Category Archives: Human Behavior

Experts weigh in on whether COVID-19 is here to stay – UC Riverside

COVID-19 is far from beaten. Vaccines may not be the ultimate panacea to haul us out of the pandemic crisis. In the future, will outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, arrive in waves every winter? Might COVID-19 never go away?

Experts at the University of California, Riverside, weigh in.

Whether COVID-19 is here to stay depends on the emergence and spread of SARS-CoV-2 virus variants around the world. Variants that escape detection by the antibodies induced by the current vaccines will present ongoing threats to human health. It is important that we have robust surveillance methods in place in order to detect these variants. My personal opinion is that we should be planning for booster shots for at least the next few years.

My personal opinion is that we should be planning for booster shots for at least the next few years. Borkovich

I do believe different aspects of our lives which have been changed due to COVID-19 will be forever changed. The change is permanent for those who lost loved ones, jobs, health, and their livelihoods. We have the prevention tools to end the pandemic, but until everyone is able to access and use these tools, variants will continue to plague us, and it takes all of us to end the pandemic. If we use the tools available to us, we will be better protected against the virus that causes COVID-19 and future pandemics which we must prepare for.

This will not be the last pandemic our nation faces and it would be unacceptable morally and practically to not try to learn from history, no matter how ugly this chapter has been for us. The legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic is most certainly here to stay as a very dark chapter in our nations history. This is not simply due to the extent of sickness and deaths caused by the coronavirus, but because of how our nation responded to the challenges it threw at us. To be sure, we have much to be proud of in terms of how we tapped into our nation's deep well of scientific and public health expertise to quickly learn about a new disease and develop multiple safe, efficacious vaccines in such a short time span. Yet, the pandemic showcased so many disappointing elements of our nation for which we have been reckoning with for months and will continue to do so in the months and years ahead. These include:

In addition, the pandemic spotlighted that many historically disadvantaged persons and communities face disproportionately higher disease and death burdens for COVID, as they do with so many other health threats. Despite these harsh realities, I remain hopeful that, after we begin to get this pandemic under control, there will benonpartisan federal and state panels set up to review and evaluate our national response and provide actionable recommendations that we will pursue in earnest to ensure we don't repeat the same mistakes next time.

This will not be the last pandemic our nation faces and it would be unacceptable morally and practically to not try to learn from history, no matter how ugly this chapter has been for us. Carpiano

Over the past year, it has been quite challenging to predict with certainty what will happen to the current pandemic. However, it has become clear that SARS-CoV-2 is here to stay for at least a few more years. While it is likely that the disease will persist, I would not worry yet. Over time, we may end up with a situation similar to the flu or the common cold. It is indeed now quite clear that the virus can mutate and escape some of the immunity generated by prior infections and/or vaccines. Scientists and health care workers will have to remain extremely vigilant, monitor virus evolution and most likely update their vaccine designs on a regular basis. There are still many scientific questions that remained unanswered. One of the most important one will be to find out how long it will take to lose immunity after infection or vaccination. Ultimately, we want to maintain a situation in which the disease is less severe for life to return to normal.

Often this is about the properties of the virus or vaccine, and we do have incredible scientists on the job. The real question is whether human behavior will be up to the task, and recent history has already provided the answer. We eradicated smallpox, and nearly eliminated polio from the planet, with coordinated community-level effort. But now weve abandoned the battlefield; people cannot even agree on the value of science and verifiable facts. Weve had at least three worldwide pandemics in my lifetime, but none of those lessons were applied toward preparation for the next one. So, is COVID-19 here to stay? The answer is yes, and another one is coming.

The real question is whether human behavior will be up to the task, and recent history has already provided the answer ... So, is COVID-19 here to stay? The answer is yes, and another one is coming.Lo

I predict SARS-CoV-2 will continue to be an issue in the coming years because of the rise of viral variants and the delays in global vaccination. It is important to note that viruses can only replicate inside a host cell, and that they acquire mutations during replication. Even though SARS-CoV-2 has a lower mutation rate than other RNA viruses like influenza virus, the sheer number of people who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 has given the virus the opportunity to accumulate an array of mutations. Currently, the approved vaccines offer protection against the new variants, but not as effectively as the original strains. As newer variants emerge, some may be better at escaping vaccine protection, thereby potentially allowing the virus to replicate in vaccinated persons. The other issue that will drive the spread of COVID-19 is that vaccination rates are currently low. There are developing countries that will not have access to the vaccines for quite a while, so the virus will continue to spread and mutate in these unvaccinated populations. Until there is herd immunity across the globe, the virus will be just a plane ride away. That is why it is imperative we vaccinate as many people as we can as soon as possible.

Until there is herd immunity across the globe, the virus will be just a plane ride away.Morrison

I think it is too early to say. There is obviously a clear source of hope that maybe it wont be around to stay, with the very effective vaccines we have now. But with the proliferation of more resistant variants, my guess is that we will be updating and changing the vaccine and will need yearly boosters, like flu shots, for the foreseeable future.

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Experts weigh in on whether COVID-19 is here to stay - UC Riverside

SAI Global and NABCRMP Launch Ground-Breaking Training Course "Addressing Systemic Racism in the Workplace" – PRNewswire

CHICAGO, Feb. 15, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- SAI Global, a leader in integrated cloud-basedGovernance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) and Ethics & Compliance (E&C) learning solutions announced today a partnership with the National Association of Black Compliance and Risk Management Professionals (NABCRMP) to launch a new training course "Addressing Systemic Racism in the Workplace."

SAI Global and NABCRMP will work together to help companies raise awareness about the importance of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, answering the question, "How do we reshape human behavior to support and mitigate the risk of discrimination?" The new training course provides a comprehensive look at behaviors embedded within organizations.

With the support of SAI Global's learning methodology, the course aims to reshape human behavior by building a solid vocabulary and a plain-language explanation of what systemic racism is, how it perpetuates, and the tangible changes needed to eradicate it. Learners will be presented with self-reflective checkpoints that support the development of a workplace that promotes respect, acceptance, and equity.

The training course aims to take discussions about diversity and inclusion one step further. Diversity and Inclusion is meant to highlight and value broad representation across people, ideas, and culture in an environment that fosters belonging and community. Antiracism means understanding the structures that promote racial inequities and taking a proactive stand against racism through definitive actions and policies.

"We're delighted to have NABCRMP on board as a strategic partner," said Rina Souppa, Sr. Director, Product Management & Design at SAI Global. "The organization's breadth of knowledge in this core area will be instrumental for companies committed to taking up the challenge of dismantling the structures that perpetuate racial inequality and racial discrimination within their organizations."

"Systemic racism continues to exist because people don't think it's that big of problem and there are many companies that have difficulty acknowledging the problems in their own organization," said Dion Harrison, Chair of the NABCRMP DEI Workgroup. "There needs to be recognition of this issue to demystify notions that cloud the judgment of anyone rationalizing racism in any form. We need to be intentional, honest, and bold anti-racists to create inclusive workplaces. Companies haven't historically looked at diversity, equity and inclusion as a risk mitigation tool. This training is the first step of many that will foster the conversations needed to make tangible changes in organizations."

Kicking off their partnership, SAI Global and NABCRMP will host awebinar on Feb. 17 with Moni N. Robinson Chief Operating Officer, ofthe National Association of Black Compliance and Risk ManagementProfessionals, members of NABCRMP's Diversity, Equity and InclusionWorkgroup and SAI Global's Anne Spencer, who helped design the course.The event will be moderated by Rina Souppa, Sr. Director, ProductManagement & Design at SAI Global. For more information on the programor to register for the webinar, please visitour website.

About SAI Global SAI Global is headquartered in Chicago, U.S., and operates across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific. Discover more atwww.saiglobal.com/riskor follow us onLinkedIn.To see SAI360 in action,request a demo.

About NABCRMP Founded in 2019, the National Association of Black Compliance & Risk Management Professionals, Inc. is a member-based 501 (c)(3) non-profit dedicated to the professional development of African-American compliance and risk management professionals. NABCRMP envisions an environment where the unique perspectives and contributions of Black compliance and risk management professionals result in a more inclusive environment.

Contact Moni N. Robinson NABCRMP Phone: 937.520.2242 [emailprotected]

Jacqueline Fleming SAI Global Phone: 917-573-6120 [emailprotected]

SOURCE SAI Global; NABCRMP

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SAI Global and NABCRMP Launch Ground-Breaking Training Course "Addressing Systemic Racism in the Workplace" - PRNewswire

Clinical Trials Are Moving Out of the Lab and Into Peoples Homes – The New York Times

When the pandemic hit last year, clinical trials took a hit. Universities closed, and hospitals turned their attention to battling the new disease. Many studies that required repeated, in-person visits with volunteers were delayed or scrapped.

But some scientists found creative ways to continue their research even when face-to-face interaction was inherently risky. They mailed medications, performed exams over video chat and asked patients to monitor their own vitals at home.

Many scientists say this shift toward virtual studies is long overdue. If these practices persist, they could make clinical trials cheaper, more efficient and more equitable offering state-of-the-art research opportunities to people who otherwise wouldnt have the time or resources to take advantage of them.

Weve discovered that we can do things differently, and I dont think well go back to life as we used to know it, said Dr. Mustafa Khasraw, a medical oncologist and clinical trial specialist at Duke University.

According to one analysis, nearly 6,000 trials registered on ClinicalTrials.gov were stopped between Jan. 1 and May 31, roughly twice as many compared with non-pandemic times.

At Johns Hopkins University, for instance, researchers delayed their investigation into how adults aged 65 to 80 metabolized tenofovir, a drug used to prevent and treat H.I.V.

The idea of recruiting older people who we know are particularly vulnerable recruiting them to answer a fundamental question that is not going to immediately change care or impact their health just seemed like not what we should be doing, said Dr. Namandje Bumpus, the pharmacologist leading the study, which remains on hold.

In Flint, Mich., researchers had to stop enrolling emergency-room patients for a hypertension trial. Other volunteers quit the study or became difficult to reach.

Their phone service has dropped or they have very different schedules or theyre harder to reach because theyre caring for someone, said Dr. Lesli Skolarus, a stroke neurologist at the University of Michigan who is leading the study.

Dr. Skolarus and her colleagues kept the trial going, albeit with some modifications. Most notably, they scrapped their in-person follow-up visits, instead asking participants to use take-home blood pressure cuffs and to send photos of the readings via text message.

Other research teams made similar adjustments. Neurologists at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston revamped a pilot study of methylphenidate, the active ingredient in Ritalin, in seniors with mild dementia or cognitive impairment. Instead of going to the hospital every two weeks, study participants are now receiving their medication by mail, taking cognitive assessments over video conference, playing brain games on their computers, and completing daily surveys at home.

Essentially, this is now a totally virtual trial, said Dr. Steven Arnold, the neurologist leading the trial.

Feb. 18, 2021, 8:01 p.m. ET

Even when scientists cant eliminate in-person visits, theyre finding ways to reduce them. When Lorraine Wilner, a 78-year-old retiree with metastatic breast cancer, first began a clinical trial at Duke University last summer, she had to make the three-hour drive to the Durham, N.C., campus every four weeks, for blood work and occasional other tests. She said she would always leave with a full gas tank, so I dont have to stop at a gas station or touch things or go into places where half the people dont have a mask on, she said.

But she can now have her blood drawn at a lab near her home in Lancaster, S.C. Researchers then review the results with her over a video call. She still has to drive up to Duke for periodic scans, but the reduced traveling has been a great relief. It makes it a lot more convenient, she said.

Remote trials are likely to persist in a post-pandemic era, researchers say. Cutting back on in-person visits could make recruiting patients easier and reduce dropout rates, leading to quicker, cheaper clinical trials, said Dr. Ray Dorsey, a neurologist at the University of Rochester who conducted remote research for years.

In fact, he noted, enrollment in one of his current virtual studies, which is tracking people with a genetic predisposition to Parkinsons, actually surged last spring. While most clinical studies were paused or delayed, ours accelerated in the midst of the pandemic, he said.

The shift to virtual trials could also help diversify clinical research, encouraging more low-income and rural patients to enroll, said Dr. Hala Borno, an oncologist at the University of California, San Francisco. The pandemic, she said, does really allow us to step back and reflect on the burdens that weve been placing on patients for a really long time.

Virtual trials are not a panacea. Researchers will have to ensure that they can thoroughly monitor volunteers health without in-person visits, and be mindful of the fact that not all patients have access to, or are comfortable with, technology.

And in some cases, scientists still need to demonstrate that remote testing is reliable. While Dr. Arnold is optimistic that in-home cognitive tests could provide a better window into his patients everyday functioning, he noted that homes are uncontrolled environments. Maybe theres a cat crawling on them or grandchildren in the next room, he said.

There is also the unpredictable nature of human behavior. Dr. Brennan Spiegel, a gastroenterologist and the director of health services research at the Cedars-Sinai Health System, frequently uses Fitbits to monitor trial subjects remotely. But a participant once put the device on a dog. Several others sent their Fitbits through the wash. You get a lot of steps all of a sudden thousands and thousands of steps, he said.

And some treatments simply may not work as well at a distance. Last January, Clay Coleman Jr., a 61-year-old Chicago resident, enrolled in a clinical trial to treat his peripheral artery disease, which caused intense pain whenever he tried to walk. It was very hard, said Mr. Coleman, who doesnt drive. My legs are very important to me because thats how I get around.

He hoped that the trial which involved taking a blood pressure medication and participating in a supervised exercise program could get him back into walking shape. Three times a week, he traveled to a local gym for a structured treadmill workout with a coach. I had been there maybe six weeks or so before this virus thing came around, he said.

Suddenly, the gym was out. Instead, Mr. Colemans coach called him regularly on the phone and encouraged him to keep moving.

Dr. Mary McDermott, a general internist at Northwestern University who is running the trial, isnt sure how effective this kind of remote coaching will be. We cannot assume that remote interventions are going to be the same, she said. Or that remote measurements are going to replace everything that we have done in person.

Still, the pandemic has demonstrated that there is room for reform. Dr. Deepak Bhatt, a cardiologist at Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston, is part of a team starting a trial of an injectable blood thinner later this year. After the first, in-person medical visit, appointments will be virtual.

Im quite sure if Covid had not occurred, we would have done things the usual way, he said. Sometimes, he added, it takes a crisis to provoke change.

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Clinical Trials Are Moving Out of the Lab and Into Peoples Homes - The New York Times

How to Build Security Resilience in Healthcare Beyond COVID-19 – HealthTech Magazine

Hackers Use Pandemic-Related Tactics in Phishing Scams

During the pandemic, Texas Childrens has seen a 100 percent increase in scam emails related to the coronavirus, COVID-19 and personal protective equipment, Tonthat says. Many of the attacks targeted the supply chain and accounts payable groups.

Email could be our worst enemy sometimes because thats the gateway in, she says. When suspicious emails come in, Tonthats team reviews those that pass through the email security stack to confirm their validity.

We see it happen all the time there has definitely been an increase during COVID, Tonthat says. Weve been faced with many targeted attempts around PPE-type fraud schemes.

Luke McNamara, a principal analyst at the Mandiant Threat Intelligence unit of FireEye, saw the incorporation of COVID-19 into various phishing campaigns as a theme amid the surge of cases in the U.S. last spring, similar to the jumps in thematic phishing that happen during tax season or the holidays. Such emails often have a malicious link or attachments, he says.

The intent is to get the user to open that file and deploy the malware unwittingly, of course or click on a link and enter their credentials into what appears to be a legitimate web page, which then get captured, McNamara says.

Any emails with COVID-19 in the subject line or in an attachment filename should be examined carefully.

Texas Childrens has established multiple layers of defense for email. The stronger the security, the more likely actors will give up and go to an easier target, Tonthat says. She notes that customers using Microsoft 365 gain an additional layer of email defense.

MORE FROM HEALTHTECH: See how AI can increase efficiency in healthcare.

A proper security setup includes multiple controls such as a proxy, network firewall, application-level firewalls, encryption, dedicated denial of service protection and two-factor authentication, Tonthat says. She also advises that, where possible, organizations consider geolocation blocks to guard against overseas threat actors.

Health systems also should implement systems like tap and go to log on to EHR systems, and facial recognition is another tool for consideration. Together, password, badge and physical access comprise the multiple layers of strong access management for a hospital.

Texas Childrens conducts phishing simulations to train staff to respond appropriately to malicious emails. The idea is to ensure that physicians, nurses and staff arent caught off guard as they focus on attending to patients, Tonthat says.

During the pandemic, simulations to enhance workforce vigilance have been considered critical, she said.

We send them a phishing email, and we monitor who clicks, who forwards, and make sure they take the required training, Tonthat says. Cybersecurity is everyones responsibility. During the pandemic, we have engaged our executives to help raise awareness of cybersecurity threats to their teams, and we have seen a very positive shift in human behavior.

Ransomware has been one of the biggest threats facing hospitals, particularly the prospect of this type of attack slowing down a health system in the middle of a pandemic.

The fact that they could be disrupted by these operations is certainly something that is concerning, McNamara says.

In 2020, in addition to installing ransomware on PCs, threat actors exfiltrated data and publicly posted it online, which caused privacy and regulatory issues. To avoid losing data during an attack, healthcare organizations should secure and back up data off the network, McNamara advises.

In October, the FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the Department of Health and Human Services alerted Texas Childrens about cyberthreats related to ransomware targeting providers, Tonthat says.

Among other threats, she points to the danger of financially motivated, nation-sponsored hacking. You steal the data to sell it on the dark web and disrupt operations because you believe you will be able to get a ransom by the victim organization, she says.

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How to Build Security Resilience in Healthcare Beyond COVID-19 - HealthTech Magazine

Emergence, Rise and Fall of Surveillance Capitalism, Part 2: Rise and Fall – CircleID

"We are still in the early days of an information civilization. The third decade is our opportunity to match the ingenuity and determination of our 20th-century forebears by building the foundations for a democratic digital century."1 (Shoshana Zuboff)

One of the consequences of the Jan 6th events is a renewed attention towards Surveillance Capitalism as a key doctrine undermining democracy.2 This part 2 of the 2 part series of discusses the rise and fall of Surveillance Capitalism under the premise that the better we understand the danger at the door, the better we are able to confront it.

"Capitalism is supposed to be a system of checks and balances. It's a marketplace where everyone haggles until they are basically satisfied, and it works because you can always threaten to walk away if you don't get a fair deal. But when there's only one Marketplace, and it's impossible to walk away, everything is out of balance. Amazon owns the marketplace. They can do whatever they want, That's not capitalism. That's piracy. (David Kahan, Chief Executive Birkenstock Americas)3

Surveillance has a built-in drive for more and more surveillance. The goal is certainty, but to reach more certainty, you need more surveillance data. It can never reach the ultimate goal. It can only increase the observations and sharpen the analytic tools, but it can never reach 100% certainty, but it can suggest other surveillance uses. It will forever be on the hunt for the holy grail of certainty, with the user investing time and sacrificing more and more data. Shareholders want ever better margins from the monetization of data. Advertising partners want even more precise predictions. Governments spur themselves on with the thought of missing another 9/11. The stakes have become higher. A hunt for higher profits has become, in the context of security agencies, a question of corporate life and death. Ever more certainty has become an imperative! To achieve this, it is no longer enough to observe, it has to go further and read everybody's minds and ultimately control and direct what we do.

Surveillance capitalist corporations are in a perpetual "startup' mode of disrupting existing businesses and replacing them with their own. The moment they lose this drive, they become themselves the prey of other companies. That is why surveillance capitalist companies are always monopolistic and by design fighting any and all anti-trust regulations and regulatory moves. It only knows one direction, to become ever more disruptive, bigger, dehumanized, antisocial to the degree of criminality. It amasses power because it knows without it will die. Will they die? Are there are limits to their exploitation? Left on their own will, they leave nothing but devastation and despair behind them.

The genius of surveillance capitalism is revealed when it comes to introducing the new tools needed to increase its powers of observation and manipulation. Following the tried and tested digital business model of the search engine and social media platform, it offers a new product, the "next big thing." On the surface, it offers innovations that make the user's life easier, but the real purpose of the (IoT) devices or apps is to harvest even more and better personal data. Why should a digital corporation or government install the instruments of observation and risk a "big brother" image when it can manipulate its citizens and customers to provide the data, and even pay to do it. ( In surveillance capitalism, you can build the wall and get Mexico to pay for it!)

The most valuable tool and resource surveillance capitalism has exploited is the smartphone. Smartphones equipped with gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetic field detectors, and a barometric pressure sensor allow apps to monitor a person's activities in great detail. It does not just roughly know where you are and what you do; it knows that you are on the fourth-floor dance studio, having salsa lessons with the nice co-worker you met at the watercooler 4 month ago. The same co-worker that searched the net for engagement rings and was recently seen lurking outside the displays of jewelry shops. There are endless business opportunities opening there. All hell will break loose if she says "yes" and the wedding industry takes over the situation. Data-driven marketing pitches will pressure the couple away from that intimate 40 person family event that they wanted, and into a 3-day stadium event that will bankrupt them for life, possibly at the cost of their children's higher education, as college funding underwrites a flashy wedding.

Sometimes it is argued that the iPhone is less intrusive than Android phones. Apple makes a point to portrait itself as the good guy with slogans like "what happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone" or even point out their role as guardians of privacy with slogans like "we're in the business of staying out yours." In fact, iPhones have the same array of sensors and send as much personal data to third parties as any Android phone. There is also a persistent worry that Apple's use of Chinese subcontractors makes it vulnerable to backdoors and hacking.

The methods to create consumer demand and consent are simple. Either you appeal to laziness or comfort. When that is not possible, a threat is created and promoted together with the offering of the tool to alleviate it. Consumers become the collaborators in their own exploitation. By "google" people, they internalize the values of surveillance capitalism, and their ethics have become one with it.

To see what they do, doorbells with networked cameras are brought to market. They can stop a thieve to steal a parcel, but they also register who is going in and out of the house and what is happening in front of it. Combining the images of all doorbells in the street enables the observation of the whole street and, ultimately, the whole town. Combining the images with the sounds from "smart interfaces" that have been marketed as "household helpers" provides more refined data and context.4 As these devises leave few physical tasks for the humans, they need to keep fit, which requires knowledge about what is going on in their bodies. The knowledge about your health that is important for you and your doctor is equally important for a health insurance company to decide if you are worth the risk.

To aid driving, cars are equipped with navigation systems. To make the car "smart" its connected directly with its manufacturer and other entities such as banks and insurance companies. If the installments are late, it gets switched off remotely. If the service intervals are not observed, the top speed reduces to 15 miles an hour and forces the car to come to the garage of the manufacturer's choice for "service." Your car insurance premium is flexible now and is deducted monthly depending on which driving behavior is reported. There is much too much uncertainty in just allowing people to drive. A self-driving car, or even better, a self-driving car that checks if your journey is justified and gives you permission for it is a much more sensible proposition. What is more, it is all done in the interest of, and out of "care" for, the consumer.

Uncertainty, rooting in the free will of the individual, is bad for business and ultimately inefficient, and chaotic. One can argue that it contributes to unnecessary emissions and impacts climate change. Here we have reasons why humans must be taught to control their behavior, otherwise, they will continue the madness of turning up all at once, with their motors running, to buy their coffees and bagels at the drive-through. Teaching them to come in regular intervals will save the world by saving humankind from its irrational self.

Surveillance capitalism feeds a new "cult of reason"5 like during the French revolution, and this time it has the means to direct people to what is best. How to do that was demonstrated successfully by Pokmon GO.6 The game whose basic object it is to collect creatures. Instead of hunting them down, it uses mapping tools to take the hunt from the screen into the real world. By making a creature to appear outside a particular coffee shop at 8.30 pm and letting the player know in advance, you ensure that he or she will be there. Make the next person come at 8.32 and so on. Use and refine these basic principles to all areas of human behavior, and voila, a state of perfect reason has been created, but at the expense of what human rights.

Surveillance capitalist corporations claim that they have a specific corporate culture, as an Amazon executive expressed it "our way," not grasping that the significance of his words mean that the values and needs of the company are more important than the rights of individuals, individual or the common good. This begs the question about our fears about computers taking, a takeover that has long been fulfilled. Humanity becomes no more or less than a function that has mobilized the support of capitalist surveillance companies. Even Jeff Bezos has to realize that he too is among the poorest with us, when he sold himself and us to ultimate surveillance capitalist exploitation through a machine called Amazon.

There is a reason why they teach robotics using Lego bricks:

"The most consequential global policy concerns of the present era are arising in debates over the architecture and governance of cyber-physical systems. Technology policy has to be conceptualized to account for the expansion of digital technologies from Communication and information exchange to material sensing and control. How technical, legal, and institutional structures evolve will have sweeping implications for civil liberties and Innovation for a generation."7

The goal of surveillance capitalism is to change the Internet from a communication network of, for, and by the people, to a system of control. Think about human communication as children's building blocks. Before surveillance capitalism, think of the Internet. There are blocks of different shapes, sizes, and colors. You can stack them on top of each other or side by side to construct whatever you want. Construction is limited by the fact that the blocks might touch one another, but they are not connected by anything more than gravity, making any construction both possible and unstable. (But that is also part of the fun, which child could resist the sight and sound of tumbling building blocks.)

Then came innovation by the creators of Lego. By sticking little round knobs on the bricks that clicked into holes in the bottom of other bricks, they created a stable connection that made the creative possibilities endless. The Internet is the little round knobs on the bricks of human communication. It enabled people to connect with each other globally. The digital knobs, the technical infrastructure of the Internet, like the Lego knobs, are both physical and virtual; they are cyber-physical. We can see the knobs clearly, but they are hidden and invisible within the platforms and applications where they make their magic, form connections with other bricks, and produce a gold mine of archived and tagged data.

The possibility to connect is endless, and everything seems to be possible as long as the knobs and holes are compatible with one another. To gain an economic advantage, surveillance capitalism wants to control all the bricks in play, and to do, so it tampers with the bricks and little knobs that connect the network of networks. They started to collect data about every brick, every effort to move a brick, and all the traffic in and around the brick, and any traffic facilitated by the brick. To do so, they created bricks with a multitude of sensors. Connected to the Internet, they form the Internet of Things (IoT). They look like ordinary bricks and function as part of the whole construction. Their real purpose is to send data to a special cluster of bricks that collects and analyzes the data and to send commands to actuator bricks that are able to manipulate all the bricks around it through numerous ways like turning switches, moving bricks into the desired position, and determine where and when bricks would connect with others. These magic sensor/actuator bricks bridge the gap between virtual and real. Something real, like the position of a person, is translated into digital virtual information. Based on the analysis and a pre-determined goal, commands are sent to actuators that cause where the person might go next. There is a subtle (and hidden) interplay between services provided and data collected.

The character and function of the Internet is changed from a communication network to a network of sensing and control. The Internet has undergone a transition from being primarily content-centric to increasingly surveillance and activation-centric. The Internet was always used by companies and governments to remote control utilities such as the electric grid, the step that Surveillance capitalism did is that it began to integrate humans and human behavior into the Internet of Things (IoT). A large part of the Internet is used to control legions of sensors and actuators. Outfitted with sensors and actuators like smart phones, social media sides and health watches, humans are surveyed and activated. The point of interaction between humans and the Internet has moved from the screen to the sensors, resulting in the invisibility of the network, a lack of agency about control, and a loss of ability to determine what happens with personal data.

The win here for surveillance capitalism is that by monitoring and controlling the sensors and actuators, it determines the shape of the whole and does not need to control everybody and everything. It only must establish itself as the architect that guides the overall construction and use (orchestration) to achieve the desired results. You cannot build a round house if you have only square bricks. Cyber-physical architecture determines what the Internet is and, more importantly, what it will become in the future. In a form-follows-function design model, the functions are data mining and behavioral modification, designed in the clothing of friendly apps.

To control all aspects of construction and to eliminate the last havens of freedom and creativity, surveillance capitalism needed to replace the round knobs with knobs of another design under its control.

To do so, it had to first cause a disruption by disassembling existing socio-economic constructs. The next step of the "innovation" was to reassemble the bricks in such a way that the connection between the bricks is controlled by the virtual bricks. Becoming the intermediary between two systems, one real and one virtual, with the virtual in surveillance mode, lets the virtual control the real.

To convince players to abandon the round design they made the new bricks free and gave them attractive functions designed to appeal to and please the users. First, these bricks seemed to be compatible but having convinced a large amount of players to use their bricks, surveillance capitalism began to change the design of the knobs. Then it created knobs specific to economic sectors like buying a book, ordering a taxi and renting a room. These knobs were different in shape and size and could only be connected with bricks of the same specification, a design primarily to restrict access to valuable data. Free creative play and economic competition are replaced by an increasing need to create and follow a pre-ordained design. Soon their knobs began to replace the original knobs everybody used. The new knobs where hailed as vital innovations and treated as commercial property that surveillance capitalists used to create powerful monopolies that forced everybody else to adapt and buy bricks with, or compatible with, the new knobs.

All firms are now technology companies, but not all are surveillance capitalists. Surveillance capitalism has achieved the seemingly impossible takeover of most global commercial activities. It did this by making itself the connector between providers and consumers, offering free access in exchange for data mining.

In the end, there is only one pre-ordained design. We have stopped being players with agency and have become bricks in an overall construction by an architect who has no concerns about us, other than as the producers of data and as the subjects of behavior modification as consumers (and citizens?).

Governments try to regulate the visible but are unable to address the real problems that a pre-determining cyberinfrastructure represents. Existing governance structures fail as they are basically addressing the wrong net. As observed:

"Interventions based on law and international agreements are not alone sufficient. Public policy is inscribed and concealed inside architecture." "The technological diffusion of the Internet into the material world requires new approaches to technical architecture and governance that not only consider the content-centric protection of the digital economy and the free flow of information but also view infrastructure stability and cybersecurity as a critical human rights issue."8

"What has made us great for so long is suddenly being seen as something we ought to be ashamed of!" (Amazon executive)

"people are worried-we're suddenly on the firing line." (recently retired Amazon executive)9

The situation looks hopeless. Escape from Alcatraz High-Security Prison seems to be more likely than escaping from surveillance capitalism. 99.9% of the digital information is rendered in a digital format that the surveillance capitalists have created for us. How can we escape or at least resist? We went the wrong way with the Internet, and we got led down the wrong path by surveillance capitalism. Now that we are becoming increasingly aware of its dangers, how can we start our way back to the crossroads and try again?

One reaction is to opt-out of digital technologies, which in developed societies seems impossible. The next option is to go digital hiding by deploying practices like Virtual Private Networks (VPN) that disguise our identity and deceive the deceivers. This might afford a person some limited level of protection, and even with that VPN in play, the devise is transmitting coordinates and other identifiable data. Individual defenses take a lot of effort and resources and do not bode well as the best path for our human dignity and integrity. The question is whether these forms of passive resistance can effect change, or do they just change the information to surveillance capitalism that has won over our self-determination.

We should not despair. There are good reasons that will ultimately cause the downfall of surveillance capitalism. It is unsustainability, and its business practices run against human nature and our notions of human rights and human dignity.

The European Commission stated in its recent White Paper on Artificial Intelligence: "As digital technology becomes an ever more central part of every aspect of people's lives, people should be able to trust it. Trustworthiness is also a prerequisite for its uptake."10

"For most of us, computers are effectively magic. When they work, we don't know how. When they break, we don't know why. For all but the most rarefied experts, sitting at a keyboard is an act of trust" (Raffi Khatchadourian in The New Yorker)11

(Silicon Valley is in) "the trust business if you loose the trust of the people who use the product, you are done, You never get it back" (McNammee in the New Yorker)12

The tide is turning against surveillance capitalism as users are increasingly losing trust with regard to some uses of the Internet. There is a wealth of studies about how mistrust against digital industries in general and social media and online news platforms is growing.13 The current developments and discussions around privacy and the proposed Covid-19 tracking apps shows how deep this mistrust goes. Singapore was one of the first countries to introduce a Covid19 tracking app. It turned out to be a failure not only for technical reasons but mainly because people did not trust and download it.14 60-80% adoption would be needed to make it effective, but only around 30% used the app.15 One of the reasons was that the digital use plan, like in any surveillance capitalism app, tried to take advantage of the situation, and collected data that did not fit its stated purpose. Populations responded or failed to respond, where it seems that many would rather risk illness than submit themselves to digital monitoring by states in combination with data mining by surveillance capitalism. This is a case where the lack of digital integrity in the past results in death today.

No citizen will deny a legitimate and authorized health or law enforcement agency access to relevant data if the appropriate checks and balances are in place. Surveillance capitalism's insistence on scraping data, tagged to individuals from all sources, is at the core of concerns and opposition here.16

If a government treats its citizens by default as potential, but "not yet", offenders and manifests its non-existing trust relationship with widespread digital surveillance, possibly backed up with social-economical retributions, citizens will wisely strive to hide their information.17 They will not trust a government that does not trust them. When the government bases its approach to surveillance on digital integrity, and practices it, a policy dialogue to determine the rights and responsibilities of both governments and citizens is possible. The "Brands in Motion 2018" study, based on 25,000 consumers globally, found that 93% of the consumers in Germany demanded more ethical responsibility in the use of digital technologies.18

Governments and the digital industry need to restore the public trust in themselves through transparency, accountability, and truth and unity between their words and deeds, complimented by checks and balances provided through Internet Governance. Trustworthiness requires a new way of thinking, resulting in structural changes embedded in digital processes and Internet governance.

"Rivalries in 'Silicon Valley One' revolved around technological Prowess, consumer allegiance, and profitability. Now competition is for moral superiority..." Brian Barth, The New Yorker19

Surveillance capitalism has a build-in inability to do the right thing because doing so would mean self-destruction. The "right thing" is contrary to its digital business plan. Piecemeal private data protection regulations are nothing more than a short-term fix, inadequate and costly. In the long run, Surveillance capitalism will damage and impoverish the lives of all that are touched by it.

To see how a trust-based business model might work, we must return to digital integrity. Digital integrity is an Internet user's most valuable protection from digital exploitation. Current digital business models are based on the exploitation of personal data. Internet users live in a constant tension between using the full potential of the Internet and being exploited to the point of digital slavery. As more Internet users suffer and feel the tension, the more they will value digital integrity, and the more they will demand and possibly be willing to pay for assured digital integrity.

We have seen the same demand for integrity at work in creating marketplaces where consumers go "green" and started to pay for their physical health, and the health of the planet, by buying biological products at a higher price than non-biological ones. Private sector companies that offer products that demonstrably do not violate their customers' digital integrity are able to charge a price and make a profit without having to resort to practices that are harmful to their customers. Like the "green industry, a "digital integrity industry" is forming, from registries to domain name sellers, platform providers and online stores. We see just the beginning of a movement, but it is gaining momentum.20 Digital citizens start to express their will through behavioral changes and so create new digital realities. With each new "digital integrity business," the will of the people manifests itself in pressures to reform the digital marketplace.

The more we know here, the more we will be able to resist. Education in all matters concerning digital integrity and the workings of the digital ecosystem is one of the main pre-requisites for effective digital citizenship. Education informs digital citizens to become empowered digital citizens. The right to education should go beyond, for example, basic literacy or the higher goals STEM or STEAM-focused curriculum. It must include awareness around one's role in the governance ecosystem and building and maintaining a suitable social fabric and the social contract for social processes and behavior that promote access to individual human dignity.

Are anti-trust laws and privacy regulations by governments the solution?

"It's as if Bezos charted the company's growth by first drawing a map of antitrust law, and then devising routes to smoothly bypass them" (Lina Khan)21

The ultimate goal and premise would be to restrict commercial activity based on private data seriously. Only data that was strictly necessary for providing a particular service, from medical files to gym membership, could be collected, never shared, and deleted when no longer needed.

Surveillance capitalism has so far managed to deceive the general public and lobby politicians into legislation that minimally regulates how the collected data is used, and avoid the worst-case scenarios around the integrity, and human rights concerns, related to company digital business practices to collect data. This is like regulating how a slave is to be treated but not questioning the general premise of slavery.

Attempts are made to get around even the existing very limited regulations as the recent attempts of Facebook to declare a "legitimate interest" to all personal data, even that which is protected by existing legislation such the European Union's GDPR.22

The main argument against not allowing general access to private data is that to do so limits innovation and, for example, the effectiveness of AI and applications like Covid-19 prevention apps. First of all, the difference between personal data and general data (e.g., facial recognition) is blurred. Surveillance capitalism is not after just the insights that can be gotten from aggregate, anonymous data, but its digital business model is also interested in insights about you. Secondly, it focuses AI on Artificial Narrow Intelligence or "ANI," which is basically smart algorithms that make quick decisions, for example, based on real-time data they receive. They are superior to human intervention only in that they have the ability to process data quicker. The algorithms still remain "human intelligence" based, in contrast to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), where machines refine the algorithms based on specified (human?) objectives.

How Surveillance Capitalists explore the possibilities of AI was demonstrated by Alpha Go developed by Googles Deep Mind Lap, which pitted a computer against a world-class Go player resulting in a 4-1 win for the computer23. Not only did the games show that computers can win but also that AGI has the potential to teach people how to think in better ways. The currently applied emphasis is on ANI, with slower growth for AGI innovation. AI-based technology and digital business plans will developed as ways to refine the control and manipulation of people, for whatever ends the users of AI seek. The real danger is that surveillance capitalists will develop a monopoly on AI, or at least a protection against transparency and accountability, that threatens the use of knowledge and technology in the common good service.

Surveillance Capitalism underestimates human nature as it sees us as soulless machines that can be controlled through the appropriate command codes.

"...the ultimate goal of surveillance capitalism is to eliminate the uncertainty of decision-making. "That has a superficial appeal, until you realize that agency and identity depend on uncertainty; because it is the choices we make in uncertainty that define who we are."24 (McNamee, The New Yorker)

The predictions about human behavior ignore one fact that can be predicted about human nature with certainty: Whatever the incentives digital technologies provide if they are violating fundamental human rights such as freedom, dignity, and integrity, people will sooner or later react, oppose, and burst the chains of their subservience. There are numerous examples in human history that support this premise. For surveillance capitalism to function, it needs ever-increasing certainty based on ever-increasing data. This is causing an ever-increasing separation of persons from knowledge, rights from responsibilities, common good from profit. In the surveillance capitalism business model, balance, dialogue and a middle ground do not exist. All that exists is the extreme need for ever more data for it to continue. Much of today's digital technology is as though our data is in the hands of data junkies in search of the next data fix.

However sophisticated surveillance capitalism becomes, it will always have to predict the thoughts and actions of people in the end. That is the monetized product sold to its corporate and government customers. The next "big thing" is to take humans totally out of the decision-making algorithm and let computers make the decisions. Delegating the analysis and the decision-making to autonomous or semi-autonomous AI algorithms is highly risky, but for surveillance capitalists, that is the way they will try to go. It is the logical outcome of their digital business strategy and the only way to reach behavioral predictability at the scale of activities and behaviors faced (enjoyed) by surveillance capitalists. They are not concerned if they lead humanity to its: "I am sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that moment, like in Stanley Kubrick's film "A Space Odyssey."

We need to find ways to make better investments in societies for their benefit and stop investments made for the sake of profits in ways that challenge the integrity and human rights and make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

"I also call upon Member States to place human rights at the centre of regulatory frameworks and legislation on the development and use of digital technologies. In a similar vein, I call upon technology leaders urgently and publicly to acknowledge the importance of protecting the right to privacy and other human rights in the digital space and take clear, company-specific actions to do so". (UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres)25

As the gap between rich and poor widens, the social contract between different parts of a society becomes unsustainable, surveillance capitalism will be confronted as a cancerous business process that is both violating human rights and feeding that inequitable growth.

We need to return to an Internet that enables us to do more for the sake of humanity and not for the sake of monopolistic surveillance capitalism and their oligarchy of investors. As the focus of the Internet increasingly became the monetization of all data and processes, the Internet started to lose its soul. Its chief evangelist spread the gospel of Google for private gain, and not in the service or for the salvation of humankind.

In the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), we need to retool digital technologies to provide direct social security for the wellbeing of all. To achieve the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will depend on the massive and targeted use of appropriate digital technologies. Currently, digital technologies are often detrimental to the achievement of the SDGs, many with aspects in violation of the UDHR. We need new kinds of digital innovation. We need innovations that are born out of the need to address real human goals and needs and not innovations that are servants of surveillance capitalism. Instead of putting their energies into lining the pockets of shareholders, we need smart incubators that work on solving problems like climate change. Many of the surveillance capitalist business models and apps are contributing to problems like climate change, social inequity, and socio-economic marginalization.

The next "Big Thing!" to be sought and hoped for is an Internet ecosystem populated by applications and (IoT) devices that do not exploit their users. Even a smartphone where the user fully understands the terms of services offered and transparency around the nature and uses of data collected would be truly revolutionary without exploiting private user data. The associated commercial potential would not have to rival surveillance capitalism since there is every expectation that surveillance capitalism's digital business practices will be reined in.

The question is whether governments and companies have the will, or feel the pressure from citizens and consumers, to bring integrity to their digital data practices and respect human rights in both the literal and virtual aspects of life. One fear is that manufacturers and governments so value access to data to predict and manipulate the deeds and thoughts of customers and citizens that the integrity and privacy of persons are so compromised that they are never released from their digital servitude.

We face an uncomfortable truth. We will likely never be free of digital servitude unless we take on the task of change and do the job ourselves. The safe and predictable world surveillance capitalism is luring us into is nothing more than an illusion and a distraction. It will not banish unpredictability and may well heighten insecurity. The current Covid-19 pandemic has revealed how fragile we are and that we need to work together and respect each other to survive. We will stop giving in to our laziness and comfort that took us away from engagement in the affairs and wellbeing of the world and community that surround us. We must build a balance between the uses and the effects of the digital applications and (IoT) devices that are trapping us in digital servitude and contributing to wellbeing and life for all, including flora and fauna) on our fragile planet earth.

Let us build new digital structures and processes that are constructive and not destructive. Let us set up structures of Internet Governance the promote engagement and democratic accountability. Let us return decency and integrity to what we do and how we do it. We are not where we want to be, but through conscious and deliberate engagement. With good Internet governance and by retooling social media and other digital apps to serve engaged dialogue, we can get on the way to a better tomorrow.

The author would like to give a big THANKS to Prof. Sam Lanfranco. Without his support and input these articles would not be possible.

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Emergence, Rise and Fall of Surveillance Capitalism, Part 2: Rise and Fall - CircleID

Five keys to combatting violence: Advice for the Biden administration | TheHill – The Hill

America is back means that President Biden faces a slew of foreign policy challenges as he modifies the course of U.S. national security. From confronting Russian President Vladimir PutinVladimir Vladimirovich PutinBiden can push back on Russia by supporting its neighbors in the Caucasus Five keys to combatting violence: Advice for the Biden administration Putin takes aim at a news company funded by Congress: How will US respond? MORE on cyber-based attacks against the American public to competing with Chinas ambitions under Xi Jinping to searching for a path toward honest diplomacy with Irans Supreme Leader Khamenei and President Rohani, moments like these can lead to big and important changes.

With years of experience working in national security (from war zones to the U.S. Senate to federal law enforcement), I have learned that the simplest and most effective way to make sense of the complexity of these moving moments is to treat these issues as firms and entrepreneurs acting in competitive markets.

To change the behavior of a criminal, terrorist or tyrant, offer something in exchange. Offer a good money, political support, market access, etc. or a bad kinetic force from military or law enforcement, trade sanctions, denial of access to currency or banking, etc. The key idea is to think of Putin, Xi, and Rohani and their critical supporters as humans, and not just countries.

To help make this shift to thinking in markets, considering heads of state as entrepreneurs leading firms in competitive markets I suggest a framework of five vectors of national security policymaking:

People want the best for themselves and their people, defined decreasingly as family, communities and nation. People tend to base their involvement in an activity on the expectation that the involvement will somehow bring about what they want. Entrepreneurs can lead commercial or political organizations and make resource allocation decisions for that organization. The organization can be called a firm: a state, an insurgent organization, a mafia. Whether a president, a criminal, a terrorist, or a tyrant or a president engaging in crime the first rule to keep in focus is this:Each human seeks to optimize these personal goals.

Resources like wealth can constrain a persons chosen behaviors for a given set of goals. A tyrants power may be limited by the wealth he can pay to his internal police forces, for example. Increasing or decreasing the wealth available to a leader/entrepreneur often effects human behavior. Sanctions from the Treasury Department, trade promotion from the Commerce Department and the United States Trade Representative (USTR), and development assistance from USAID have proven powerful tools in the past and must be considered in the context of incentives to change the behaviors of entrepreneurs such as Xi and Putin.

Institutions are the human-devised set of rules and associated enforcement of those rules which further constrain or enable human behavior. Laws and norms of behavior promoted by institutions such as the Financial Action Task Force, World Customs Organization or World Bank can define standards of behavior and exercise or moral suasion like name-and-shame policies of the Treasury that identify individuals providing financial support to terrorists.

Information feeds a persons expectations, and leaders, like all other people, make decisions based on expected outcomes. But leaders make decisions with imperfect information, so their decisions can be wrong.

Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Osama bin Laden orchestrated attacks on people in the World Trade Center and Pentagon and Pablo Escobar bombed a commercial airliner, but each of the three likely did not expect to be killed shortly after these actions.

In the coming year, the Biden administration should communicate clearly with both our friends and adversaries around the world to avoid information asymmetries. What consequences could the Iranian leadership expect to suffer if they violate weapons agreements? If President Biden cannot provide information convincing his Iranian counterparts of real negative consequences, then the agreement will have no good impact.

Time horizons act as an enabler or constraint on a leaders decision making. This time horizon may be different based on age, health or expected political term. An elected official may expect a four-year term, but a dictator may expect a lifetime term and the ability to pass on power to her heirs.

All those who would threaten the public safety and security of the American people are people, so this framework from economics can inform our national security protections and countermeasures. Seeing global threats as firms led by entrepreneurs acting in competitive markets makes clear that national security isnt just a job for the military and law enforcement. All levers of U.S. power (kinetic, financial, trade-based, cultural, diplomatic, etc.) comprise the tools of national and homeland security. Crafting U.S. foreign policy in market terms provides the framework to regain balance following a shift in priorities.

Gary M. Shiffman, Ph.D., a former chief of staff of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. He is the founder of Giant Oak and Consilient and the author of The Economics of Violence: How Behavioral Science Can Transform our View of Crime, Insurgency, and Terrorism.

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Five keys to combatting violence: Advice for the Biden administration | TheHill - The Hill

Opinion Why the GOP is now anti-democratic – The CT Mirror

There is some movement afoot in the Connecticut legislature to make voting easier permanently, not just during the pandemic. The matter is complicated by our state constitution, but one pattern holds depressingly clear. Here, as elsewhere, Republicans mainly oppose easier ballot access.

The idea that one of our two viable political parties has evolved into an anti-democratic institution- one that does not want free and fair elections with high voter turnout whose results are respected is almost too upsetting to contemplate. But as Republican machinations graduate from voter purges and computer-assisted gerrymandering to their congressional attempt to overthrow a national election, it is incumbent on those of us who would think clearly about America to cope with this reality. Global warming is no fun to think about either, but not thinking about it wont help.

A good first step in understanding our situation is to acknowledge that throughout human history, representative democracy with a wide voter base has hardly been the norm. We in this country have had the exquisite good fortune to be able to take it for granted until lately, but in the big picture its the exception not the rule.

After the USSR dissolved and the Berlin Wall came down, there was a triumphalist moment in political science when some academics argued that liberal democracy had clearly won the battle of ideas and would vanquish all competitors forthwith, but the end of history didnt quite happen. Ours is certainly not the only polity in which liberal democracy is endangered or has never arrived. There is nothing inevitable about a system like ours, and nothing indestructible about it once established.

The average human being has not, while evolving from other primates, developed an instinctual and deep-seated love of democracy. Realistically, we want what we want and need what we need, and tend to like a political dispensation that we think will satisfy our needs and wants. If we dont think fair elections with lots of people voting are going to deliver the results we want, we are not genetically programmed to say Oh well, I guess its for the best. Whether from the perspective of world history or of human behavior, there has never been any reason to be complacent about the continued existence of a system like ours.

In the case of the contemporary GOP, the turn against democracy is not especially mysterious. This is a minority party. A Pew Research Center study from October 2020 found that 29% of registered voters identified as Republican. Its an unsurprising result in terms of banner Republican policies: most Americans favor a womans right to choose, and the GOP isnt having it; most Americans understand about climate change, and the GOP basically denies it; most Americans are having a more or less hard time making ends meet, and the GOP likes the federal minimum wage where it is, at $7.25/hr. How does a party like that win?

Certainly there are many independent voters who vote Republican, but its worth remembering that of three GOP presidential victories this century, two were popular-vote losses. Gore got more votes than Bush in 2000, and Clinton got way more than Trump in 2016. She beat him by about as many votes as Bush beat Kerry by in 2004, and we did not consider that to be a close election. The GOP happens to benefit, in a huge and anti-democratic way, from the electoral college.

It benefits similarly from the structure and behavior of the Senate. A vote for a senator in bright-red Wyoming is 67.6 times as powerful as a vote for a senator in deep-blue California, because thats the population differential, and they each get two senators. Once theyre in, these minority-party senators thrive in a body in which plain-old majority rule is now a rare exception; it generally takes 60 votes to do anything.

The Republican party also benefits from some apparently natural voting (or non-voting) patterns. Young people tend not to vote Republican, but then again they tend not to vote at all. The same is true of poor people. White people are more likely to vote, and to vote Republican, than non-whites, but here the result is not especially natural. Selective voter suppression has been the norm throughout U.S. history, with a relatively brief pause while the Voting Rights Act had teeth.

With all of these advantages natural, unnatural, and happenstance they lost in 2020; Trump was just too repellent. So now the Republican party is against our elections. It wanted the right to put them aside. When the courts wouldnt do it, they tried it in Congress.

I dont think it makes sense to think of this as an aberration. The Republican party in America is not well-situated to win free and fair elections in which lots of people vote. They know it, and will probably continue to act accordingly. They dont seem to care what gets broken along the way.

This is what we face.

Eric W. Kuhn lives in Middletown.

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Opinion Why the GOP is now anti-democratic - The CT Mirror

Economists and Psychologists Are Weaponizing Psychology and the Thought of "Rationality" – The Shepherd of the Hills Gazette

This year has been interesting for Wall Street, to say the least. After hearing that hedge funds had shorted the stock of the dying retail chain GameStop by over 100 percentof shares, Redditors banded together to buy up the stock, knowing that short sales do not expire, so the hedge funds willeventually be forced to buy it all back at a drastically raised price.

Estimates of short interest on the stock from sources such as the NASDAQ, MarketBeat, Yahoo Finance, and Bloomberg range from 53 percentto 177 percentof float. Hedge funds have been shutting down retail brokers, trading among themselves after hours, and publicly claiming to cover shares they had not yet bought, all in an attempt to lower the price on the stock, minimizing losses for the hedges when they finally cover the shorts. Historical examples such as the Volkswagen short squeeze of 2008 suggest that even a short interest as low as 50 percentcould still yield high dividends for GME stockholders.

With this in mind, Redditors hold GameStop under the perfectly rational desire to avoid getting tricked out of their money, and many more profess a willingness to hold despite losses if it means that hedge funds will be punished through bankruptcy for manipulating the market.

So why does the corporate press describe this phenomenon as a bubble that is irrational, insane, and dangerous,the product of the hysteria and cognitive bias of investors whodont know what theyre doing? Short squeezes are not new. The Redditors strategies are nothing that Wall Street has not tried before. In addition, the Redditors who initially popularized the stock have a reputation for treating the stock market like a casino, as evidenced by the name of their community, r/wallstreetbets. Gambling is a form of consumption spending, an end in itself. It is not inherently irrational for someone to buy a consumer good, no matter how strange.

Moreover, the Redditors live in a world where the committee investigating the blatant fraud surrounding GameStop is led by a woman who accepted six-figure fees from the defendant. Holding the stock as an attempt at getting justice makes sense, especially from the perspective of an online community full of Millennials, who have had their economic future crippled by Wall Street financiers through three consecutive once in a generation market crashes. For the amateur investor, there is no rule of law on Wall Streetand revenge is a rational strategy outside the law. All of this is obvious to anyone who reads what the Redditors have to say. Their plan might be ill advised, but it is definitely not irrational. Why doesnt the corporate media acknowledge this?

The answer is that economic rationality, like so many other terms, has been defined to suit the convenience of the neoliberal establishment. The concept of bias in economic decision-making is pseudoscientific, since its meaning can be warped to include any deviation from neoclassical economic models, even ones which are rational when put incontext. In the instance of the GameStop investors, this confusion of terms is serving its purpose, pathologizing as irrational a well-reasoned populist response to a broken financial system. This crucial context is necessary to recognize that the medias concern for the mental soundness of retail investors is only a tool meant to delegitimize them in the eyes of the public.

First, a word about irrationality. Rationality in economics is a different concept than rationality to the average person, a distinction lost upon the media pundits that bandy about the term. There is no single accepted definition of rationality in economics, but the general concept is one of maximization of self-interest, quantifiable as utility. Neoclassical economists models of human behavior all revolve around a strict interpretation of this definition, one that Austrian economists see as incompatible with the actual human experience. This mainstream conception of rationality excludes values that cannot be quantified from economic decision-making, painting human beings as automata competing to gain control of limited tangible resources.

When neoclassical economists models are compared with reality, they fail, often spectacularly. But rather than sacrifice their models to accommodate a broader definition of rationality, where humans use the means available to them to meet subjectively valued ends that can differ based on a multitude of factors, neoclassical economists of late classify those who deviate from these models as irrational,and make it their mission to fix them.

Enter behavioral economics, the application of the theory of cognitive bias to economic decision-making. Despite the name, it is an offshoot of applied psychology, specifically the theory of behaviorism within psychiatry. Behaviorism holds that human reactions to stimuli are either products of evolutionor reflexes trained through past reinforcement. By this definition, human action is predictably irrational, and must be systematically adjusted by some enlightened outside actor in order to maximize human welfare in a world vastly different from the one we evolved to live in. In behavioral economics, the logical endpoint of this world view is the need for regulation, which behavioral economists take it upon themselves to design.

Earlier scholars of the liberty movement have performed prescient analysis of the relationship between governance and the science of human behavior. In his book, Law, Liberty and Psychiatry, prominent antipsychiatrist Dr. Thomas Szasz describes the role of such sciences as follows: Law and psychiatry are similar in that both disciplines are concerned with norms of conduct and methods of social control.If people believe that health values justify coercion, but that moral and political values do not, those who wish to coerce others will tend to enlarge the category of health values at the expense of the category of moral values. Today, this medicalization of moral values has grown out of the field of psychology, where it originated, and into other fields such as economics.

Decades before Daniel Kahneman and Aaron Tversky would publish the paper that created behavioral economics as we know it, Szasz argued that the medicalization of social science would create a therapeutic state,one that granted power to unelected departments of expertsto pathologize and thereby delegitimize abnormal social behavior in the name of the health of the citizenry. The Western world was put on house arrest for a year by the policy czars of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Psychiatrists have en masse violated the Goldwater rule, which disallows them to speculateabout the mental health of a public figure they have not personally examined, in order to stigmatize right-wing populism. Its not difficult to see the resemblance to current events. How neatly this parallels arguments to deny amateur investors access to the market for their own good, in a move that would, coincidentally, of course, benefit the hedge funds that these investors want to bankrupt.

The mechanism of the therapeutic state is the same, no matter which social science is used to implement it. Irrationality, to the behavioral economist, is the consumers insanity, and the behavioral economists who profess to cure it are the darlings of the Keynesian establishment. Daniel Kahneman has received the Nobel Prize. Cass Sunstein, another pioneer of the field, was appointed administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in 2008. Policymakers in both the private and public spheres have leapt at the chance to implement these theories. They recognize cognitive bias as a useful explanation for why the public doesnt react as expected to policies that are supposedly in our best interest. And the terminology that behavioral economists coin makes its way into popular parlance, where it can be thrown at anyone whose actions are inconvenient to the established orderincluding retail investors.

From the perspective of an economist, this makes little sense. Austrian economists have had no problem incorporating economic behavior deemed irrational from a neoclassical standpoint into their paradigm. Moreover, many of the studies instrumental to the theories that behaviorists, and behavioral economists in turn, cite to prove human irrationality are highly flawed in their reasoning. In many cases, they either extrapolate beyond what the original experiment can be said to prove, have fallen victim to the replication crisis in social science, or have been shown to be the product of deliberate fraud.

Finally, as any student of human behavior should be able to predict, the ethical concerns that behavioral economists pay lip service to are ignored by policymakers in fact. These self-titled choice architects,using a euphemism for psychological manipulation common in the field of social engineering, assume their own immunity to the biases that they accuse others of displaying. If they cared to think about many of these cases of irrationality from the perspectives of the people they try to regulate, they would realize that their view of human behavior is not born of some privileged knowledgebut is a willful blindness to other factors at play.

But from the perspective of an apparatchik of the therapeutic state, this economic fad makes perfect sense. These are the same people whose conception of the business cycle assumes that entrepreneurs are incapable of recognizing and correcting systematic errors in their economic calculations, even when doing so would provide long-term benefit. This view is incompatible with reality, only useful to justify endless government intervention. Is it any surprise that they want to smear every economic actor in the same way, if only to claim that their intrusions constitute a moral good?

In this light, it is inevitable that the GameStop uprising will be declared a product of cognitive bias,even though the only bias here is that of media companies towardthe Wall Street investors who own them. Rather than admit that the Redditors investing behavior poses a threat to the powerful, the media condescends to them, hoping that a public unaware of the fraught history of the terminology in use will discard what they have to say. As long as it is inconvenient for these lackeys of the American aristocracy to acknowledge the rational incentives at play, they will continue to use any shoddy rhetorical tactic necessary to justify their overlords manipulation of the market, regardless of the impact this slander may have on retail investors. This is not science;this is graftand unfortunately for the field of economics, it is here to stay.

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Economists and Psychologists Are Weaponizing Psychology and the Thought of "Rationality" - The Shepherd of the Hills Gazette

Linsey Davis discusses journey from U.Va. to ABC World News Tonight – University of Virginia The Cavalier Daily

When Linsey Davis arrived at the University in 1995, a journalism career wasnt exactly on her mind. The award-winning ABC News anchor thought she wanted to be a psychologist and focused her studies on human behavior and how people think. Two and a half decades later, she moderated two of the 2020 elections Democratic presidential debates in front of a live, national audience.

I don't think I ever had to study that hard at U.Va., Davis remarked in an interview with The Cavalier Daily about preparing for the debates.

On Feb. 1, ABC News named Davis as anchor of its Sunday broadcasts of World News Tonight the most-watched evening-news broadcast in the nation. A two-time Emmy Award winner, Davis is also an anchor for ABC News Live Prime, the networks first-ever streaming evening newscast.

Its no secret that the University has produced many notable journalists and media executives in the last half century, despite not having a journalism school. From Katie Couric to Margaret Brennan, the University has prepared many for working in the media.

Any good institution worth its salt is going to help provoke their students to be curious and to question and to wonder, Davis said. I would say that all of that my curiosity and just wanting to kind of question certain things was nurtured while I was on Grounds.

Instead of taking courses on reporting, Davis learned about psychology, astrology and African American studies while at the University even taking a course with the late Professor Julian Bond, one of the nation's preeminent civil rights leaders. It wasnt until she studied abroad in London and took a few journalism courses late in her undergraduate career that she decided to pursue journalism.

I didn't have a change in heart until it was late, Davis said. But I will say that psychology degree was not for not I mean, you can certainly use that in any, in probably most, career paths, and just understanding how people work and just like the human behavior behind it all.

Since the University lacked a communications department at the time, she had to enroll in a graduate program elsewhere landing at New York University.

After obtaining a masters degree in communications, Davis worked as a reporter and anchor at local television stations in Syracuse, N.Y., Flint, Mich. and Indianapolis, Ind. She joined ABC News in 2007 as a New York-based correspondent and made waves in 2009 with a special Nightline report examining why African American women are the least likely of any race or gender to get married.

Davis has since conducted interviews with major influential figures and politicians including Secretary Hillary Clinton, Vice President Mike Pence, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Myon Burrell, a Minneapolis inmate who said he was wrongfully convicted for murder in part because of Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who was the chief prosecutor in the case.

Last summer, as protests against police brutality were growing following George Floyds death, Davis led a roundtable discussion with Black female mayors and also anchored a documentary on the issue of domestic terrorism and hate-inspired violence in the U.S. As a Black female anchor, Davis wants to use her platform to talk about the issues facing her own community even if those conversations are uncomfortable.

I'm not afraid to tackle it and confront the issues and the facts, Davis said. Sometimes we don't have these conversations because people are so worried about how we address it or how we talk about it. I do think that there's a certain relevance that I'm able to bring to the table when I know that perspective of Black and Brown people in this community I live it, and it's my own personal experience.

However, she added that all Americans not just Black and Brown people should be starting conversations about racial issues.

Davis was also at the forefront of ABC News coverage of the 2020 presidential election, co-anchoring major political events such as two presidential debates, the vice presidential debate, presidential election coverage and Inauguration Day.

It was intense, Davis said. I had two huge, three-ring binders with 200 pages or more. [I spent time] just going through and talking about policy, talking about the economy, talking about climate change, whatever it might be so that I could really get a grasp and an understanding for the questions that I was going to be asking.

ABC News President James Goldston commended her skills as a journalist in a note to staff last week, saying that viewership of her streaming primetime newscast surged by over 200 percent in the last year.

Linsey has had an impressive rise at ABC News as a result of her unflinching interview prowess, her versatility and experience, Goldston said. Her presidential debate moderating performance was nothing short of commanding.

Outside of journalism, Davis is a best-selling author of three childrens books, including one coming out this month which she described as a love letter to our children. She is also a proud member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. and vividly remembers walking down the Lawn and Rugby Road and eating at Bodos Bagels as a University student.

It continues to be the best decision I ever made in life, Davis said. I loved U.Va. and really would attribute a lot of who I am to my four years there.

Davis will continue to anchor Live Prime Monday through Thursday in addition to being the new co-anchor of World News Tonight on Sundays.

Correction: A previous version of this article said that Davis anchors Live Prime Monday through Friday and that she moderated the presidential debates 14 years after arriving on Grounds. This article has been updated to reflect that she anchors Live Prime Monday through Thursday and that she moderated the debate 2.5 decades after coming to Grounds.

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Linsey Davis discusses journey from U.Va. to ABC World News Tonight - University of Virginia The Cavalier Daily

Jodie Foster: Yes, Mel Gibson is problematic but says shell always love him – The Mercury News

Jodie Fosters friendship with Mel Gibson has long puzzled movie fans, who see the two-time Academy Award winner as always acting with integrity, professionally and in her personal life.

Gibson, on the other hand, is problematic, as Foster herself acknowledged in a new interview this week. Gibson, 65, has won an Oscar for directing and starred in popular and critically acclaimed films, including Braveheart and the Lethal Weapon buddy cop movies. He more recently received an Oscar nomination for directing the 2016 World War II film Hacksaw Ridge.

Gibson also is just as famous for his scandals involving documented ugly behavior. He was ostracized by the industry for about 10 years after he was arrested for a DUI in Malibu in 2006 and unleashed an anti-Semitic rant. That arrest was followed by Gibson being caught on leaked tapes in 2010, screaming the n-word and other racist epithets at his then-girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva. The Russian singer-songwriter and mother of one of Gibsons nine children, also alleged he was physically abusive.

In June, Gibson was forced to deny claims from Winona Ryder that she heard him make anti-Semitic and homophobic comments at a Hollywood party.

Throughout these scandals, Foster, 58, has stayed loyal, she told Marc Maron for his WTF podcast.

Yes, he is a problematic person, Foster said. And he is warm and affectionate and loving and a really good friend.

In addition, Foster said, hes a great actor, and a deep, deep person, saying, I think thats probably whats gotten him into so much trouble in the past.

Foster, who currently stars in the Guantanamo Bay legal drama The Mauritanian, has spent the past 10 years explaining her appreciation for Gibson, although she also told Maron that she absolutely doesnt condone some of his worst behavior.

Some of Fosters appreciation for the actor and director stems from her childhood, essentially growing up on movie sets, which mostly were populated by complicated men in the cast and crew. The men looked out for her.

It was just me, and then sometimes a script supervisor and occasionally a makeup artist and sometimes the woman who played my mom, Foster said. Otherwise, it was me and a whole bunch of guys and they were my brothers and dads. And then there were the directors and other actors Ive worked with. I really like these guys who are complicated guys, and who (are not people) everyone loves. Im the sister who laughs at their jokes. I just love them.

Foster told the Hollywood Reporter in 2011 that she was drawn to Gibsons dark side after getting to know him while working on the 1994 film Maverick.

Hes not saintly, and hes got a big mouth, and hell do gross things your nephew would do, Foster said. But I knew the minute I met him that I would love him the rest of my life.

In 2011, Foster was promoting her work with him in The Beaver, a film she directed about a depressed, alcoholic middle-aged executive who communicates through a glove puppet. Box office-wise, the film was considered a flop, and Time magazine said it was hard to separate its premise a somber, sad domestic drama featuring an alcoholic in acute crisis from Gibsons real life scandals.

Foster told the Hollywood Reporter that she knows Gibson has troubles, (but) when you love somebody you dont just walk away from them when they are struggling.

Foster repeated that sentiment to Maron when he jokingly asked whether she and Gibson had buried a body together to explain their continued bond. She explained how she always told her college-aged sons that she would be the first to call the police if they did anything illegal.

But Im going to visit you in jail every day, Foster said. Its not that I condone peoples behavior when they are wrong, but I cant not love my children or my family members (or friends). You dont abandon people in their worst moment of struggling. Instead, you extend your hand to try to teach them and help them be a better human.

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Jodie Foster: Yes, Mel Gibson is problematic but says shell always love him - The Mercury News