The BRAKE Report

Source: Honda announcement

TOKYO Honda Motor Co., Ltd. premiered some of the advanced future safety technologies it is developing for the realization of a society where everyone sharing the road will be liberated from the risk of traffic collisions and enjoy freedom of mobility with total peace of mind.

Honda will strive to attain its goal of realizing zero traffic collision fatalities involving Honda motorcycles and automobiles globally by 2050 utilizing two key technologies.

One is the worlds first*1 artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Intelligent Driver-Assistive Technology providing assistance that is suited to the ability and situation of each individual to reduce driving errors and risks, helping the driver achieve safe and sound driving.

The other is the Safe and Sound Network Technology which connects all road users, both people and mobility products, through telecommunications, making it possible to predict potential risks and help people avoid such risks before collisions occur.

Striving for a collision-free society for everyone sharing the road, represented by the global safety slogan Safety for Everyone, Honda has been pursuing the research and development of safety technologies from the perspective of both hardware and software.

For the pursuit of a collision-free society, Honda will expand the introduction of Honda SENSING 360, a recently announced omnidirectional safety and driver-assistive system, to all models to go on sale in all major markets by 2030. Moreover, Honda will continue working to expand application of a motorcycle detection function and further enhance functions of its ADAS (advanced driver-assistance system).

Furthermore, Honda also will continue to make progress in expanding application of motorcycle safety technologies and offering of safety education technologies (Honda Safety EdTech). Through these initiatives, Honda will strive to reduce global traffic collision fatalities involving Honda motorcycles and automobiles by half*2 by 2030.

Beyond that, Honda will strive to realize its ambitious goal of zero traffic collision fatalities by 2050 through establishment of future safety technologies at the earliest possible timing.

Aiming for zero human error in driving with the Intelligent Driver-Assistive Technology

Honda has unraveled the factors behind human errors through its original fMRI*3-based study of the human brain and analysis of risk-taking behaviors.

The system presumes predictors of driving errors based on information obtained through a driver monitoring camera and pattern of the driving operations.

This technology is being developed to enable each individual driver to mitigate driving errors and enjoy mobility without any sense of anxiety.

Honda will strive for establishment of underlying technologies during the first half of the 2020s, with practical application during the second half of the 2020s.

With the goal to unravel underlying causes of driving errors that make the driver feel anxious, Honda has been conducting research and development of technologies to understand people with an original method that utilizes fMRI*3.

In addition to technologies to understand human behavior and conditions, which Honda has amassed to date, the Intelligent Driver-Assistive Technology unveiled today, the worlds first such technology, uses ADAS sensors and cameras to recognize potential risks in the vehicles surroundings, which enables AI to detect driving risks. At the same time, AI will determine optimal driving behavior on a real-time basis and offer assistance suited to the cognitive state and traffic situations of each individual driver.

With the next-generation driver-assistive functions currently under research and development, Honda will strive to offer the new value of error-free safety and peace of mind which are suited to the driving behavior and situation of each individual driver and keep them away from any potential risks.

1.No driving operation errors (Operational assist):

Vehicle offers AI-based assist to reduce drifting and prevent a delay in operations.

2.No oversight / No prediction errors (Cognitive assist): Vehicle communicates risks with visual, tactile and auditory sensations.

Technologies in R&D phase: Risk indicator, seatbelt control and 3D audio

3.No errors due to daydreaming and careless driving (Attentiveness assist): Vehicle helps reduce driver fatigue / drowsiness

Technologies in R&D phase: Bio feedback / vibration stimulus through the seatback

To view the entire announcement, with several graphs and images, click HERE.

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Honda Unveils Safety Tech Aimed at 0 Fatalities by 2050 - The BRAKE Report

Human Behavior

Scientist Camilla Pang On Being Neurodivergent And The Power Of Science : Short Wave – NPR

Scientist and author Camilla Pang turns her memoir into an instruction manual for life. Greg Barker/Penguin Books hide caption

Scientist and author Camilla Pang turns her memoir into an instruction manual for life.

Camilla Pang is a postdoctoral scientist and writer. When she was five years old, she asked her mother a vexing question: "Is there an instruction manual for humans - like a guidebook - something that explains why people behave the way they do?"

Years later, Pang was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder. At the time, she simply felt like an outsider.

"No, Millie," her mother told her.

Pang did find answers and connection in her uncle's science textbooks. She began scribbling facts and figures in notebooks and reading about all kinds of science. She went on to obtain a Ph.D. in bioinformatics from University College London and she reached a place in her life where she had enough material to write the instruction manual she wished she'd had as a kid.

Short Wave host Emily Kwong talks with Pang about her memoir, An Outsiders Guide to Humans: What Science Taught Me About What We Do And Who We Are.

She says it is a guidebook for anyone searching for a blueprint to the human condition, pairing scientific principles with the more befuddling aspects of human behavior and daily life. In making tough decisions, Pang deploys lessons from machine learning. In seeking harmony in relationships, she turns to wave theory. Her writing is both prescriptive and reassuring and she ultimately wants to help people feel less alone.

"I think there's no greater empathy than enabling people to feel that they can do something, and be assuring them that what they feel is valid," Pang says.

The British version of the book, Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us About Love, Life and Relationships, won the Royal Society Science Book Prize in 2020. A paperback version of An Outsider's Guide to Humans will be available December 7, 2021 from Penguin Books.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Ramirez, edited by Gisele Grayson and fact-checked by Margaret Cirino. The audio engineer was Leo Del Aguila.

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Scientist Camilla Pang On Being Neurodivergent And The Power Of Science : Short Wave - NPR

Human Behavior

Opinion | You Are the Object of Facebooks Secret Extraction Operation – The New York Times

As we move into the third decade of the 21st century, surveillance capitalism is the dominant economic institution of our time. In the absence of countervailing law, this system successfully mediates nearly every aspect of human engagement with digital information. The promise of the surveillance dividend now draws surveillance economics into the normal economy, from insurance, retail, banking and finance to agriculture, automobiles, education, health care and more. Today all apps and software, no matter how benign they appear, are designed to maximize data collection.

Historically, great concentrations of corporate power were associated with economic harms. But when human data are the raw material and predictions of human behavior are the product, then the harms are social rather than economic. The difficulty is that these novel harms are typically understood as separate, even unrelated, problems, which makes them impossible to solve. Instead, each new stage of harm creates the conditions for the next stage.

All of it begins with extraction. An economic order founded on the secret massive-scale extraction of human data assumes the destruction of privacy as a nonnegotiable condition of its business operations. With privacy out of the way, ill-gotten human data are concentrated within private corporations, where they are claimed as corporate assets to be deployed at will.

The social effect is a new form of inequality, reflected in the colossal asymmetry between what these companies know about us and what we know about them. The sheer size of this knowledge gap is conveyed in a leaked 2018 Facebook document, which described its artificial intelligence hub, ingesting trillions of behavioral data points every day and producing six million behavioral predictions each second.

Next, these human data are weaponized as targeting algorithms, engineered to maximize extraction and aimed back at their unsuspecting human sources to increase engagement. Targeting mechanisms change real life, sometimes with grave consequences. For example, the Facebook Files depict Mr. Zuckerberg using his algorithms to reinforce or disrupt the behavior of billions of people. Anger is rewarded or ignored. News stories become more trustworthy or unhinged. Publishers prosper or wither. Political discourse turns uglier or more moderate. People live or die.

Occasionally the fog clears to reveal the ultimate harm: the growing power of tech giants willing to use their control over critical information infrastructure to compete with democratically elected lawmakers for societal dominance. Early in the pandemic, for example, Apple and Google refused to adapt their operating systems to host contact-tracing apps developed by public health authorities and supported by elected officials. In February, Facebook shut down many of its pages in Australia as a signal of refusal to negotiate with the Australian Parliament over fees for news content.

Thats why, when it comes to the triumph of surveillance capitalisms revolution, it is the lawmakers of every liberal democracy, especially in the United States, who bear the greatest burden of responsibility. They allowed private capital to rule our information spaces during two decades of spectacular growth, with no laws to stop it.

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Opinion | You Are the Object of Facebooks Secret Extraction Operation - The New York Times