Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

Brian Laundries parents behavior while searching Carlton Reserve is not normal as theyre not frantic,… – The US Sun

BRIAN Laundries parents werent acting frantic enough while searching for their fugitive son on Wednesday at a Florida nature reserve, according to a body language expert.

Patti Wood told The Sun: What were seeing is different from that norm."

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The norm is to behave with a sense of urgency, walk together and be constantly shifting their heads to find any clue.

Wood didn't see that in the Chris and Roberta's behavior during the short couple video clips she evaluated.

"Theyre not together and not doing normal sweeping to side to side motion or looking low, at a regular level and looking up and away," she said. Theres not a franticness.

The FBI identified the skeletal remains found yesterday belonged to their 23-year-old son using his dental records.

"On October 21, 2021, a comparison of dental records confirmed that the human remains found at the T. Mabry Carlton, Jr. Memorial Reserve and Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park are those of Brian Laundrie, a statement by the FBI reads.

Two detectives shared their findings by paying a visit to the Laundrie's home in-person on Thursday evening.

The FBI also confirmed the identification in a statement.

"On October 21, 2021, a comparison of dental records confirmed that the human remains found at the T. Mabry Carlton, Jr. Memorial Reserve and Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park are those of Brian Laundrie," it read.

Authorities had been searching Brian since his parents Chris and Roberta reported him missing on September 17.

Laundrie had told his parents that he was going for a hike at the 24,000-acre Carlton Reserve on September 13 - which was the last time they saw him.

The fugitive has been on the run since his fianc Gabby Petito was found strangled to death in Wyoming on September 19.

The FBI confirmed the shocking discovery during a press conference on Wednesday, where they also characterized the death of Gabby as "murder" for the first time.

Chris and Roberta Laundriewere at the scene after joining the search when the remains and personal items were found.

During Wednesdays fruitful search at the swampy reserve, the parents were shadowed by authorities and reporters sifting through the rough terrain. <<>>

At one point, Chris can be seen veering into an isolated bramble while Roberta continues walking several yards ahead on the main trail.

Wood thought their different actions on that walk were especially telling.

I found it interesting that instead of walking and moving and doing the search together they separate out, she said.

They go off in different directions.

I find it interesting that he goes directly into a secluded, dark more challenging, and secretive area - and she walks away to a clear, you can see over a distance path.

They separate out like that.

Wood explains that the demeanor of the Laundrie parents struck her as outside the norm.

...Shes not walking that much far ahead of him even though hes going through deep brush, said Wood.

The lack of urgency by the head movements of Chris and Roberta as they looked around the wilderness for their missing son stood out to Wood.

Typically when youre searching like that, your body and head or upper part of face would be sweeping side to side, head down looking side to side, be on [the] same standing looking side to side, and looking up side to side, she said.

"Chris didn't want to pick the bag up because he wanted law enforcement to see it," their attorney Steven Bertolino said, adding: "This was caught on camera."

Bertolino explained that it was Chris who foundBrian's white plastic dry bag in full view of a news reporter who was about 20 feet off the trail, while police uncovered his backpack and human remains.

"Chris couldn't find the law enforcement because they were then out of sight, because Chris had been in the woods, so he didn't want to leave the bag there with the news reporter standing nearby, so he picked it up."

Once he found the item, Bertolino insists that Chris informed authorities.

"They looked at the contents of the bag," the lawyer explained.

"At that time, law enforcement officers showed him a picture on the phone of a backpack that law enforcement had located also nearby, and also some distance off the trail."

In a separate moment captured by Fox News, Chris and Roberta can be seen conversing with a police officer on a hiking trail in Myakkahatchee Creek after Brians belongings and partial skeletal remains were found and the park closed down.

In the clip, the officer at one stage seems to tell them "we've found something" and advises the pair to go home.

The officer places his hand on Chris Laundrie's right shoulder during the exchange.

Roberta then gazes up at face him and wipes his left cheek.

The tender moment between the parents struck Wood revealing how strong their loving bond is.

When theyre informed of what appears to be the findings of human remains, Wood notices Chris and Roberta collapse down of the arms as they come closer in to the sides to touch - to gain security and show some fear as his shoulders hunch over.

She then notices him settling a hand in his pocket suggesting something is shifted quite radically between left and right side.

As far as Roberta wiping Chriss tear-marked cheek, Wood is convinced the motion is intimate and proves their very close relationship.

What shes doing is an indication of great intimacy and caretaking.

Shes touching - the brush is going downwards - any touch in that intimate zone of the face would indicate that they have a very close relationship, [the] kind of touch shes done before or been in that area to do it out in public.

Wood compared it to a mother nurturing their child.

She said its similar to a mum wiping a childs face with a Kleenex.

She added: Its the same kind of maintenance and care thats very very intimate.

Chriss reaction to his wifes tender hand is also very informative.

She noticed how Chriss response is not to pull away.

Instead, his response is yes, thats it ok. I feel comforted by that.This kind of grooming behavior while learning their child may be gone,speaks to a long relationship, Wood said.

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Brian Laundrie timeline

Brian Laundrie has not been seen since the morning of September 13. Here is a timeline of Laundrie's latest whereabouts:

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Brian Laundries parents behavior while searching Carlton Reserve is not normal as theyre not frantic,... - The US Sun

Human Behavior

Does raising the minimum wage kill jobs? The elusive answer shows why economics is so difficult but data su – pennlive.com

Veronika Dolar, SUNY Old Westbury

For decades it was conventional wisdom in the field of economics that a higher minimum wage results in fewer jobs.

In part, thats because its based on the law of supply and demand, one of the most well-known ideas in economics. Despite it being called a law, its actually two theories that suggest if the price of something goes up wages, for example demand will fall in this case, for workers. Meanwhile, their supply will rise. Thus an introduction of a high minimum wage would cause the supply of labor to exceed demand, resulting in unemployment.

But this is just a theory with many built-in assumptions.

Then, in 1994, David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of this years Nobel winners, and the late Alan Krueger used a natural experiment to show that, in the real world, this doesnt actually happen. In 1992, New Jersey increased its minimum wage while neighboring Pennsylvania did not. Yet there was little change in employment.

When I discuss their work in my economics classes, however, I dont portray it as an example of economists providing a definitive answer to the question of whether minimum wage hikes kill jobs. Instead, I challenge my students to think about all the ways one could answer this question, which clearly cannot be settled based on our beliefs. But rather, the answer requires data which in economics, can be hard to come by.

Economics studies the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. And so, like other social sciences, economics is fundamentally interested in human behavior.

But humans behave in a wide variety of often hard-to-predict ways, with countless complications. As a result, economists rely on abstraction and theory to create models in hopes of representing and explaining the complex world that they are studying. This emphasis on complicated mathematical models, theory and abstraction has made economics a lot less accessible to the general public than other social sciences, such as psychology or sociology.

Economists also use these models to answer important questions, such as Does a minimum wage cause unemployment? In fact, this is one of the most studied questions in all of economics since at least 1912, when Massachusetts became the first state to create a minimum wage. The federal wage floor came in 1938 with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

And its been controversial ever since. Proponents argue that a higher minimum wage helps create jobs, grow the economy, fight poverty and reduce wage inequality.

Critics stress that minimum wages cause unemployment, hurt the economy and actually harm the low-income people that were supposed to be helped.

Most students in my introductory microeconomics class can easily show, using the standard supply and demand model, that an increase in the minimum wage above the level that the market sets on its own should drive up unemployment. In fact, this is one of the most commonly used examples in introductory economics textbooks.

However, this result assumes a perfectly competitive labor market in which workers and employers are abundant and employees can change jobs with ease. This is rarely the case in the real world, where a few companies frequently dominate in what are known as monopsonies.

And so others theorized that because monopsonistic companies had the power to set wages artificially low, a higher minimum wage could, perhaps counterintuitively, prompt companies to hire more workers in order to recover some of their lost profitability as a result of the increased labor costs.

How can economists tell which of these two theories may be right? They need data.

Studying the real world is difficult, and its constantly changing, so it is not easy to obtain all the relevant evidence.

Unlike in medicine or other sciences, economists cannot conduct rigidly controlled clinical trials, a method vacinologists used to test the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. Due to financial, ethical or practical constraints, we cannot easily split people into treatment or control groups as is common in psychology. And we cannot randomly assign a higher minimum wage to some and not others and observe what will happen, which is how a biomedical scientist might study the impact of various treatments on human health.

And in studying the minimum wage, we cannot simply look at past times when it was increased and check what happened to unemployment a few weeks or months later. There are many other factors that affect the labor market, such as outsourcing and immigration, and its virtually impossible to isolate and pin down one factor such as a minimum wage hike as the cause.

This is where the pioneering work of natural experiments like the ones Card and Krueger have used over the years to study the effects of raising the minimum wage and other policy changes comes in. It began with their 1994 paper, but theyve replicated the findings with other studies that have deepened the amount of data that shows the original theory about the minimum wage causing job losses is likely wrong.

Their approach isnt without flaws mostly technical ones - and in fact economists still dont have a clear answer to the question about the minimum wage that I posed earlier in this article. But because of Card, Krueger and their research, the debate over the minimum wage has gotten a lot less theoretical and much more empirical.

Only by studying how humans actually behave can economics hope to make meaningful predictions about how a policy change like increasing the minimum wage is likely to affect the behavior of the economy and the people living in it.

Veronika Dolar, Assistant Professor of Economics, SUNY Old Westbury

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

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Does raising the minimum wage kill jobs? The elusive answer shows why economics is so difficult but data su - pennlive.com

Human Behavior

Researchers propose targeted interventions to contain the pandemic with minimal societal disruption – News-Medical.Net

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to more than 218 million infections and over 4.5 million deaths as of Sept. 3, 2021. Nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), such as case isolation, quarantining contacts, and the complete lockdown of entire countries, were implemented in an effort to contain the pandemic. But these NPIs often come at the expense of economic disruption, harm to social and mental well-being, and costly administration costs to ensure compliance.

Given the slow rollout of vaccination programs worldwide and the rise of several mutations of the coronavirus, the use of these types of interventions will continue for some time. In Chaos, by AIP Publishing, researchers in China use a data-driven agent-based model to identify new and sustainable NPIs to contain outbreaks while minimizing the economic and social costs.

Based on the proposed model, we proposed targeted interventions, which can contain the outbreak with minimal disruption of society. This is of particular importance in cities like Hong Kong, whose economy relies on international trade."

Qingpeng Zhang, Study Author, American Institute of Physics

The researchers built a data-driven mobility model to simulate COVID-19 spreading in Hong Kong by combining synthetic population, human behavior patterns, and a viral transmission model. This model generated 7.55 million agents to describe the infectious state and movement for each Hong Kong resident.

Since mobile phone data is difficult to obtain in most countries, the researchers calibrated their model with open-source data, so it could be easily extended to the modeling of other metropolises with various demographic and human mobility patterns.

"With the agent-based model, we can simulate very detailed scenarios in Hong Kong, and based on these simulations, we are able to propose targeted interventions in only a small portion of the city instead of city-level NPIs," said Zhang.

The researchers found that by controlling a small percentage (top 1%-2%) of grids in Hong Kong, the virus could be largely contained. While such interventions are not as effective as citywide NPIs and compulsory COVID-19 testing, such targeted control has the benefit of a much smaller disruption of society.

The proposed model leading to the targeted interventions has the potential to guide current citywide NPIs to achieve a balance between lowering the risk and preserving human mobility and economy of the city.

"Our findings also apply to other major cities in the world, such as Beijing, New York, London, and Toyko, as COVID-19 is likely to be around indefinitely, and we have to learn how to live with it," said Zhang.

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Researchers propose targeted interventions to contain the pandemic with minimal societal disruption - News-Medical.Net

Human Behavior

Cellphone data shows that people navigate by keeping their destinations in front of them even when that’s not the most efficient route – The…

Think of your morning walk to work, school or your favorite coffee shop. Are you taking the shortest possible route to your destination? According to big data research that my colleagues and I conducted, the answer is no: Peoples brains are not wired for optimal navigation.

Instead of calculating the shortest path, people try to point straight toward their destinations we call it the pointiest path even if it is not the most efficient way to walk.

As a researcher who studies urban environments and human behavior, I have always been interested in how people experience cities, and how studying this can tell researchers something about human nature and how weve evolved.

Long before I could run an experiment, I had a hunch. Twenty years ago, I was a student at the University of Cambridge, and I realized that the path I followed between my bedroom at Darwin College and my department on Chaucer Road was, in fact, two different paths. On the way to Chaucer, I would take one set of turns. On the way back home, another.

Surely one route was more efficient than the other, but I had drifted into adapting two, one for each direction. I was consistently inconsistent, a small but frustrating realization for a student devoting his life to rational thinking. Was it just me or were my fellow classmates and my fellow humans doing the same?

Around 10 years ago, I found tools that could help answer my question. At the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we were pioneering the science of understanding cities by analyzing big data, and in particular digital traces from cellphones. Studying human mobility, we noticed that, on the whole, peoples routes were not conservative, meaning they did not preserve the same path from A to B as the opposite direction, from B to A.

However, the technology and analytical methods of that time prevented us from learning more in 2011, we could not reliably tell a pedestrian apart from a car. We were close, but still a few technological steps short of tackling the enigma of human navigation in cities.

Today, thanks to access to data sets of unparalleled size and accuracy, we can go further. Every day, everyones smartphones and apps collect thousands of data points. Collaborating with colleagues at the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and other international scholars, we analyzed a massive database of anonymized pedestrian movement patterns in San Francisco and Boston. Our results consider questions that my young self at Cambridge didnt know to ask.

After we analyzed pedestrian movement, it became clear that I am not the only one who navigates this way: Human beings are not optimal navigators. After accounting for possible interference from people letting Google Maps choose their path for them, our analysis of our big data sets fueled several interconnected discoveries.

First, human beings consistently deviate from the shortest possible path, and our deviations increase over longer distances. This finding probably seems intuitive. Previous research has already shown how people rely on landmarks and miscalculate the lengths of streets.

Our study was able to go a step further: developing a model with the capability to accurately predict the slightly irrational paths that we found in our data. We discovered that the most predictive model representing the most common mode of city navigation was not the quickest path, but instead one that tried to minimize the angle between the direction a person is moving and the line from the person to their destination.

This finding appears to be consistent across different cities. We found evidence of walkers attempting to minimize this angle in both the famously convoluted streets of Boston and the orderly grid of San Francisco. Scientists have recorded similar behaviors in animals, which are described in the research literature as vector-based navigation. Perhaps the entire animal kingdom shares the idiosyncratic tendencies that confused me on my walk to work.

Why might everyone travel this way? Its possible that the desire to point in the right direction is a legacy of evolution. In the savanna, calculating the shortest route and pointing straight at the target would have led to very similar outcomes. It is only today that the strictures of urban life traffic, crowds and looping streets have made it more obvious that peoples shorthand is not quite optimal.

Still, vector-based navigation may have its charms. Evolution is a story of trade-offs, not optimizations, and the cognitive load of calculating a perfect path rather than relying on the simpler pointing method might not be worth a few saved minutes. After all, early humans had to preserve brain power for dodging stampeding elephants, just like people today might need to focus on avoiding aggressive SUVs. This imperfect system has been good enough for untold generations.

However, people are no longer walking, or even thinking, alone. They are increasingly wedded to digital technologies, to the point that phones represent extensions of their bodies. Some have argued that humans are becoming cyborgs.

This experiment reminds us of the catch: Technological prostheses do not think like their creators. Computers are perfectly rational. They do exactly what code tells them to do. Brains, on the other hand, achieve a bounded rationality of good enoughs and necessary compromises. As these two distinct entities become increasingly entangled and collide on Google Maps, Facebook or a self-driving car its important to remember how they are different from each other.

Looking back on my university days, it is a sobering thought that humanitys biological source code remains much more similar to that of a rat in the street than that of the computers in our pockets. The more people become wedded to technology, the more important it becomes to make technologies that accommodate human irrationalities and idiosyncrasies.

[The Conversations science, health and technology editors pick their favorite stories. Weekly on Wednesdays.]

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Cellphone data shows that people navigate by keeping their destinations in front of them even when that's not the most efficient route - The...

Human Behavior

The Seven Ways Equinix is Plugging the Holes in NGAV with DTEX – Security Boulevard

Next-Gen Anti-Virus (NGAV) technology has greatly improved many organizations abilities to detect, identify and stop malware from infecting their endpoints, servers and networks. Its efficacy over legacy solutions is undebatable. So why are we continuing to hear about the frequency and severity in data breaches increasing? Its simple really humans. Users remain the elusive missing link whos behavior has the most impact on an organizations risk posture.

In a recent webinar, we heard from Stephen Seljan, Security Operations Manager at Equinix, who shared how Equinix is super-charging its NGAV tool with behavioral DLP and human activity forensics with the help of DTEX.

Below, weve summarized the key points highlighted within the webinar for those not able to listen for the full hour. Hopefully, learning about the seven ways Equinix is utilizing workforce cyber security alongside NGAV will help other organizations emulate what the company has done successfully to improve their own security posture.

1. Root Cause Analysis Back in February, Equinix had a user whose Office 365 account was compromised with a known MFA bypass vulnerability. This led the company to ask a number of questions: Was this a drive by? Was this scanning? How did this happen?

With DTEX, Equinix was empowered to go back through this particular users history in detail to see that he unknowingly fell victim to a targeted phishing attack. With the ability to duplicate everything that happened, the company was able to determine how the attack occurred in addition to identifying other weaknesses introducing areas of vulnerability. This level of visibility and root cause analysis proved crucial in explaining this first attack and preventing future attacks.

2. Data Exfiltration All companies continuously strive to prevent data exfiltration. Equinix worked with DTEX to help solve part of this challenge by looking at the amount of data and specific files an individual transfers. For instance, with the capability to see file names and distinguish whether files are sensitive, IT teams have the granularity needed to create rules that identify sensitive file paths so IT can be notified in the event that any employee accesses those directories. With this visibility, IT teams are able to confirm whether the individuals accessing the data should be able to have access, helping to prevent the exfiltration of sensitive files.

3. Work-From-Home (WFH) Engagement Monitoring The shift to remote work has made it increasingly difficult for businesses to tell what employees are doing. With DTEX, Equinix is able to anonymously compare the processes of team members alongside one another to evaluate productivity. This helps the organization to balance workloads more effectively, spot any activities that shouldnt be occurring and support team members to increase productivity.

4. Malicious Insider Detection Equinix, along with other organizations, is constantly working to deter the activity of malicious insiders. DTEXs workforce cyber intelligence and security solution enables the company to anonymously identify what users are engaging in these types of behaviors. So, for example, if a user creates a fake email to send anonymous notes, the organization would be able to see that the anonymous user was engaging with that address through their device. From there, they would be able to identify the individual and address the malicious activity head-on.

5. Shadow IT/ Unwanted Applications Unwanted applications are a huge problem today, especially given the shift to remote work and the friction between IT teams and other members of the organization. In the case of unwanted apps, Equinix is able to look at the most used and least used apps in its environment. With this intel, the company can pinpoint what the least used apps are and evaluate whether theyre necessary. This has enabled the company to spot malicious actors and negligent users introducing risk, and to identify potential licensing issues.

6. Early Ransomware Detection Equinix has benefited from creating alerts for network share discovery. So, anytime files are found on a network share, DTEX helps to rewrite those files and encrypt them. By detecting early whether a system is accessing any network shares out of the norm for that host, the company can stay one step ahead of these types of attacks.

7. User Lockout The ability to lock users out of their system is crucial, especially with users working remotely and in the case of malicious insiders. With this lockout, if users try to login to their system, they will immediately be logged out. This is essential in preventing data exfiltration.

NGAV technology on its own has helped to improve many organizations abilities to detect, identify and stop malware from infecting their endpoints, servers and networks. However, data breaches still occur as a result of NGAVs missing link humans.

With Workforce Cyber Intelligence & Security, organizations like Equinix are empowered to understand the human element and the sequences of human behavior that are impacting an organizations risk posture so that it can be improved.

Interested in learning more about how DTEXs insights are providing an extra layer of security protection? Please reach out to us at [emailprotected] or send us a note here. We look forward to working with you.

The post The Seven Ways Equinix is Plugging the Holes in NGAV with DTEX appeared first on Dtex Systems Inc.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Dtex Systems Inc authored by Jonathan Daly. Read the original post at: https://www.dtexsystems.com/blog/the-seven-ways-equinix-is-plugging-the-holes-in-ngav-with-dtex/

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The Seven Ways Equinix is Plugging the Holes in NGAV with DTEX - Security Boulevard

Human Behavior

Strong Evidence That COVID-19 Is a Seasonal Infection And We Need Air Hygiene – SciTechDaily

New research provides strong evidence that COVID-19 is aseasonal infection linked to low temperatures and humidity, much like seasonal influenza.

A new study led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), an institution supported by la Caixa Foundation, provides robust evidence that COVID-19 is aseasonal infection linked to low temperatures and humidity, much like seasonal influenza. The results, published inNature Computational Science, also support the considerable contribution of airborne SARS-CoV-2 transmission and the need to shift to measures that promote air hygiene.

A key question regarding SARS-CoV-2 is whether it is behaving, or will behave, as a seasonal virus like influenza, or whether it will be equally transmitted during any time of the year. Afirst theoretical modeling study suggested that climate was not a driverin COVID-19 transmission, given the high number of susceptible individuals with no immunity to the virus. However, some observations suggested that the initial propagation of COVID-19 in China occurred in a latitude between 30 and 50oN, with low humidity levels and low temperatures (between 5oand 11oC).

The question of whether COVID-19 is a genuine seasonal disease becomes increasingly central, with implications for determining effective intervention measures, explainsXavier Rod, director of theClimate and Health program at ISGlobal and coordinator of the study. To answer this question, Rod and his team first analyzed the association of temperature and humidity in the initial phase of SARS-CoV-2 spread in 162 countries across five continents, before changes in human behavior and public health policies were put into place. The results show a negative relationship between the transmission rate (R0) and both temperature and humidity at the global scale: higher transmission rates were associated with lower temperatures and humidity.

The team then analyzed how this association between climate and disease evolved over time, and whether it was consistent at different geographical scales. For this, they used a statistical method that was specifically developed to identify similar patterns of variation (i.e. a pattern-recognition tool) at different windows of time. Again, they found a strong negative association for short time windows between disease (number of cases) and climate (temperature and humidity), with consistent patterns during the first, second, and third waves of the pandemic at different spatial scales: worldwide, countries, down to individual regions within highly affected countries (Lombardy, Thringen, and Catalonia) and even to the city level (Barcelona).

The first epidemic waves waned as temperature and humidity rose, and the second wave rose as temperatures and humidity fell. However,this pattern was broken during summertime in all continents. This could be explained by several factors, including mass gatherings of young people, tourism, and air conditioning, among others, explainsAlejandro Fontal, researcher at ISGlobal and first author of the study.

When adapting the model to analyze transient correlations at all scales in countries in the Southern Hemisphere, where the virus arrived later, the same negative correlation was observed. The climate effects were most evident at temperatures between 12oand 18oC and humidity levels between 4 and 12 g/m3, although the authors warn that these ranges are still indicative, given the short records available.

Finally, using an epidemiological model, the research team showed thatincorporating temperature into the transmission rate works better for predicting the rise and fall of the different waves, particularly the first and third ones in Europe. Altogether, our findings support the view of COVID-19 as a true seasonal low-temperature infection, similar to influenza and to the more benign circulating coronaviruses, says Rod.

This seasonality could contribute importantly to the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, since low humidity conditions have been shown to reduce the size of aerosols, and thereby increase airborne transmission of seasonal viruses such as influenza. This link warrants anemphasis on air hygienethrough improved indoor ventilationas aerosols are capable to persist suspended for longer times, says Rod, and highlights theneed to include meteorological parameters in the evaluation and planning of control measures.

Reference: Climatic signatures in the different COVID-19 pandemic waves across both hemispheres by Fontal A, Bouma MJ, San Jos A, Lopez L, Pascual M, Rod X, 21 October 2021, Nature Computational Science.DOI: 10.1038/s43588-021-00136-6

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Strong Evidence That COVID-19 Is a Seasonal Infection And We Need Air Hygiene - SciTechDaily

Human Behavior

UNC Expert Offers Tips on How To Combat COVID-19 Misinformation in Public Health – Chapelboro.com

Right now, Americans have some big decisions to make: deciding whether a COVID-19 booster shot is right for them, if and when to vaccinate their children, and if they should get the vaccine assuming theyve made it this long without getting sick.

While these decisions might seem like easy ones to make for some medical professionals, the spread of misinformation often blurs the lines between right and wrong for the general public.

UNC and Duke professor Brian Southwell is an expert in communication and human behavior. He said the way people encounter and process misinformation is often overlooked.

We tend to think about misinformation as this threat thats out there, its insidious, were really worried about its prevalence, and certainly there are legitimate concerns in that regard, Southwell said. But its also important to keep in mind that actually all of us are vulnerable to misinformation based on what we know about the way that the brain works.

Southwell said humans tend to take in information at face value and may lack the energy or motivation to independently fact check sources before sharing with their personal networks. This leaves the door open for the subsequent spread of fake news especially on social media.

One of the issues right now is weve got this flattened landscape, where if youre looking on your phone you can find information from all over, but we arent necessarily thinking about where that comes from, Southwell said. So perhaps if we build up a bit more of a trusted relationship with a few information sources over time, that you can go back to, that can turn out to be really helpful as well.

He said once people accept that we are all susceptible to spreading misinformation, it becomes easier to have empathy for others. This is especially important in a clinical setting, and even more so during a global pandemic.

One of the things that we generally advise is that we need clinicians to actually pay attention to patients as people, Southwell said. You know they do that in lots of different dimensions, but when it comes to that piece of misinformation that theyre trying to point to, sometimes theres some frustration there and theres some exasperation.

To help clinicians better communicate and partner with patients, Southwell has helped develop a workshop series titled The Duke Program on Medical Misinformation. This program aims to build the patient-provider relationship in a way that encourages psychologically safe conversations about all types of medical information, regardless of accuracy.

Rather than dismissing misinformation right away or immediately spouting peer-reviewed evidence, workshop curriculum teaches providers to ask questions and try to understand why the patient thinks the way they do.

This is very different than just saying oh, whatever you say is right, Southwell said. Its not accepting false information. But instead trying to focus in on what it is that that patient is trying to express in terms of their values and preferences. And then once we know that, trying to direct them towards credible information thats really relevant to the issue that theyre raising.

Southwell said making space for constructive conversations that allow room for someones personal views and beliefs is a good step towards halting further polarization in the country. He said we need more patience, tolerance, and empathy to better understand each other and gently lead people to more credible sources.

You know, were all in this together, Southwell said. So, the more that we end up in a situation of polarization and just dismissing certain people outright, not letting them back into our family discussions or our friendship group because of some outlandish claim that they were espousing six months ago, thats going to lead to a really difficult spot for us. So, what were trying to do here is leave the door open for us to come back together as a society, which I think is going to be important given the severity of the challenges that were facing.

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Human Behavior

How Difficult Is It to Develop AI That Thinks Like Humans? Researcher Try To Find Out – Science Times

Researchers from the University of Glasgow's School of Psychology and Neuroscience led a study on analyzing the Deep Neural Networks technology work by using 3D modeling. They aim to pave the way for developing a human-like artificial intelligence (AI) that processes information like humans and makes predictable errors.

Deep Neural Networksare part of a broad family of machine learning that processes information. Scientists hope to create someday human-like AI that not only mimics human behavior but also processes information or thinks like humans.

(Photo: Pixabay)How Difficult Is It to Develop an AI That Thinks Like Humans? Researcher Try to Find Out

According to the university's news release, one of the challenges that scientists are facing today in developing human-like AI is better understanding the process of machine thinking and whether it would match the way people process information to ensure accuracy.

Deep Neural Networks technology is usually present as the best human decision-making model that performs excellently in human tasks. But when compared to humans, there are still some inconsistencies and errors from AI models.

The technology is currently used in face recognition, which has shown great success. However, scientists still do not fully understand how Deep Neural Networks process information and when errors might occur.

In the study, titled "Grounding Deep Neural Network Predictions of Human Categorization Behavior in Understandable Functional Features: The Case of Face Identity," published in the journal Patterns, researchers addressed this problem by using 3D modeling to visualize whether the way Deep Neural Networks process information is similar to humans.

Study senior author Professor Philippe Schyns said that it is important to ensure that the AI model uses the same information from the face as another human would in recognizing that face.

The team used a series of modifiable 3D faces and asked study participants to rate the similarity between the generated faces to four familiar identities. Then they tested the Deep Neural Networks if they could make similar ratings for the same reasons. This approach helped them visualize the results as to whether a network correctly classified 2,000 identities of the 3D faces, showing that it processes the face differently than humans.

ALSO READ: Deep Learning Artificial Intelligence Designed As Early Warning Device to Analyze, Predict Multiple Climate Change Tipping Points

One of the most famous futurists, Ray Kurzweil, told Futurismthat computers will have the same level of intelligence as humans by 2029, and singularity will happen by 2045. "2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence," he said.

However, this remarkable technology also comes with major concerns for humanity, as sci-fi movies have shown throughout the years. These days, serious concerns about this technology are raised in the scientific community and politics.

AI will undoubtedly improve people's lives through advances that define what it truly means to be a person of the 21st century. According to Forbes, some of the benefits of AI are driverless cars, precision medicine, virtual assistants, and implantables. On the other hand, it could also mean mass surveillance, modern warfare, massive job losses, and socioeconomic inequality.

The bottom line is that people should be aware of the upcoming disruptions as AI technology advances and not just blindly enjoy the benefits of using AI.

RELATED ARTICLE: Cancer Treatment: New Software Uses Artificial Intelligence to Grow, Treat Virtual Tumors

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How Difficult Is It to Develop AI That Thinks Like Humans? Researcher Try To Find Out - Science Times

Human Behavior

Shaun Robinson on longevity and 90 Day Bares All – Yahoo News

EXCLUSIVE: The host of 90 Day Bares All sat down with theGrio and opened up about her lengthy career

In an exclusive interview, Emmy award-winning journalist Shaun Robinson opened up about having longevity in the industry and 90 Day Bares All.

From her tenure on Access Hollywood to her Emmy winning coverage of A Grand Night in Harlem, Robinsons accomplishments speak for themselves. Since 2016, Robinson has also hosted the hit TLC series, 90 Day Fianc, with its new spin-off, 90 Day Bares All, currently streaming on Discovery Plus.

Robinson sat down with theGrio and opened up about the hit series, what the shows really say about relationships and couples, and her career in general.

Shaun Robinson attends Manuela Testolini And Eric Bent Present An Evening Of Music, Art And Philanthropy Benefiting In A Perfect World Honoring Prince Arrivals at The Jeremy Hotel on March 03, 2019 in West Hollywood, California. (Photo by Leon Bennett/Getty Images)

I think one of the reasons that I have lasted so long in the entertainment business is because I truly believe that my purpose is to help other people tell their stories, she shares exclusively with theGrio.

Speaking specifically to the 90 Day Fianc franchise, she explains, It has been so much fun being a part of the 90 Day Fianc franchise and 90 Day bares all. Ive been hosting the show for several years now and it keeps growing and growing and growing.

She even jokes that her own mother is a big fan of the reality TV series, saying, she is absolutely addicted to the show! Still, Robinson insists there is much more to the series than just entertainment, as there is plenty to learn about human behavior and relationships through the show.

All of these shows just really bring home the point that communication is the key to any good relationship. The couples that you see through their ups and downs, it always it always surprises me that they are able to talk about things that under normal circumstances, maybe they wouldnt say anything about, but we make them bring it all to the surface. They are really baring all.

Later in the conversation, Robinson opened up about her hard work in the news and entertainment business, and the secret to her longevity.

Story continues

I think that one of the things that contributes to my longevity is that I had the foundation of being a journalist, she shares. I studied journalism when I was in college and I knew that I wanted to be not just a talking head, but somebody who could really, you know, respect the art of journalism, because I do really think its an art, the integrity of journalism and working as hard as I could to be the best journalist that I could be.

Moderator Shaun Robinson onstage during Visionary Women present Grit, Guts, and Grace Lessons in Overcoming Adversity and Cultivating Resilience with Diana Nyad and Norma Bastidas at the Montage Beverly Hills on October 9, 2017 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Rachel Murray/Getty Images for Visionary Women)

She adds, I truly believe that my purpose is to help other people tell their stories. So Ive worked really, really hard at it.

Check out Robinsons full interview with theGrio now.

New episodes of 90 Day Bares All drop Sundays on discovery+.

Have you subscribed to theGrios podcast Acting Up? Download our newest episodes now!TheGrio is now on Apple TV, Amazon Fire, and Roku. Download theGrio today!

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Human Behavior

Dan Haar: The enormous task of stopping fraud as alleged in West Haven – Thehour.com

Lets take a look at the situation that led to allegations state Rep. Michael DiMassa committed fraud as he collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in pandemic relief money for the town of West Haven, where he worked as a municipal official until Thursday.

The question is, with this case in mind, what can we do about potential fraud in the coronavirus relief payments to Connecticut cities and towns? The numbers make the task staggering.

The West Haven money, just under $1.2 million, was part of a small set-aside of $75 million for cities and towns by the state, from the very first allotment of $1.4 billion the state received back in the horrific spring of 2020. The goal was simple: Reimburse towns for some of their direct COVID-19 expenses.

Just to hand out that $75 million to the towns, including the money at issue in West Haven, the state had to set up a whole new apparatus. Numerous letters, memos and guidelines went out to towns.

As it happens, the deadline for cities and towns to submit claims for 2020 expenses in that simple pot of money: Friday, Oct. 22, 2021. It took 10 months into the new year because nothing about the pandemic stimulus is simple.

Now the federal government is about to hand out 40 times that amount to Connecticut cities, towns and school systems a total of $3.04 billion in four giant programs. Thats 340 separate recipients including school boards and town halls, if youre keeping score at home.

The Feds will accomplish this without a lot of help from the state, with few feet on the ground here in Connecticut, as part of $674 billion thats headed to cities, towns, states and tribal governments nationwide. And that gargantuan total is just a small part of the $5 trillion in U.S. pandemic relief, including $1 trillion for unemployment and $1 trillion in direct payments to households.

What could possibly go wrong? Yes, there will be fraud. Stop already with the shock and amazement.

The good news is, cities and towns have significant internal and external controls in place for the tens of billions of dollars they collectively spend without the pandemic relief money.

I dont think its outside of what they have to do anyway. Its just become bigger, said Joe DeLong, executive director and CEO of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, which is helping local sort out how to manage the flow of all this money.

DeLong believes, and I agree, that the majority of fraud in the pandemic relief is in private enterprise, business and relief to individuals, where checks and balances dont generally exist as mush as they do in state and municipal governments.

Those controls in each municipality include department-level and town-level checks on checks that any town writes, plus mandatory outside audits of the whole shebang, plus separate audits of each grant program, such as community development block grants.

Every check in most municipalities has to be signed by more than one person, said state Sen. Cathy Osten, co-chair of the General Assemblys powerful appropriations committee, and first selectman of Sprague for 12 years until two years ago.

Osten walked me through the checks and balances, including the number of people who must sign each check. In Sprague it was three.

Im more than willing to look at other checks and balances that we should do, Osten said, but she added, We should also recognize the checks and balances that are there.

Thats not enough to stop fraud schemes, in part because people are smart and in part because people are dumb. Obviously, what is alleged to have happened in west Haven ironically, one of three Connecticut municipalities already under the control of a state Municipal Accountability Review Board required some serious incompetence, or worse, if indeed it did happen.

Human behavior will always find a way to get around the system, said DeLong, at CCM, whose help for cities and towns includes an arrangement the conference made for a fraud hotline for municipal employees.

Federal criminal authorities allege that DiMassa set up a consulting firm that collected as much as $630,000 without doing much or any work for the payments, and received payments of as much as $83,000 at a clip.

Yes, thats brazen. Some Republicans on social media, not in the leadership are suggesting that DiMassa, a rising Democrat in a Democrat-controlled town, was able to scarf up the money (if the scheme happened as charged) because of party insiderism. There was, clearly, an abundance of trust in a 30-year-old elected official.

Now Republicans in the loyal opposition want a lot more controls. In a release Thursday, the GOP leaders of the state House called for a public hearing next week on the distribution of public COVID-19 relief money, and they issued a list of 20 questions general, and specific to West Haven that they want answered.

It is unacceptable for government to suggest that current protocols are sufficient because this problem has now come to light, the group of five Republican leaders said in a written statement. We must have a system that prevents against the misuse of the funds in the first place, not one that acts only after an FBI investigation of alleged wrongdoing and the loss of over $600,000.

The hearing is a good idea, and more controls would be fine.

We can certainly beef it up across the board, said Osten, the Sprague Democrat who, along with Rep. Toni Walker, D-New Haven, the other co-chair of appropriations, received a letter outlining the Republicans demands.

Its all great theater and maybe we can stop some fraud before it happens. Maybe.

For now, Gov. Ned Lamonts budget office is looking closely at the allegations around the Coronavirus Relief Funds in West Haven. Even before Wednesdays arrest of DiMassa, it brought in CohnReznick, an auditing and accounting firm, to conduct a full and complete audit of West Havens use of CRF funding.

And, Melissa McCaw, Lamonts budget chief, added, Once the audit and investigation is complete, we will take all appropriate steps to address any findings of waste, fraud, or abuse and address any internal control weaknesses. In addition, OPM will cooperate fully with the ongoing federal investigation.

The state auditors, too, are working overtime, meeting with federal officials as part of a sweeping program to make sure the $674 billion is well spent and well targeted, John Geragosian, the Democratic state auditor, told me Thursday.

All of this is terrific, as we add a hinge or two to the barn door, lest the next horse gets out in a high wind. But lets be realistic here about the task.

Theres waste, fraud and abuse in every federal program, every state program, Geragosian said. The audit process is not necessarily going to detect fraud.

An audit can show that a company was properly paid for its invoice, for example, but he added, We cant tell you that that company was fake.

dhaar@hearstmediact.com

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Dan Haar: The enormous task of stopping fraud as alleged in West Haven - Thehour.com