Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

REVIEW: The Dark and Profoundly Uninhibited World of ‘PVT Chat’ – Substream Magazine

In PVT Chat, writer-director Ben Hozie pulls back the curtain on our most private moments to explore our collective longing for connection and recognition. Though his writing ultimately succumbs to the allure of fantasy over reality, the execution of Hozies narrative vision is one of the most visceral and exciting depictions of life in the digital age that the world of cinema has seen.

Jack (Peter Vack) is a low-level professional internet poker player on the verge of losing his New York City apartment. Single, socially awkward, and painfully alone, Jack finds comfort and companionship through hiring cam girls he finds online. His interactions range from mundane to highly sexual, but something about one girl a dominatrix named Scarlett (Julia Fox) captivates young Jack. His infatuation grows as the sessions continue, leading Jack to believe he has a bond with the woman hes never met.

Want more movie coverage? Check out our review of Shadow In The Cloud.

Viewers are introduced to Jack while hes hunched over his laptop, masturbating to a woman hes chatting with online. A handheld camera pans over the tiny space Jack occupies and his naked body before lingering on his contorting facial expressions. Its an abrupt and jarring introduction to the uninhibited world where Hozies characters exist that informs the audience of everything they can expect moving forward.

The voyeuristic look and feel of the film emphasize the blurring boundaries of its protagonists. Jack and Scarlet are not people to feel sorry for, nor are they meant to be your new best friends. Their every motivation and insecurity is laid bare to create relatability through a universal sense of discomfort. Hozie exposes human behavior elements that rarely appear in cinema, and he does so with an unflinching eye that demands we acknowledge our true nature. Try as we might to be modest and put together, were all profoundly flawed creatures yearning for a sense of happiness none of us feel we deserve, yet we look for it all the same.

When Jack spots Scarlet in a New York bodega near his home, he cannot believe his eyes. While his desperation to legitimize their connection intensifies, PVT Chat pivots to follow Scarlet, and in doing so, provides Fox an opportunity to showcase her range. The Uncut Gems star takes what could easily be a two-dimensional character and makes her seem fully alive, with fears and ambitions that extend far beyond her laptop.

PVT Chat is not a tale of romance with elements of eroticism; its an erotic thriller with ruminations on romance. Though the final act succumbs to absurd ideas regarding Jack and Scarlets bonds strength, there is a grit to the film that will linger with viewers long after the credits roll. Hozie has resurrected a rough and tumble style of indie filmmaking that cinema desperately needs. In doing so, hes given two promising young actors a platform to launch their careers into the stratosphere. This is a film made to make you squirm as if youre witnessing something you shouldnt see, but its energy and delivery will keep you hanging on every moment like no other feature in recent memory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgXYBd6M2JA

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REVIEW: The Dark and Profoundly Uninhibited World of 'PVT Chat' - Substream Magazine

Human Behavior

January: Cell phone data | News and features – University of Bristol

Being prepared for a pandemic, like COVID-19, depends on the ability to predict the course of the pandemic and the human behaviour that drives spread in the event of an outbreak. Cell phone metadata that is routinely collected by telecommunications providers can reveal changes of behavior in people who are diagnosed with a flu-like illness, while also protecting their anonymity, a new study has found. The research, led by Emory University and devised by the University of Bristol, is based on data drawn from a 2009 outbreak of H1N1 influenza in Iceland and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Dr Ymir Vigfusson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Emory University and first author of the study, said: "To our knowledge, our project is the first major, rigorous study to individually link passively-collected cell phone metadata with actual public health data, says. Weve shown that its possible to do so without compromising privacy and that our method could potentially provide a useful tool to help monitor and control infectious disease outbreaks."

The research team collaborated with a major cell phone service provider in Iceland, along with public health officials on the island. They analyzed metadata for over 90,000 encrypted cell phone numbers, which represents over a quarter of Icelands population. They were able to link the encrypted cell phone metadata to 1,400 anonymous individuals who received a clinical diagnosis of a flu-like illness during the H1N1 outbreak, while preserving privacy at all stages. The study, which began long before the COVID-19 pandemic, took ten years to complete.

Dr Vigfusson stated: "The individual linkage is key. Many public-health applications for smartphone data have emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic but tend to be based around correlations. In contrast, we can definitively measure the differences in routine behavior between the diagnosed group and the rest of the population."

Dr Leon Danon, Associate Professor in Infectious Disease Modelling and Data Analytics from the University of Bristol, and the Alan Turing Institute, senior author and who designed the study, added: "This careful study was designed to do two things: inform mathematical models that seldom take into account behaviour change due to infection and provide evidence for infectious disease surveillance through mobile phone data. The result that behaviour change is clearly observable in our study points to the tantalising possibility that infectious disease burden is measurable through routinely collected data, our future direction. This work required close collaboration between a government health department and a mobile phone operator and highlights the power of close ties between academic efforts, government and industry."

The results showed that, on average, those who received a flu-like diagnosis changed their cell phone usage behavior a day before their diagnosis and the two-to-four days afterward: They made fewer calls, from fewer unique locations. On average, they also spent longer time than usual on the calls that they made on the day following their diagnosis.

Dr Vigfusson added: "We were going into new territory and we wanted to make sure we were doing good science, not just fast science. We worked hard and carefully to develop protocols to protect privacy and conducted rigorous statistical analyses of the data.

"While only about 40 per cent of humanity has access to the Internet, cell phone ownership is universal, even in lower and middle-income countries, and cell phone service providers routinely collect billing data that provide insights into the routine behaviors of a population", he explained.

Dr Vigfusson added: "The COVID pandemic has raised awareness of the importance of monitoring and measuring the progression of an infectious disease outbreak, and how it is essentially a race against time.

"More people also realise that there will likely be more epidemics during our lifetimes. It is vital to have the right tools to give us the best possible information quickly about the state of an epidemic outbreak."

Privacy concerns are a major reason why cell phone data has not been linked to public health data in the past. For the PNAS paper, the researchers developed a painstaking protocol to minimise these concerns.

The cell phone numbers were encrypted, and their owners were not identified by name, but by a unique numerical identifier not revealed to the researchers. These unique identifiers were used to link the cell phone data o deidentified health records.

Dr Vigfusson said: "We were able to maintain anonymity for individuals throughout the process. The cell phone provider did not learn about any individuals health diagnosis and the health department did not learn about any individuals phone behaviors."

The study encompassed 1.5 billion call record data points including calls made, the dates of the calls, the cell tower location where the calls originated, and the duration of the calls. The researchers linked this data to clinical diagnoses of a flu-like illness made by health providers in a central database. Laboratory confirmation of influenza was not required.

The analyses of the data focused on 29 days surrounding each clinical diagnosis, and looked at changes in mobility, the number of calls made and the duration of the calls. They measured these same factors during the same time-period for location-matched controls.

Dr Vigfusson added: "Even though individual cell phones generated only a few data points per day, we were able to see a pattern where the population was behaving differently near the time they were diagnosed with a flu-like illness."

While the findings are significant, they represent only a first step for the possible broader use of the method. Specifically, if an emerging disease displays a sufficiently distinct signature of behavioral changes, the methodology could prove useful to augment monitoring efforts.

The current work was limited to the unique environment of Iceland: an island with only one port of entry, with a similar, affluent, and small population. It was also limited to a single infectious disease, H1N1, and those who received a clinical diagnosis for a flu-like illness.

Dr Vigfusson concluded: "Our work contributes to the discussion of what kinds of anonymous data linkages might be useful for public health monitoring purposes. We hope that others will build on our efforts and study whether our method can be adapted for use in other places and for other infectious diseases."

Paper

'Cell-phone traces reveal infection-associated behavioral change' by Ymir Vigfusson et al in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)

Dr Ymir Vigfusson, Assistant Professor at Emory University, USA, is an expert on data security and developing software and algorithms that work at scale.

Dr Vigfusson is first author of the study with two of his former graduate students: Thorgeir Karlsson, a graduate student at Reykjavik University who spent a year at Emory working on the project, and Derek Onken, a PhD student in the Computer Science department.

Dr Leon Danon, Associate Professor in Infectious Disease Modelling and Data Analytics from the University of Bristol, and the Alan Turing Institute of the British Library, devised the study.

Co-authors include the late Gudrun Sigmundsdottir, Directorate of Health and Icelands Center for Health Security and Communicable Disease Control; Congzheng Song (Cornell University); Atli F. Einarsson (Reykjavik University); Nishant Kishore (Harvard University); Rebecca M. Mitchell (formerly with Emorys Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing); and Ellen Brooks-Pollock (University of Bristol).

The work was funded by the Icelandic Center for Research, Emory University, the National Science Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the Alan Turing Institute, the Medical Research Council, and a hardware donation from NVIDIA Corporation.

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January: Cell phone data | News and features - University of Bristol

Human Behavior

How Can Friendly Competition Solve the World’s Biggest Problems? – zocalopublicsquare.org

by Janet OShea and Daniel T. Blumstein|January28,2021

Ours is a time of reduced civility, heightened political partisanship, and decreased faith in institutions. If we dont figure out how to engage respectfully, we will all lose out. COVID will continue to advance, and overrun our hospitals as we wait months to receive a vaccine that some 35 percent of Americans have said they will avoid. The climate crisis will bring more and more polluted air, hurricanes, floods, and fires as we hop from one not-so-natural disaster to another. The political discord of the past four yearsand past two monthswill continue to upend everyday life.

Americans need to find another way forward, a way to come together to solve the issues of the day and enable our continued survival as individuals, as a nation, and as a species. We have an audacious suggestion: Turn solving these critical tasks into a game. Lets take our innate and life-preserving love of play and competition and harness it to change human behavior. By doing so we could improve the world in a way that decades of failed public discourse have not.

This idea takes its cues from the animal kingdom. In the wild, many animals use games and play to learn and improve themselvesand, ultimately, to survive. When wolf pups or fox kits chase their siblings around and pounce on each other near their den, they are predators playing hunt, perfecting their prey-catching skills and improving their odds of survival. When prey such as marmot pups chase their siblings near their burrows, they are playing escape; their survival depends on not being killed by the likes of wolves and foxes.

Importantly, these play bouts are ritualized and highly structured, and they involve communicating through strict signals to ensure that everyone involved realizes that what follows is play. Animals take turns. They let each other know through clear signals that even though theyre playing rough, its still play. If someone yelps in pain, for instance, everyone pauses for a moment to give the crying play partner a chance to recover.

Hunting and escaping, of course, are crucial skills for predators and prey; engaging in this kind of behavior helps them practice managing the difficult realities they will face as adults. But play is not limited only to chasing. Animals play fight and play wrestle to learn to navigate hierarchy and difference, to negotiate with one another, and to build social bonds. The marmots Dan studies begin to create their dominance hierarchies through play. And, when the time comes to guard valued resourceswhether they be food or matesthey will be ready.

Some animal play operates just as human play does: mainly for fun! Crows slide down snowy rooftops just for the thrill of doing so. Monkeys leap from treetops into ponds to experience freefall with a reassuring splash of cool water at the end. Through this seemingly purposeless play, animals learn how to navigate challenging conditions, turning chaotic experiences into manageable ones. Indeed, by playing, they learn how to contend with failure, loss, vulnerability, and also successwhere the stakes are relatively low.

Yes, play is evolutionarily expensive. It can be dangerous and it takes time away from practical tasks such as procuring food and finding shelter. And, yet, it is widespread throughout a large part of the animal kingdom. Its universality is striking.

Humans are, of course, familiar with the power of play. Athletic competitions, from Little League to the Olympics, present us with goals to be achieved and obstacles to be overcome. It doesnt matter that both goals and obstacles are artificial: landing a ball into a net carries no real weight in the outside world and has no impact on it, aside from the meaning humans ascribe to it. Participating in sports helps humans learn to manage our competitive nature, taking an adversarial drive and harnessing it to build strength and health, to learn discipline, and to even create beauty when we play a game with skill, intelligence, and grace. Sports teach us to function within a social group and can build a sense of unity and cohesion. To play with someone else, one must agree to the rules of engagement.

What if we took the model of sport further, intentionally reverse engineering serious problems and turning them into games where friendly competition can reign? If problems could be tackled in such a way, in a safe environment with agreed-upon rules, we might be able to meet more of our goalsor at least, be more prepared to face them when they reach a crisis point.

People have tried it before, as theyve searched for certain kinds of technological solutions. The Defense AdvancedResearchProjects Agency, or DARPA, is an advanced-technology branch of the U.S. Department of Defense, charged with trying out and perfecting new technologies for potential use on the battlefield and beyond. The agency created prize competitions called DARPA Challenges that ask engineers to compete in tackling seemingly unsolvable tasks under set rules of engagement. If a team manages to solve a particular problem, it wins a prize and gloryand society benefits.

Lets take our innate and life-preserving love ofplayandcompetition and harness it to change human behavior.

One DARPA Challenge tasked engineers with inventing self-driving vehicles. The end goal was to develop automated weapons as well as create ways to transport critical supplies on and off the battlefield, but in the process it also gave us the self-driving vehicle technology that is slowly making its way onto our streets. The X-Prize Foundation does something similar, regularly announcing an audacious goal to improve health, technology, or the environment, and asking teams to self-organize and compete for acknowledgement and a cash prize.

Leaders could expand this competitive model to confront different sorts of pressing challenges that contest designers have often overlookedthose that require behavioral change, institutional investment, and sustained action. What if we treated societys response to the climate crisis, the COVID pandemic, or even declining faith in politics as an opportunity for international competition and Olympics-like play? Think the Eurovision Song Contest, but for carbon reduction or civic participation.

Or, if international competition seems a step too far, the focus could be local and cooperative. We already know that neighborhood play can drive immediate benefits. When cities block off traffic during Ciclova events, for instance, encouraging the public to ride bicycles, skate, or walk, and refrain from using cars, air quality improves immediately, local businesses get increased foot traffic, and people meet neighbors and interact with strangers in ways that would otherwise be unlikely.

Government and other leaders could create friendly competition among communities to walk and bike more, buy used or reusable products, install insulation, or favor high-efficiency appliances. We could track rides on public transit and offer prizes when ridership goes up and traffic congestion goes down. What if COVID transmission rates were monitored not just as a reminder of encroaching threat but also to celebrateand rewarddeclining transmission rates? Instead of bemoaning a lack of political engagement, we might instead recognize the recent upsurge in voting and encourage cities, towns, or neighborhoods to get as close to 100 percent voting as possible, vying against one another toward that goal. We could create systems to facilitate, acknowledge, and reward success while encouraging communities to see failure as useful feedbacka learning experience much like a loss on a playing field.

If we create competition between communities in the interest of solving major problems, we will also need to set limits on what can be done in the interest of winning. Rules, structures, and parameters of engagement would be key. As we encourage communities to maximize voting, for example, we will need to give them reminders that voter intimidation is beyond the bounds of healthy competition.

Fair play will matter not just as much but more than whether we win. Rules extend beyond the game space to become a code of behavior, a process for respectful interaction. And here we would be following our nonhuman relativesincluding marmots, crows, monkeys, foxes, and wolvesthat directly benefit from their enjoyable and structured play.

Increasingly, it seems that Americans are losing the skills that come from respectful competition and dynamic collaboration. We can reverse that trend. We can relearn how to be adaptable and collaborative, and to respect one another even as we disagree.

Americans dont play as much as we used to; our excuse is that we dont have the time. The majority of children play a sport but, by age 15, most have quit. If people dont playwhether its soccer or chesshow will they learn how to navigate competition with civility and care? What opportunities are they taking to practice working together in a group? How will they know that coming together with respect matters more than winning, and that losing can sometimes be an opportunity for learning?

Successful public discourse, at its root, is about respect for a process, and acceptable parameters for action: honoring the limits to which we, and others, have agreed. It hinges on recognizing that our opponents are worthy. It also involves a desire for an opponent to fully engage so that we can hone our skills, refine our position, and come to a satisfying compromise.

In other words, its a lot like a game.

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How Can Friendly Competition Solve the World's Biggest Problems? - zocalopublicsquare.org

Human Behavior

The Duchess of Cornwall Recommends "Heart-breaking" Novel Where The Crawdads Sing – TownandCountrymag.com

Since the Duchess of Cornwall released her lockdown reading list last year, she has been contacted by people from all over the world wanting to share their thoughts and book recommendations. And now, Camilla is highlighting four titles every eight weeks in a bid to continue sharing her enjoyment of reading with others.

The latest work to be the focus of her Instagram-based book club is best-selling novel Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, which tells the story of young Kya Clark growing up alone in the marshes of North Carolina. All is not as it seems in this beautifully written, heart-breaking coming-of-age novel. I couldnt put it (or my handkerchief) down! the Duchess says about the book. For her part, author Owens has shared thoughts on the story, which is her debut novel.

Where the Crawdads Sing

When I wrote Where the Crawdads Sing I had a particular story in mind that I wanted to tell, Owens says in a video shared with T&C (above). After studying wildlife in Africa for 23 years, I had learned how much human behavior is still similar to the behavior of wild animals. So, I wanted to write this novel that it would explore how much we can learn about human behavior, and how much we learn about human nature from nature itself.

Owens adds that she included a lot of different traits and different behavior patterns in her characters, saying, I wanted to include some of these behaviors that we still exhibit like wild animals. Describing the book as spanning multiple genres, Owens says: I don't know of anybody's life that is just a love story, or just a mystery. Most peoples lives include a lot of different aspects, so I think it was fairly realistic that way.

Where the Crawdads Sing is the second book to be featured on The Duchess of Cornwalls Reading Room. The first was Hilary Mantels The Mirror and The Light. The final two books which will be highlighted in season one of the book club are Restless by William Boyd and The Architects Apprentice by Elif Shafak.

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The Duchess of Cornwall, who married into the royal family in 2005, has long used her platform to advocate for literacy charities and organizations. In a recently-released video she described reading as a passion, adding that once the lockdown began she saved up all the books I wanted to read and sat down and read them. She concluded, You know, whatever other awful things came out of lockdown I think reading has come out extremely well and I think its revived and we just want to keep that going.

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The Duchess of Cornwall Recommends "Heart-breaking" Novel Where The Crawdads Sing - TownandCountrymag.com

Human Behavior

Wildlife movement is strongly influenced by human behavior Earth.com – Earth.com

In order for animals to thrive in the wild, they must have natural habitats known as wildlife corridors that connect neighboring populations. Otherwise, a group of animals may become isolated and unable to breed and survive. A new study describes the strong influence that humans have on wildlife movement.

Past studies on wildlife connectivity have focused on measuring various aspects of the landscape, and the potential impacts of human behavior have largely been overlooked.

An international team of researchers led by the University of Gttingen and Humboldt University Berlin have introduced a new concept that they call anthropogenic resistance. The experts say that this aspect of wildlife movement must be considered to secure sustainable landscapes for both animals and people in the future.

Human disturbances, including rapid urbanization and deforestation, are increasingly impacting natural landscapes. When these changes are assessed, the analyses are largely focused on properties of the land such as agriculture, urbanization, forestland, or elevation.

Meanwhile, human impacts are usually lumped together in categories such as population density, or distance from settlements or roads.

The researchers propose that it is not merely the presence, absence, or number of people that affects wildlife movement. Instead, it is what the people are actually doing that alters the behavior of nearby animals.

According to the study authors, a range of psychological and socioeconomic factors can play a part in anthropogenic resistance, including hunting or supplementary feeding.

For their investigation, the researchers analyzed three case studies on wolves in Washington State, leopards in Iran, and large carnivores in central India.

The same concept can be applied to other species as well. For example, roe deer use croplands for both shelter and food but reduce their presence during the hunting season.

The experts report that differences in human behavior based on cultural and religious beliefs strongly influence wildlife movement.

Anthropogenic resistance is also relevant to the BearConnect project, which aims to understand the factors that determine connectivity in European populations of the brown bear. Bears are capable of moving across huge distances, as shown by bear JJ1, better known as Bruno, who traveled from the Italian Trento region all the way to Bavaria, where he was shot, explained Professor Niko Balkenhol.

It is important to note that, although Bruno was able to cross the physical landscape, he was stopped by the severe anthropogenic resistance provided by humans who could not tolerate his behavior.

Our paper shows that anthropogenic resistance is an important piece of the puzzle for connectivity-planning to ensure the functionality of corridors for wildlife and people, said study senior author Dr. Trishna Dutta. It reveals that there are advantages for social and natural scientists to collaborate in understanding the effects of anthropogenic resistance in future studies.

The study is published in the journal One Earth.

By Chrissy Sexton, Earth.com Staff Writer

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Wildlife movement is strongly influenced by human behavior Earth.com - Earth.com

Human Behavior

COVID-19: What have we learned about human behavior in 2020? – opinion – The Jerusalem Post

Without a doubt, we learned a lot about compliance, the act of getting people to do what we think they should be doing. When it comes to the pandemic, compliance involved wearing masks, distancing from others and not gathering in large groups. And what we in fact learned is what we should have already known. Getting people to comply is not easy. The pandemic has shown us how complicated simple things can be. Although many people did follow the rules, many, many others simply did not or were not able to be consistent. They could not keep away from others, could not keep away from family, could not wear a mask properly and could not disconnect socially. Some people did not believe, some people could not believe, and some people mimicked others and behaved as they saw others around them behaving.On the face of it, noncompliance may be a source of annoyance and irritation for some, especially those who do make an effort to comply. But if we look at the scientific literature regarding adherence and compliance, none of this should have at all been surprising. All the more reason to question why, with an event like a pandemic that has so many national health implications, we were not better prepared to implement policies that would deal with the reality that compliance would be far from perfect. The lack of a sensible plan on how to respond no doubt contributed to worsening infection rates and, as a consequence, created a catastrophic economic collapse for so many. Were the expectations regarding compliance realistic? If we look at the science, the answer is an unequivocal no. People who know smoking is bad continue to smoke, people who should keep to a diet continue to cheat, people who should exercise sit on the couch and people who should take medication often set it aside. But it is not only with respect to health that guidelines are not followed. How often do we follow the speed limit to the letter of the law and how often do we jaywalk? How often do people make noise late into the night? How often do people take a chance and swim without a lifeguard? In wartime as well, when one would think life and death means something, we have seen situations where some people would not wear gas masks, where some would not enter shelters and where some would stand on rooftops to watch missiles coming in. WITH ALL this as known behavior, perhaps the expectations regarding adherence to guidelines should have considered that widespread compliance is but a fantasy. Human behavior is consistent, so we do see this lack of compliance all over the free world. Masking is inconsistent, infection rates are high and nowhere, except in some exceptional circumstances where cultural factors are very different, do we see success. Expecting anything different was always an illusion. No matter how hard we would try, there would be leakage in keeping to the rules because people do not listen. And when each leaked drop is a potential weapon, a virus that can disable and kill, we have a problem.

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COVID-19: What have we learned about human behavior in 2020? - opinion - The Jerusalem Post

Human Behavior

Men and women on the move | Stanford News – Stanford University News

Navigating, exploring and thinking about space are part of daily life, whether its carving a path through a crowd, hiking a backcountry trail or maneuvering into a parking spot.

A group of Hadza relocating to a new camp, 2005. (Image credit: Brian Wood)

For most of human history, the driving force for day-to-day wayfinding and movement across the landscape was a need for food. And unlike other primates, our species has consistently divided this labor along gender lines.

In new research published in Nature Human Behaviour, scientists including James Holland Jones of Stanford and lead author Brian Wood of University of California, Los Angeles, argue that the increasingly gendered division of labor in human societies during the past 2.5 million years dramatically shaped how our species uses space, and possibly how we think about it.

Underlying these conclusions is a huge and detailed trove of travel data revealing stark differences in the ways men and women among the nomadic Hadza people of Tanzania use space. A contemporary hunter-gatherer society, the Hadza provide a window into a highly mobile lifestyle, which was the norm for our species before the widespread adoption of agriculture.

Were taking gender differences as a given in this particular cultural setting, and then asking what consequences they have downstream, said Jones, an associate professor of Earth system science at Stanfords School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth) and a senior fellow at Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

A better understanding of this dynamic could yield clues about why men and women seem to think about space differently. Research in many human populations suggests men and women are better at different types of spatial tasks. On average, women tend to excel on spatial memory tasks, while men tend to score higher on two basic measures of spatial cognition associated with movement: mental rotation of objects and accurately pointing to distant locations.

The paper examines a popular theory that mens hunting for wild game would produce more extensive and sinuous travel, and that womens harvesting of plant foods would lead to more concentrated, straight-line travel to and from known locations.

A view of all GPS tracks collected from one Hadza camp, with male tracks in red, female tracks in green. (Image credit: Brian Wood)

While previous efforts to substantiate the theory have relied heavily on verbal accounts, the researchers here tested it by examining more than 13,000 miles of travel logged on lightweight GPS trackers worn by Hadza foragers between 2005 and 2018. One or two researchers would walk through camp early in the morning as people were rousing, the authors write. We would greet people at their homes or hearths and hand out GPS devices to be worn during the day.

Around nightfall, when most people had returned to camp, Wood and assistants hired in the Hadza community removed the devices. They ultimately used data from 179 people, representing 15 camps and ranging in age from 2 to 84 years old.

The authors also examined the degree of overlap in the lands visited by men and women. One of the most surprising results of this study was the fact that Hadza men and women essentially occupy different worlds from a young age. In our data, most of the landscape was effectively gender-segregated, said Wood, an assistant professor of anthropology at UCLA who began working on this paper a decade ago as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford.

To analyze the movement data, the researchers adopted techniques from the field of movement ecology and also developed custom software. As expected, the results show men walked further per day, covered more land in less direct paths and were more likely to travel alone. In this hunting and gathering context, male work is more navigationally challenging, the researchers write.

Although some individual day journeys extended to 20 miles or more, Hadza men overall averaged 8 miles per day and women many of them accompanied by young children averaged nearly 5 miles. Gender differences emerged by the age of 6. From the mid-40s, the gender difference declined, mostly due to decreasing travel by men while women sustained more of their daily mileage.

Detailed spatial data like those amassed in this study will aid future comparative research into human mobility, according to the authors. This holds particular resonance in light of a pandemic that has forced sudden revisions of normal movement patterns and heightened attention to the costs and benefits of different spatial habits.

Three Hadza men at an overlook scouting for game, west of Lake Eyasi. (Image credit: Brian Wood)

Already, Wood has begun to apply technical, logistical and scientific lessons from this study to a new National Science Foundation project meant to help identify research and policy priorities to prepare the U.S. for inevitable future pandemics in part by measuring mobility and modeling patterns of social interaction. The study of human movement can be used to identify at-risk communities for disease transmission and spread, Wood explained.

Even when were not in a pandemic, Jones said, peoples mobility drives economic activity, social cohesion and environmental impacts. And the environment, in turn, shapes spatial behavior. That feedback loop is at the heart of some of the internal migration patterns already emerging as a response to global warming. As once-rare weather events become commonplace, Jones explained, migrant laborers will likely travel longer distances for work; more people will engage in seasonal migration to pursue agricultural work or escape hurricanes and droughts, and crop failures will drive more rural residents to urban areas.

Changing mobility is going to be one of the key ways that humans adapt to a heated world, Jones said. Knowing more about gender differences and other drivers for spatial behaviors across a wide swath of human populations and ecological contexts will help us anticipate how this adaptation will play out and inform policies to manage it.

The research received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Leakey Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Geographic Society, Yale University, UCLA and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Wood is also affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Coauthors are affiliated with the Max Planck Institute, Arizona State University, University of Southern California, Duke University, University of Chicago, University of Roehampton, University of Nevada, University of Dar es Salaam and University of Utah.

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Men and women on the move | Stanford News - Stanford University News

Human Behavior

Better behavior, fledgling population immunity behind US case decline – FRANCE 24

Washington (AFP)

The trend line is now unmistakable: the US Covid outbreak is easing, with new cases and hospitalizations down two weeks in a row, even though the overall numbers still remain far higher than prior to the fall-winter surge.

What's behind the slide? Experts say there are many reasons, from a better adherence to masking and distancing measures, to the fact that the holiday period is now well behind us.

Another factor, at least in some areas of the country, is that the virus has already burned through much of the population and is running out of targets -- but easing restrictions too fast could still upset the current equilibrium and trigger a new spike, scientists warn.

Here's what you need to know.

- Holiday super-surge over -

After a summer lull, the US infection rate began to pick up again last fall, when gatherings began to move indoors and people started letting their guards down.

Then came the holiday season: Thanksgiving, Christmas, then New Year's: a coronavirus triple-threat that sent cases soaring as millions of Americans ignored official guidance and visited their families and friends.

The US was clocking a daily case average of more than 250,000 by the second week of January, and more than 130,000 hospitalizations, according to data from the Covid Tracking Project.

There are still more than 3,000 deaths on average per day, because of the lag time, but overall the metrics are heading in the right direction.

"That holiday travel which the virus was exploiting has kind of dissipated," Amesh Adalja of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security told AFP.

- Caution rises with cases -

The spread of infectious diseases is innately linked to human behavior.

Natalie Dean, a biostatistics and infectious disease expert at University of Florida, told AFP she saw a "population-level feedback mechanism, such that people respond to rising numbers in their areas."

She cited how Florida, Texas and Arizona quickly turned things around after their summer surges. "Whether through policies or many small behavior changes, the numbers slow," she added.

Brandon Brown, a public health specialist at the University of California, added "there is also less misinformation compared to before, and it's hard to deny the over 400,000 deaths."

But if people respond to rising cases by becoming more cautious, the opposite can also be true when infections decline, warned the experts.

- Inching towards immunity -

The current number of confirmed cases in the US is around 25 million -- but we know by now the true figure is likely to be much higher, and could be as high as 100 to 125 million people, Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya told AFP.

We know that natural infection confers a high degree of immunity, at least for a period of time, then you can add the people who have received at least one vaccine dose (which confers partial immunity) -- currently 21 million.

The two figures together get you to around 40 percent of the population of 330 million -- inching towards the goal of 85 percent thrown around for "true herd immunity," but still some way to go.

The vaccinations already delivered to nursing homes is probably responsible for pushing down the hospitalization and death rate, said Adalja.

Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia who has been modeling the population immunity question, says that according to his team's calculations, "between 50-70 percent of North Dakota's population has been infected with the virus."

While this is one extreme, Shaman said that between rising national-level population immunity, and current behavior patterns, the outbreak "should be self-limiting at this point."

The problem would be if behaviors changed, breaking this delicate balance, said Shaman and Bhattacharya.

As spring comes, people may start moving around more than they are currently, and more infected people could then come into contact with people who are not immune.

Finally, new variants present "wild cards," whose transmissibility advantage would raise the statistical threshold needed for true population immunity -- and in the case of the South Africa variant, pose a greater reinfection risk.

2021 AFP

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Better behavior, fledgling population immunity behind US case decline - FRANCE 24

Human Behavior

The Duchess of Cornwall Recommends "Heart-breaking" Novel Where The Crawdads Sing – Yahoo Lifestyle

Photo credit: Getty Images

From House Beautiful

Since the Duchess of Cornwall released her lockdown reading list last year, she has been contacted by people from all over the world wanting to share their thoughts and book recommendations. And now, Camilla is highlighting four titles every eight weeks in a bid to continue sharing her enjoyment of reading with others.

The latest work to be the focus of her Instagram-based book club is best-selling novel Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, which tells the story of young Kya Clark growing up alone in the marshes of North Carolina. All is not as it seems in this beautifully written, heart-breaking coming-of-age novel. I couldnt put it (or my handkerchief) down! the Duchess says about the book. For her part, author Owens has shared thoughts on the story, which is her debut novel.

When I wrote Where the Crawdads Sing I had a particular story in mind that I wanted to tell, Owens says in a video shared with T&C (above). After studying wildlife in Africa for 23 years, I had learned how much human behavior is still similar to the behavior of wild animals. So, I wanted to write this novel that it would explore how much we can learn about human behavior, and how much we learn about human nature from nature itself.

Owens adds that she included a lot of different traits and different behavior patterns in her characters, saying, I wanted to include some of these behaviors that we still exhibit like wild animals. Describing the book as spanning multiple genres, Owens says: I don't know of anybody's life that is just a love story, or just a mystery. Most peoples lives include a lot of different aspects, so I think it was fairly realistic that way.

Where the Crawdads Sing is the second book to be featured on The Duchess of Cornwalls Reading Room. The first was Hilary Mantels The Mirror and The Light. The final two books which will be highlighted in season one of the book club are Restless by William Boyd and The Architects Apprentice by Elif Shafak.

Story continues

The Duchess of Cornwall, who married into the royal family in 2005, has long used her platform to advocate for literacy charities and organizations. In a recently-released video she described reading as a passion, adding that once the lockdown began she saved up all the books I wanted to read and sat down and read them. She concluded, You know, whatever other awful things came out of lockdown I think reading has come out extremely well and I think its revived and we just want to keep that going.

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The Duchess of Cornwall Recommends "Heart-breaking" Novel Where The Crawdads Sing - Yahoo Lifestyle

Human Behavior

ABC Channel 9 Reporter Performs Operation in a Virtual Operating Room – PR Web

As the world sees the value and embraces artificial intelligence, this type of technology will become crucial in order to train and test those algorithms to be completely helpful, safe, and unbiased

CINCINNATI (PRWEB) January 30, 2021

WCPO Channel 9 reporter Lisa Smith put on the VR headset and was instantly transported into a virtual operating room, complete with patient, surgeons, and the latest medical instruments.

Her story presents a deep dive into Kinetic Visions latest technology, AiVision Simulate, which is a Digital Twin software platform that utilizes motion capture (mocap), virtual reality, and game engine technology.

To watch the Channel 9 news story click HERE.

The system creates an infrared matrix that captures the users every motion, down to their fingertips, and transfers that motion to digital avatars in the virtual environment, or digital twin. Digital twins have existed in various forms for a few years, but Kinetic Visions breakthrough is the incorporation of real human action and interaction into the process.

In addition to medical applications, Kinetic Visions Machine Learning + Training Data group is applying this technology to a number of industries, from consumer retail, where store shopping behavior is analyzed, to aviation, where the ergonomics of controls are being studied.

We created this system to optimize current surgical procedures and devices, and speed the development of new innovations. Its much faster and less expensive to test digitally versus utilizing real rooms, equipment, and people. In the not-too-distant future, this system will be expanded to test, train, and perfect a much wider range of human activities, from building construction to conducting experiments on the International Space Station, said Jeremy Jarrett, Executive Vice President of Kinetic Vision.

As AI (artificial intelligence) becomes ubiquitous in almost all aspects of product development, manufacturing, quality control, and distribution, the data to train machine learning models will become more valuable, but harder to create. Digital twins solve this conundrum by being accurate enough to be used for the creation of synthetic training data, which enables AI systems to be developed, tested, and optimized within the virtual twin. By incorporating real-time human behavior, Kinetic Vision has evolved the digital twin concept into a true digital representation of reality.

As the world sees the value and embraces artificial intelligence, this type of technology will become crucial in order to train and test those algorithms to be completely helpful, safe, and unbiased, said Jarrett.

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ABC Channel 9 Reporter Performs Operation in a Virtual Operating Room - PR Web