Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

To live the Gospel, stand for (and with) the vulnerable. – America Magazine

Less talk and more action! Todays readings remind us not only to preach the Gospel but to live it. The readings encourage us to prioritize care of vulnerable groups and to avoid corruption, which damages relationships with one another and with God.

Be doers of the word and not hearers only. (Jas 1:22)

Liturgical day

Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

Readings

Dt 4:1-8; Ps 15; Jas 1:17-27; Mk 7:1-23

Prayer

What can you do to care for the most vulnerable in society?

How can you encourage others to be more mindful of their actions?

How do you live out the Gospel in your daily life?

The Letter of James addresses a Christian community, offering guidance on how to live out their faith. James states that generous acts done by people are a way that God works in the world: All good giving and every perfect gift is from above. When we help others, we facilitate divine care and love in the world.

James speaks of what Christian faith and practice require, emphasizing care for orphans and widows. In the Bible, orphans and widows are often mentioned in tandem as groups afforded intentional human and divine care because of their financial, emotional and legal challenges. Orphans and widows are associated with vulnerable, disenfranchised and oppressed peoples. Isaiah, for instance, criticizes his community for its disregard of people in need, stating that they should learn to do good; make justice your aim: redress the wronged, hear the orphans plea, defend the widow (Is 1:17). The Letter of James challenges us to reflect and act. Who are the orphans and widows of today? What groups in our society are vulnerable and most in need? Scripture is clear in calling on us to fight for and alongside them.

The Gospel of Mark also speaks to how people live and engage in the world. Jesus interacts with Jewish leaders who are critical of his followers for not following prescribed laws and customs. Jesus is critical of the leaders and their intentions and shifts the discussion to preach on broader human behavior, not just formal religious observance. Jesus condemns acts that corrupt people and inflict harm, such as theft, murder, malice, greed and arrogance. These types of actions, and sin more generally, not only defile the individual and the human-divine relationship but also damage the community.

As the world is filled with much suffering, we are called to action. We should ask ourselves the Vincentian question, What must be done? How do we put faith in Christ into practice? Scripture requires support of people who are most in need, offering resources and advocating for changes that will help all people to thrive. Likewise, Jesus emphasis on morality reminds us to be mindful and intentional about our actions, doing good and avoiding evil.

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To live the Gospel, stand for (and with) the vulnerable. - America Magazine

Human Behavior

Jim Cramer: Don’t Ignore the Impact of Irrational Behavior This Earnings Season – RealMoney

When you try to make a judgment about the direction of the stock market or of individual stocks you are, per se, thinking about what human behavior will occur. You are assuming that people will act rationally and that they will not do things against their interests.

When you invest in an insurance company you do not presume that a huge percentage of the insured will attempt to crash their cars or burn their houses down. When you buy the stock of a retailer you might be doing so because a child credit given by the government should end up in the hands of a Target (TGT) or a Levi's (LEVI) , simply because it was meant to be so.

It's the same with the vaccine. I have a physician I have seen for many years. Every year at my birthday I go see him for my physical and advice on my diet, my blood pressure, my skin, all of the usual body parts that need to be checked. It's no different from a car except it's more expensive and time-consuming.

This year, I went to see him earlier, worried about Covid and seeing what's best for me to do. He said that I wanted to get the vaccine any way I could, even if it meant constantly clicking on websites to find a place to get it done. Our staff helped me and I was able to go to a tent in Staten Island, grateful even as I had no idea where I was beyond being at the correct site.

I told him and he said not to forget to go the next month and that I would not be immunized until 12 days after the second one and I should still wear a mask because of the possibility that too many people at work were to get it and the vaccine might not work well enough to stop it.

All rational behavior, or at least I thought. At no point was it a political issue, it was a medical issue. I at one point I figured everyone would want the vaccine because who wanted Covid? My daughter got it and missed three weeks of work and felt terrible for a very long time. So have many of my friends. I know elderly people who passed away quickly. It was unimaginable to have a chance to get a vaccine years before I thought we could and I was thinking it had to be like polio where we all had to go to our high schools to get our shots or our sugar cubes.

I can't believe how wrong I have been about this behavior. We are only about 50% vaccinated because of some bizarre belief that it doesn't work or that it infringes on our rights as citizens. I know that we think of this as something that involves just non-Democratic voters, but Sunday we learned that a bunch of Philadelphia Phillies came down with it because the team isn't 75% vaccinated. How could the ownership not insist on 100%? What king of irrational behavior is that?

And that kind of behavior is what's bedeviling stock-picking. Now, when I even conflate the two -- rational behavior with investing -- I am trashed on Twitter as someone who cares more about money than about health or civil rights. Again, a total misread of the situation. I presume that people won't want to get sick or die of Covid. Sure there are people who take up smoking, another irrational behavior but they are fewer and fewer. But this? Don't these people have doctors? Are the employers waiting for the FDA to bless it beyond emergency status?

We are in the money-making business. We have to figure out whether people will go to work, something we had presumed once the vaccine became commonplace. Do they go to work at Tyson Foods (TSN) ? Do they go to work at General Motors (GM) ? McDonald's (MCD) ? Do they fear their colleagues and rather stay home and collect unemployment? In truth we do not know the answers because we are not able to fathom what's rational to those who don't take the vaccine. How do you divine what people will do who do not have family physicians and are under no pressure from their employers?

So, make all sorts of mistakes when it comes to judging results. Those mistakes will be in play beginning this week, in earnings season. I think we will be surprised how much absenteeism will impact the numbers and how free choice has trumped sickness in a pattern never seen before.

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Jim Cramer: Don't Ignore the Impact of Irrational Behavior This Earnings Season - RealMoney

Human Behavior

Think Your Dog Would Share Its Food With You? We Have Bad News – ScienceAlert

If you've ever actually met a dog, new research into canine behavior will come as no shock. Scientists have found that "man's best friend" won't necessarily help said man out with a delicious snack, even if that man has given a snack first.

This is actually a little surprising for animal researchers, though, since dogs have previously been found to share food with other dogs and help humans in other ways. The finding suggests that our dog buddies just simply may not have helpful feelings towards humans when it comes to food.

Dogs are well known to be prosocial that is, they are helpful towards others, and in particular, return favors. This makes sense since they are social animals. Such animal social groups thrive best when their members help each other.

In contexts in which dogs live with humans, this has been seen, too. We've all heard the cliche of the dog rescuing humans from a burning building, but it's been demonstrated experimentally, too: Dogs will help a trapped human, particularly when that human expresses distress.

But how far will that help extend? To find out, a team of researchers led by veterinary scientist Jim McGetrick of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, designed an experiment to determine if dogs would help a human obtain food.

They trained 37 pet dogs to use a food dispenser that opens with the press of a button across two different experiments. Once the dogs knew how to open the dispenser, the button was placed in a separate enclosure, visible through a wire mesh fence.

For the first experiment, a dog was paired with two unfamiliar humans on two different days. On the first day, a human would sit in the button enclosure that now contained a functional and non-functional button. This human would press the functional button at regular intervals to distribute food to the dog.

On the second day, a different human would sit in front of a button that did not work the functioning button would still be visible and press it at regular intervals. No food was distributed.

Next, the positions were reversed. The food dispenser was placed in the enclosure with the human, and the dispenser's button was with the dog.

The second experiment largely replicated the first, except there was only one button in the enclosure, and the unhelpful human simply never pressed it. The other difference allowed the dog to reciprocate the humans' respective behaviors on the same day instead of on different days.

The researchers found that whether or not the human had previously helped the dog obtain food had no bearing on whether or not the dog pressed the button.

The helpful or unhelpful behavior of the human also had no bearing on how the dog interacted with that human outside of the experimental setting during a free play session.

Now, it's possible that there are other reasons for this. The dogs may not have understood the role of the humans pressing the button in snack delivery or lack thereof. Given that humans are usually providing food to dogs, rather than taking it, they also may not have understood the role reversal.

However, in similar studies in which dogs' readiness to help other dogs is tested using food, the dogs showed clear reciprocity, so it's unlikely that a lack of understanding on the part of the dogs accounts entirely for their disinterest in feeding humans, the researchers said.

"In conclusion, dogs in the current studies failed to reciprocate help received from humans and a preference for either human type (helpful or unhelpful) was not evident based on a free interaction session," the researchers wrote in their paper.

"Given that dogs have already been shown to reciprocate help received from conspecifics in experimental studies, the absence of reciprocity here may be explained by methodological inadequacies, though it is also possible that dogs are not predisposed to engage in such cooperative interactions with humans naturally."

Future research could focus on helping humans in other ways rather than food, or by training the dogs to better understand the experiment, they concluded.

The research has been published in PLOS One.

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Think Your Dog Would Share Its Food With You? We Have Bad News - ScienceAlert

Human Behavior

What Does Hope in Christ’s Kingdom Have to Do with Climate Change? – ChristianityToday.com

(With excerpts from Au Sable Institutes 2021 workbook Liturgies of Restoration a five-week study on how our habits can shape us into people who serve, protect, and restore Gods earth. The workbook is available for small groups and church use here. Individuals can also sign up for a fall online workbook study hosted by Au Sable Institute here.)

Since 1970, over 15 percent, or more than 347,000 square miles, of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest has been cleared, an area more than twice the size of California. Since 1979, 1.2 million square miles of sea ice has melted, more than four times the area of Texas. In the past half-century, monitored populations of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles, and amphibians have declined an average of 68% globally.

We receive these facts with a range of emotions, including sadness, anger, frustration, determination, and despair. As Christians, we may also wonder, What hope does this gospel offer for the groaning earth and its future?

In their book Let Creation Rejoice: Biblical Hope and Ecological Crisis, Jonathan Moo (who serves together with us on the board of the Christian conservation organization, A Rocha USA) and Robert White describe a range of possible responses to our planets predicament, from ignorance is bliss and denial to problem-solving and despair. The path forward involves not ignoring or discounting our various emotions but recognizing and facing them together. For some of our faith traditionsparticularly much of white evangelicalismthis means (re)learning how to lament, repent, and bear prophetic witness in the face of denial or despair.

The Bible warns us, Moo and White write, of the ways human behavior can harm the earth. But, the Bible also sets out clearly . . . the sure and certain hope that we have in Christ for restoration and a setting of all things right in the new creation. We see promise of this throughout the Bible, especially in the writings of Isaiah, Paul (Romans 8), and the apostle John (Revelation).

Hoping for Christs kingdom can seem foolish and even dangerous, considering our present reality. Humans have really screwed many things up. Doesnt trusting that God will make everything right absolve us of responsibility to fix the problem ourselves? Does it give us permission to sit back and do nothing, waiting for God to intervene? How do we keep biblical hope from turning into Christian complacency?

There is a real temptation, given many of our cultural lenses, to believe that we humans are at the center. We are, after all, living in the era of the Anthropocenea geological age where humans are exerting a dominant influence over the climate and environment.

Putting humans at the center of the story results in two possible outcomes. The first is despair: We are the main characters, and weve made such a mess. Theres no way we can get ourselves out of this. We are doomed. The second is false optimism: We are the main characters. We are clever and resourceful. Just as we found technological solutions to our earlier problems, with ingenuity well figure out how to reverse climate change and fix all our other ecological crises.

We can feel the allure of both these responses. In reality, however, humans are not at the center of Creation, our Creator is. And the God of the Bible calls us to something different: humility and hope. Hope in the New Testament, Stephen Bouma-Prediger writes in his book Earthkeeping and Character, is centered on God, not us . . . The good future for which we hope rests on the person and work of Jesus Christ, not on our good works.

While there is reason to have some optimism around promising technological and policy innovations, our ultimate hope is in God. This wide and wonderful world that we are part of, and that we are called to care for, is not ultimately our world, its Gods. It is the very work of Gods hands and so we trust that its future also rests in God.

Human ingenuity notwithstanding, we cannot save the world any more than we can save ourselves. In any case, that is not what we are called to do. Our calling is to be faithful; to seek first the kingdom and its righteousness, and to trust in God for the rest. When we do so, our efforts to care for creation become acts of worship and signs of witness to the gospel and the kingdom of God.

Liuan Huska is a freelance writer and the author of Hurting Yet Whole: Reconciling Body and Spirit in Chronic Pain and Illness. She lives in the Chicago area, on ancestral Potawatomi land, with her husband and three little boys. She serves on the board of A Rocha USA.

Rev. Ben Lowe is the author of multiple books and has over a decade of experience engaging faith communities around social and environmental concerns. He is currently completing a doctorate in global environmental change at the University of Florida and serves as the chairperson of A Rocha USA and the co-chair of Christians for Social Action.

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What Does Hope in Christ's Kingdom Have to Do with Climate Change? - ChristianityToday.com

Human Behavior

The science and psychology of traffic – WHYY

Even with fewer drivers on the road, Philadelphia saw an 80% increase in fatal accidents in 2020 an alarming statistic that officials hope remains an abnormality. As commutertrafficreturns to pre-pandemic levels, so do concerns about construction, congestion and sharing the road. Were joined byKELLEY YEMEN, Director of the Office of Complete Streets to discuss the citys plans to improve conditions for commuters and goals for zero traffic-related deaths. We also talk with EMANUEL ROBINSON, a research scientist who studies how human behavior influences transportation, especially when it comes to distracted and reckless driving. Well look at the joy, frustration and anonymity of commuting.

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The science and psychology of traffic - WHYY

Human Behavior

Delta will become dominant strain, but vaccinated individuals should have protection – Shreveport Times

Dr. Jeremy Kamil talks about genome sequencing

LSU Health Shreveport Dr. Jeremy Kamil talks about the importance of genome sequencing during COVID-19.

Scott Ferrell, Shreveport Times

The Alpha variant makes up most COVID-19 cases in the Shreveport area, but the Delta variant will soon become the dominant strain, experts say.

Vaccinated individuals should still have individual protection from serious illness from the Delta variant, said Jeremy Kamil, director of COVID-19 sequencing at LSUHealth Shreveport. But they can still spread it, and its still a threat to unvaccinated individuals.

Cases are already climbing in the area and beyond. Thats likely due to the combination of people resuming pre-pandemic behaviors and the greater transmissibility of the dominant Alpha variant, Kamil said.

More: COVID-19 cases surging again in northwest Louisiana

"The effects of those changes in human behavior, i.e. mixing indoors and not wearing masks and not social distancing at all are going to be amplified by having a more infectious or transmissible variant like Delta," Kamil said. "Every indication is that we are looking at another wave. I expect that its intensity will be somewhat controlled in a patchwork manner according to local vaccine uptake."

Communities with high vaccine hesitancy including Louisiana will see the worst effects of the next wave, both on health and on the economy, Kamil said.

The Delta variant can probably cause mild infections in a "decent chunk" of fully vaccinated people who are relatively healthy, but that would be really rare for the original virus, Kamil said.

"Most of the time, if this virus gets past the vaccine, it's not of a huge risk to the person who's vaccinated," Kamil said. "It is, however, a problem in Louisiana."

Only 32% of people in Caddo Parish are fully vaccinated, according to the Louisiana Department of Health. For the northwest region, which also includes Bossier, Bienville, Bossier, Claiborne, DeSoto, Red River, Sabine and Webster Parishes, only about 30% are fully vaccinated.

For some vaccinated people, they could catch the Delta variant but not transmit it, Kamil said. However, others could spread the variant in spaces like restaurants or movie theaters even if it's not a threat to them.

Some vaccinated people have gotten sick, which is called a vaccine breakthrough, but its rare, said Dr. Martha Whyte, Region 7 medical director at the Louisiana Department of Health. For people with underlying health conditions such as diabetes, the vaccines may be slightly less protective.

More: Genomic sequencing coming to a city near you with the help of Rockefeller Foundation

In general, the original virus could be transmitted via 10-15 minutes of unmasked, indoor contact between people, Kamil said. For the Delta variant, that could be reduced to 3-5 minutes.

"The absolute first thing everybody needs to do is get vaccinated. And people, no matter what your fears are, it's better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it," said Whyte.

The next thing is to social distance as much as you can. If you're hanging out with friends and you don't know their vaccine status, wear a mask, Whyte said.

She said if you're not vaccinated and youre in public, wear a mask. If you're vaccinated but youre in a group of people, wear a mask.

If someone is on the fence about getting the vaccine, Whyte recommended they get their questions answered. They should ask her, their doctor or their friends who have medical knowledge, Whyte said.

"Get your fears allayed, questions answered. And then make your decision, and remember your decision isn't just for you. It's to protect you, people you love and even people you don't know in your community," Whyte said.

Just because you're younger doesn't mean you can't become severely ill or even die from COVID-19, Whyte said.

"This virus is so strange that ... you can't tell who's going to get really sick and who's not, Whyte said. You've got 102-year-old women who do fine, and you have I had a good friend who lost his 19-year-old son, healthy as a horse, and died on the vent."

The Delta variant is already here, but its not the dominant strain yet. The Shreveport-area population is more dispersed, but we will likely see Delta take over in coming weeks, Kamil said.

"...All of a sudden, we'll just see only or mostly Delta. It'll just be like a shift," Kamil said.

Alpha also took a while to take hold in the area, then it suddenly became the strain for 90% of cases, Kamil said. Large urban areas, such as Houston, already see mostly Delta in their sequencing.

Kamil said the vaccines are still quite effective in preventing individual sickness in relatively healthy people.

He used the following analogy to compare the efficacy of the protections generated by the vaccines to the newer variants of the virus: The CIA and FBI are trying to track down someone, and the suspect puts on a disguise.

More: Here's where LSU Health Shreveport is administering COVID-19 vaccines this week

"Maybe the person grows a beard and puts on sunglasses and a fake wig that's blond. Do you think that's going to fool the CIA and the FBI for very long? I mean it might slow them down, but is it absolutely going to block their ability to see them?" Kamil said.

At the end of the day, most of the community is not fully vaccinated, and Kamil and Whyte agreed the vaccines are the best way to protect yourself and others from the Delta variant.

"We're seeing society open up as if the pandemic's over. There couldn't be a bigger mistake. The pandemic's not over, especially if you haven't gotten the vaccine," Kamil said. "The thing about Delta is, it's very transmissible."

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Delta will become dominant strain, but vaccinated individuals should have protection - Shreveport Times

Human Behavior

Announcing the winners of the Women in AI Awards at Transform 2021 – VentureBeat

All the sessions from Transform 2021 are available on-demand now. Watch now.

One of the goals of Transform 2021 is to bring a broad variety of expertise, views, and experiences to the stage virtual this year to illustrate all the different ways AI is changing the world. As part of VentureBeats commitment to supporting diversity and inclusion in AI, that also means being mindful of who is being represented on the panels and talks.

The Women in AI Awards ends a week that kicked off with the Women in AI Breakfast, with several number of talks on inclusion and bias in between. Margaret Mitchell, a leading AI researcher on responsible AI, spoke, as well as executives from Pinterest, Redfin, Intel, and Salesforce.

VentureBeat leadership made the final selections out of the over 100 women who were nominated during the open nomination period. Selecting the winners was difficult because it was clear that each of these nominees are trailblazers who made outstanding contributions in the AI field.

This award honors women who have started companies showing great promise in AI and considers factors such as business traction, the technology solution offered by the company, and impact in the AI space.

Briana Brownell, founder and CEO of Pure Strategy was the winner of the AI Entrepreneur Award for 2021. Brownell and her team at Pure Strategy designed Annie (ANIE), an Automated Neural Intelligence Engine to help humans understand unstructured data. Annie has been used by doctors, specialists and physicians assistants to communicate with patients and with each other across cultural knowledge and overcoming biases, phobias and anxieties.

This award honors those who have made a significant impact in an area of research in AI, helping accelerate progress either within their organization, as part of academic research, or impacting AI approaches in technology in general.

Dr. Nuria Oliver, chief scientific advisor of Vodafone Institute, received the AI Research Award for 2021. Oliver is the named inventor of 40 filed patents, including a computational modeling of human behavior via machine learning techniques and on the development of intelligent interactive systems. Shes been named an ACM Distinguished Scientist and Fellow, as well as a Fellow of the IEEE and of Euroway. She also pioneered the not-for-profit business and academic research to use anonymized mobile data to track and prevent the spread of Ebola and Malaria in Africa, which has since been deployed across Africa and Europe in a matter of days in 2020 to track and prevent the spread of COVID-19. Whats more, she has proposed that all of the data scientists involved in her humanitarian efforts work on those projects pro-bono.

This award honors those who demonstrate exemplary leadership and progress in the growing topic of responsible AI. This year, there was a tie.

Haniyeh Mahmoudian, the global AI ethicist at DataRobot and Noelle Silver, founder of the AI Leadership Institute, both received the Responsibility & Ethics Award for 2021.

Mahmoudian was an early adopter of bringing statistical bias measures into developmental processes. She wrote Statistical Parity along with natural language explanations for users, a feat that has resulted in a priceless improvement in model bias that scales exponentially, as the platform is used across hundreds of companies and v verticals such as banking, insurance, tech, CPG and manufacturing. A contributing member of the Trusted AI teams culture of inclusiveness, Mahmoudian operates under the core belief that diversity of thought will result in thoughtful and improved outcomes. Mahmoudians research in the risk level for COVID contagion outside of racial bias was used at the Federal level to inform resource allocation and also by Moderna during vaccine trials.

A consistent champion for public understanding of AI and tech fluency, Silver has launched and established several initiatives supporting women and underrepresented communities within AI including the AI Leadership Institute, WomenIn.AI. and more. Shes a Red Hat Managed OpenShift Specialist in AI/ML, a WAC Global Digital Ambassador, a Microsoft MVP in Artificla Intelligence and numerous other awards as well as a 2019 winner of the VentureBeat Women in AI mentorship award

This award honors leaders who helped mentor other women in the field of AI, provided guidance and support, and encouraged more women to enter the field of AI.

Katia Walsh, Levi Strauss chief strategy and AI officer, was the recipient of the AI Mentorship Award for 2021. Walsh has been an early influencer for women in AI since her work at Vodafone, actively searching for female candidates on the team and mentoring younger female colleagues, and serving as strategy advisor to Fellowship.AI, a free data science training program. At Levi Strauss, Walsh created a digital upskilling program that is the first of its kind in the industry, with two thirds of its bootcamp participants are women.

This award honors those in the beginning stages of their AI career who have demonstrated exemplary leadership traits.

The Rising Star Award for 2021 was awarded to Arezou Soltani Panah, a research fellow at Deakin University in Australia.

Panahs work at Swinburne Social Innovation Research Institute focuses on solving complex social problems such as loneliness, family violence and social stigma. While her work demands substantial cross-disciplinary research and collaborating with subject matter experts like social scientists and governmental policy advisors, she has created a range of novel structured machine learning solutions that span across those disciplines to create responsible AI research. Panahs focus on social inequality and disempowerment has used the power of natural language processing to measure language and algorithmic bias. One such project quantified the extent of gender bias in featuring female athletes in the Victoria, Australian news and how womens achievements are attributed to their non-individual efforts such as their team, coach or partner compared to their male counterparts. Another project looked at gender biases in reporting news on obesity and the consequences to weight stigmatization in public health policies.

One thing was very clear from reading over the nominations that came in: There are many leaders doing meaning work in AI. It was very inspiring to see the caliber of executives and scientists leading the way in AI and making a difference in our world. The list of nominations are full of leaders who will continue to make their mark over the next few years and there will be more opportunities to hear about their work.

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Announcing the winners of the Women in AI Awards at Transform 2021 - VentureBeat

Human Behavior

In Wisconsin, an Overzealous Hunt Decimated the Local Wolf Population – In These Times

This article was published in collaboration with UpNorthNews and In These Times The Wisconsin Idea, an investigative reporting initiative focused on ruralWisconsin.

Wolf biologists and tribal nations voiced their objections going into Wisconsins court-ordered gray wolf hunt last February, and they were even more dismayed with how the hunt was planned and executedearly reports showed hunters killed almost double the allotted number ofwolves.

But that startling figure only represents officially documented kills. Now that researchers have had time to assess the full extent of the hunts damage, theyve found the outcome was far worse than initially reported: According to areport published by the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, legal and illegal killings wiped out as much as athird of the states gray wolfpopulation.

After the Trump administration announced on Oct. 29, 2020 that it would remove gray wolves from the endangered species list, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) started planning awolf hunt for fall 2021. But on Feb. 11, in response to alawsuit from the Wisconsin Institute for Law &Liberty (WILL) and aKansas hunting organization, Jefferson County Judge Bennett Brantmeier ordered the DNR to organize ahunt by the end of themonth.

The hunt began less than two weeks later, on Feb. 22, and the DNR shut it down in just 39hours given the high initial kill totals. Hunters had 24hours after closing to finish reporting their kills, and when the final numbers came in, the death toll stood at 216 wolves, almost double the DNRs quota of119.

There could have been even more wolf deaths; Wisconsins tribal nations declined to exercise their right to kill 81 wolves in theirterritories.

This month, the team of wolf researchers, headed by Adrian Treves with the Carnivore Coexistence Lab at UW-Madison, published areport that estimated that the wolf population had decreased by 27%-33% from an estimated population of 1,034in April 2020 leaving an estimated population range of 695751 wolves as of April 15,2021.

Treves estimates an additional 98 to 105 wolves have been killed since their delisting was announced, but he cautioned the number of unreported killings could be muchhigher.

We only made bulletproof assumptions that were more cautious, based on peer reviewed science, Treves said in aninterview.

He continued, What it means is that our estimates of the population are, really, plausible maximum population status. It could be quitelower.

Its a novelty hunting experience...and for some people its truly a vengeance hunt."

Francisco Santiago-vila, aco-author on the study, said the additional killed wolves were likely the victims of illegal poaching, based on other research co-authored by Treves that found deslisting or downgrading wolves from their protections under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) leads to an increase inpoaching.

When youre reducing protections for wolves in any way, be it through downgrading or delisting from the ESA youre sending asignal to would-be poachers on the landscape that either there are too many wolves on the landscape or that they are not valued as much anymore, Santiago-vila said. That essentially may incentivize the culling and concealing of wolves that are neverreported.

Santiago-vila said other potential reasons for losing track of the wolvessuch as tracking collar malfunctions or migrationdo not adequately explain the high number of wolves that go missing when their ESA statuschanges.

The policy itself wouldnt affect those two mechanisms, Santiago-vila said. The policy affects humanbehavior.

Even before the report was published, Peter David, abiologist with the Great Lakes Indian Fish &Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC)which regulates hunting, fishing, and gathering on tribal lands in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesotasaid he had already suspected the hunt was going to have an outsized impact on the wolfpopulation.

According to David, the quota set by the DNR was higher than what scientific models recommended for the DNR to reach its stated goal of having no impact on the wolf population. The timing of the wolf hunt was particularly problematic: February is the point when the wolf population is the lowest and the beginning of the wolf breeding season; hunts are typically held in late fall or earlywinter.

[The February hunt] is really unlike any other wolf harvest anywhere, that it was completely concentrated within that window, David said. All the factors make me think that the impact of this harvest was verysubstantial.

Holding the hunt during the breeding season affects wolves ability to breed and return the population to pre-hunt levels. Charlie Rasmussen, also with GLIFWC, said GLIFWC biologists who examined some of the donated carcasses from the hunt found that one was an impregnated female with nine developing wolffetuses.

It was adifficult examination for GLIFWC biologists to do, Rasmussensaid.

It's important to recognize that wolves are very good at regulating their own numbers.

Treves study recommended against holding awolf hunt this November, which David and Rasmussen said is also the opinion of GLIFWC and the tribes they represent. There is precedent for this kind of policy shift: DNR announced this month that it will cancel the sharp-tailed grouse hunt for the third year in arow to protect that population. If this falls wolf hunt is cancelled, Treves study estimated it would take the wolf population one to two years to rebound to its April 2020level.

More broadly, all of the researchers interviewed for this story agreed that there is no need to manage the wolf population atall.

Its important to recognize that wolves are very good at regulating their own numbers, David said. Because of their territorial behavior and other aspects, their numbers never get very high. And if you look at neighboring Minnesota or the upper peninsula of Michigan, both of those wolf populations have essentially plateaued without any hunting to drive their numbersdown.

Pro-hunt advocates argue the hunt is away to mitigate the risk of wolves preying on livestock, other wild game, such as deer, or their risk to humans and pets. David said those arguments dont stand up to scientificscrutiny.

While livestock predation is alegitimate concern, David said, awolf hunt is not an effective way to address the issue. Instead, he said its more effective to continue using the system in which farmers contact federal officials who investigate the attacks and can take anumber of steps to address the situation, such as killing or relocating thewolf.

That kind of aresponse is very timely and its very targeted to the location and to the wolves that might be involved, Davidsaid.

By contrast, David pointed out that nine of the ten of the wolves killed during the last hunt were more than eight miles from any confirmed sites where wolves had killedlivestock.

Theres very little reason to think that any appreciable number of those wolves were actually involved in depredations, Davidsaid.

As for the arguments about human safety, David pointed out that its incredibly rare for awolf to attack ahuman, and in those cases, addressing that individual wolf is more effective than astatewide hunt.

In response to hunters concerns about wolves killing deer, Treves argued that there are benefits to wolves preying on deer. For example, one study found that counties with wolves have lower rates of vehicles colliding with deer on theroad.

Furthermore, Treves said, In astate with over amillion deer that are acknowledged to do hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to crops and ornamentals and vehicles, we actually need more apex predators in this state to control the overwhelming deer population thats acknowledged by scientists and public officials to be causing us alot ofproblems.

David also pointed to evidence that wolves help control the spread of chronic wasting disease, which is asubstantial threat to the deer population and people or predators who consume infected deer. Overall, the researchers said, scientific studies have found that the benefits of having ahealthy wolf population outweigh the smallrisks.

David doubts that ecological concerns are the true motivation for pro-hunt advocates, especially given the evidence that wolves benefit the natural environment. Instead, he believes the pro-hunt movement is motivated by novelty andrevenge.

Its anovelty hunting experience, and its an opportunity to harvest something that people havent harvested before, David said. And for some people its truly avengeance hunt on occasion, [people] will lose dogs to wolves, when theyre training their dogs especially, and wolves have pups that they will defend. And this was achance for, Ithink, the community to get revenge on the wolfpopulation.

Meanwhile, David argued, the cultural significance of the wolf to the Ojibwe doesnt get taken very seriously. The tribes have told the DNR they do not support holding awolf hunt thisfall.

David and other biologists are the first to admit theres alot that researchers still dont know about wolves and their ecological role. But David thinks that, given what humans do know, the DNR should seriously consider leaving wolf management to MotherNature.

I think oftentimes we are abit arrogant and at what we think we understand, David said. Wolves are anatural part of this landscape for an incredibly long time, and ecologically, its reasonable to think that they have avaluable role here. And in all likelihood, we have barely scratched the understanding of that, so we need to be alittle bit humble and give nature the benefit of thedoubt.

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In Wisconsin, an Overzealous Hunt Decimated the Local Wolf Population - In These Times

Human Behavior

Mitigating sophisticated attacks the NuData way (part II) – Security Boulevard

This is the continuation of part I. If you havent read it, we suggest you start there for more attack types and fraud mitigation techniques.

Now, where were we? Right, we just talked about spotting human-driven attacks. Lets look at how to spot probing attacks that sneak in, to learn from your security parameters.

Some of the most potentially damaging attacks we see on the NuData network start extremely small. By probing your defenses with a hard-to-detect, low-volume attack, a cybercriminal can ferret out your vulnerabilities without setting off any alarms. Then they use that knowledge to launch a larger attack tailored to your systems specific weaknesses, hoping to overwhelm your defenses completely.

To prevent that from happening, early detection of probing is key. Think of those initial attacks as the first phase of a pest infestation. You might not notice or be bothered by the first ant scout who appears on a solo mission to find food in your kitchen. But you will definitely notice when theres a several-feet-long trail of ants to the leaky pot of jam in your cupboard a day later. Intercepting that first ant takes extra work, but it saves you a lot of trouble in the long run.

We recently mitigated a large multi-stage attack on a retail company in our network, in part by detecting the attackers initial probing. During this phase, which lasted one or two days, the attack was relatively small, just a small bump on a graph (youll see below). The attackers deployed human-like scripts that included realistic mouse movements and pauses between keystrokes to imitate human behavior. On an individual level, the probing attacks looked like legitimate traffic.

This was enough to fool the retailers bot-manager tool, which relied on comparing current data to known threats, such as IP addresses used in past attacks. However, NuData was able to detect the attack by looking at underlying patterns, such as anomalous behavior during the online interaction or an unusual number of login attempts within the same networks and IP addresses. After identifying the pattern, NuData blocked 99.8% of fraudulent login attempts, shutting down the first phase of the attack. (Unfortunately, there was more to come the attack kept evolving, as youll see below.)

Attacks that begin with probing rarely stop there. The most sophisticated attacks we see in our network evolve quickly as they search for ways around their targets defenses. Such attacks can change strategies in as little as a day, so companies need to keep their threat models agile and adapt swiftly.

The attack on the retail company we talked about earlier turned out to be an example of an evolving threat. After two days of probing, which NuData successfully mitigated, the attackers changed their strategy, refining their script to better mimic human behavior for example, by creating a more natural rhythm of keystrokes. They also increased their attack volume, using an eye-popping 18,500 different IP addresses and ensured attack velocity remained low.

Ironically, doubling down on attacks makes NuDatas defenses stronger. The more a bad actor interacts with our clients platform, , the more our solution learns. In this second phase of the assault on the retail company, NuData blocked 100% of attacks an even higher success rate than wed had during the initial probing.

We maintained this same mitigation rate even as the attack evolved into its third and final phase, with attackers doubling the number of IP addresses used in an attempt to evade detection. Despite the reduced velocity and fewer events per IP, NuData still identified patterns that revealed the attack, such as users holding their devices in ways that showed they werent human. All told, NuData blocked two million fraudulent logins in the last 48 hours of the attack ending the cybercriminals attempt once and for all.

Fraudulent traffic (red) vs. legitimate traffic (green) over the course of a six-day evolving attack on a retail company

Sophisticated attacks arent just growing more common theyre also growing more creative. And its impossible to predict how theyll continue to evolve. Cybercriminals are always dreaming up new ways to evade detection, and many standard bot-manager tools arent able to keep up, as we have seen in this article.

Ever-evolving attack strategies demand new, more agile defenses. By adopting multiple layers of security protection that can adapt alongside the threats you face, youll position your company to weather whatever challenges come its way.

More recent threat trends in our bi-annual report, Fraud Risk at a Glance.

The post Mitigating sophisticated attacks the NuData way (part II) appeared first on NuData Security.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from NuData Security authored by Tiffany Mark. Read the original post at: https://nudatasecurity.com/resources/blog/mitigating-sophisticated-attacks-the-nudata-way-part-ii/

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Mitigating sophisticated attacks the NuData way (part II) - Security Boulevard

Human Behavior

94% Of Organizations Have Suffered Insider Data Breaches, Egress Research Reveals – Business Wire

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Egress Insider Data Breach Survey 2021 has revealed that an overwhelming 94% of organizations have experienced insider data breaches in the last year. Human error was the top cause of serious incidents, according to 84% of IT leaders surveyed. However, IT leaders are more concerned about malicious insiders, with 28% indicating that intentionally malicious behavior is their biggest fear. Despite causing the most incidents, human error came bottom of the list, with just over one-fifth (21%) saying that its their biggest concern.

Additionally, almost three-quarters (74%) of organizations have been breached because of employees breaking security rules, and 73% have been the victim of phishing attacks.

The survey, independently conducted by Arlington Research on behalf of Egress, surveyed 500 IT leaders and 3,000 employees in the US and UK across vertical sectors including financial services, healthcare and legal.

Key insights include:

Empowering insiders to do the right thing

The research revealed that an overwhelming 97% of employees would report an insider data breach to their employer which is reassuring for the 55% of IT leaders who rely primarily on employees to report incidents. However, when employees do speak up about breaches, it can cost them: the research found that 89% of incidents lead to repercussions for the employees involved, including informal and formal warnings, and dismissal.

In addition, just 54% of employees said that they feel their organizations security culture trusts and empowers them, indicating that many organizations lack a security-positive culture.

The risks of hybrid working: a difference in opinion

The biggest driver for change in insider risk over the last year has been the adoption of long-term remote working due to the pandemic. Over half (56%) of IT leaders believe that remote work has driven an increase in data breaches caused by human error. Meanwhile, employees disagree, with 61% believing that remote work makes them less, or equally, as likely to cause a data breach.

IT leaders are also concerned for the future, with 54% indicating that they believe that remote/hybrid working will make it more difficult to prevent data breaches caused by human error. Half of IT leaders also believe that it will make it more difficult to prevent phishing attacks, and 49% believe that it will be more difficult to prevent employees from breaking the rules if theyre working remotely in the future.

Egress CEO Tony Pepper comments: Insider risk is every organizations most complex vulnerability and it has far-reaching consequences, from ransomware attacks to loss of client trust. Organizations must act now to mitigate the risk posed by their people.

The research highlights the importance of empowering employees they want to protect their employers data, and its up to organizations to ensure that theyre building a security-positive culture. With the right technology and strategy in place, organizations can transform their people from their biggest security vulnerability into their strongest line of defense.

Methodology

The Insider Breach Report 2021 was independently conducted by Arlington Research on behalf of Egress, surveyed 500 IT leaders and 3,000 employees in the US and UK across vertical sectors including financial services, healthcare and legal.

About Egress

Our mission is to eliminate the most complex cybersecurity challenge every organization faces: insider risk. We understand that people get hacked, make mistakes, and break the rules. To prevent these human-activated breaches, we have built the only Human Layer Security platform that defends against inbound and outbound threats. Using patented contextual machine learning we detect and prevent abnormal human behavior such as misdirected emails, data exfiltration and targeted spear-phishing attacks.

Used by the worlds biggest brands, Egress is private equity backed and has offices in London, New York and Boston.

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94% Of Organizations Have Suffered Insider Data Breaches, Egress Research Reveals - Business Wire