Category Archives: Human Behavior

The eternal state of the human mind a theory – Economic Times

January 31, 2021 medical

The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think. ~ Horace Walpole

Why not advance science in its most difficult and vital aspectthe knowledge of the brain? ~ Dracula

The lifetime blues minimum to face anything and the nerves caused disorders that became the target of treatment and debate between doctors. Oh, no! I dont have any psychological illness but physiological disorders.

A deeper import lurks in the legend told my infant years than lies upon that truth we live to learn.

One of the intellectual strengths of humans is the ability to imagine impossible things. When you have the fullest flower of intelligence, personality, and pluck.

Virginia Woolf, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath especially Robin Williams are historical figures in the field of psychology because of their mental disturbance.

I too have the horrible ailment Neurasthenia minus any emotional disturbance excluding my well-known anger.

I am never hostile, I am bold to stand against any sort of injustice or opinion or deed which is not morally good. Theres no yelling and melancholy madness.

My anger is like the basic human emotions, as elemental as happiness, sadness, anxiety, or disgust. These emotions are related to my basic survival and were honed over the course of my life history. Anger is related to the fight, flight, or freeze response of the sympathetic nervous system; it prepares humans to fight. But fighting doesnt necessarily mean throwing punches; it might propel communities to combat injustice trying to change laws and thoughts or enforcing new behavioral norms. Thus this is my tool for survival and I get angry against anything done wrong.

Prolonged-release of the stress hormones that accompany anger can cause physical suffering. Sometimes emotional states, particularly stress and anxiety, can also increase my anger. My anger had never been jealous anger, in my instability, vulnerability, and continuity of pain a hollow feeling of the sorrow of grudge would not lead my battle to a successful end. Mind is bogged down by lingering illness, it goes swoon to a tee those who want to flee are held by a shackle to Gods project Earth.

I have nothing to lose, I cant try to live again a perfect life, relaxed and healthy, under trees bearing chocolates, mountains of books but being less imaginary I say I dont want to lose this life with my Mum and the instances of delights divided by twilight.

The midbrain dopamine system comprises a group of dopamine-releasing neurons and their axonal projections in the brain. Although the dopamine system contains only a small set of neurons, this little population exerts a strong influence over a large area of the brain through dense and wide axonal dendrite. Dopamine neurons organize a variety of neural functions, including voluntary movement, action selection, motivation, reward-related learning, and memory. Serotonin helps regulate mood and is often called the bodys natural feel-good chemical.

Serotonin contributes to normal bowel function and reduces appetite as I eat to help you know when Im full. The neurotransmitter also plays a protective role in the gut. But my Mum is the antithesis trying to stuff food inside me even when I am full.

I dont know if this feel-good hormone is really controlling my sleep or bone density because my legs are getting weaker and I knew this might happen someday and hence after my surgeries, even liver transplant I never thought of using a wheelchair. The kind helpers used to offer me one but I denied it.

After surviving a life-threatening surgery when the doctor said everything is in Gods hands I always felt rewarding and felt good, woohoo! How many times does this make?

Wrist-cutting arriviste doesnt know various religions of the world have traditionally condemned suicide because, as they believe, human life fundamentally belongs to God.

The Italian poet Dante Aligheri, in The Inferno, reasoned from traditional Catholic beliefs and placed those who had committed the sin of suicide on the seventh level of hell, where they exist in the form of trees that painfully bleed when cut or snipped.

In Hinduism, suicide is referred to by the Sanskrit word atmahatya, literally meaning soul-murder. Soul-murder is said to produce a string of karmic reactions that prevent the soul from obtaining liberation. According to the Hindu philosophy of birth and rebirth, if not reincarnated, souls linger on the earth, and at times, trouble the living.

Buddhism also prohibits suicide, or aiding and supporting the act, because such self-harm causes more suffering rather than relieving it,suicide violates a fundamental Buddhist moral precept: to refrain from taking life.

Schizophrenia is a neuropsychiatric disorder that is characterized by hallucinations, delusions, loss of initiative, and general cognitive dysfunction. Its human-speci?c character and its genetic origin, coupled with its similar prevalence across societies varying in climate, level of urbanization, culture, industrialization etc., led to the early hypothesis that human brain evolution may have played a role in vulnerability to the disorder. They have a sort of disconnectivity problem disruptions of these organs of connection.

Bipolar disorder is a common and chronic psychiatric disorder characterized by mood disturbances with recurrent episodes of mania, hypomania, and depression interspersed by euthymic periods with none or subsyndromal mood symptoms. Studies, been associated with less grey matter volume in prefrontal brain areas.

Findings indicate that neuroanatomical traits potentially impacted by bipolar disorder are signi?cantly associated with multiple neurobehavioural domains. Findings suggest in the case of depressive disorder impaired reward-related learning signals in the ventral tegmental area during remission in patients with depression. This merits further investigation to identify impaired reward-related learning as an endophenotype for recurrent depression. Moreover, the inverse association between reinforcement learning and anhedonia(inability to feel pleasure) in patients implies an additional disturbing in?uence of anhedonia on reward-related learning or vice versa, suggesting that the level of anhedonia should be considered in behavioral treatments.

All such brain-behavior problems need optimism and are treatable.

My will power and mental concentration when my physical body, the container of my spirit which needs repairing so often is the most dangerous disease ever seen on the planet, and my recuperative power and the enjoyment of my mothers love when I make her furious are beyond imagination.

Fog hoveringOpaque, phantasmalMistral howlingMind shut like a clamKeep out the dustLive in gloryWracked fade in forgetfulnessLive heroically

Gray vapor aroundGrayness of tintThe sky made of ashSpleenful murky gray cloudsInky black firmamentImpertinent commentWise and profound

Grayness wrapping wings aroundHollow minds their indulgenceInsensate peopleWhere all is calm,Calm is calm, just silence,Hiemal commentsWalking on a tightrope plunging the fogMakes it a thrilling dream.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

END OF ARTICLE

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The eternal state of the human mind a theory - Economic Times

Human Behavior

The Holocaust, history and today’s politics – The CT Mirror

January 31, 2021 medical

On January 6 the world watched as domestic terrorists stormed the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, DC. The pictures seared into our memories of this day are replete with symbols of hatred, racism, and extremism: The Confederate battle flag, the white power hand gesture, and the gallows erected near the Capitol reflecting pool.

What many may not have noticed within this sea of white supremacy was the prominence of anti-Semitic images: the black sweatshirt reading Camp Auschwitz, Work Brings Freedom, and T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan: 6MWE = 6 million wasnt enough above Italian fascist symbols. Those who wore these shirts invoked the Holocaust, not to deny it, but to promote the continuation of its aims and ideology.

Sixteen years ago, the UN officially declared January 27 an annual International Day of Commemoration in memory of victims of the Holocaust. By the time Soviet troops arrived at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, the SS forcibly had marched almost 60,000 starved and exhausted prisoners from the Auschwitz camp system westward into Germany; more than 15,000 would die on such death marches. At this camp, the Nazis exterminated 1.1 million people, 90% of whom were Jewish.

Among those Jewish prisoners liberated at Auschwitz, however, was a 25-year-old Italian chemist by the name of Primo Levi. Two years later, Levi would publish his account of his 11 months at Auschwitz under the title If This is a Man (later translated into English as Survival in Auschwitz). Levis account of Auschwitz focused not only on the day-to-day existence of the camp and the interactions amongst the prisoners he encountered there, but also dissected, in clinical and dispassionate fashion, what Levi termed the demolition of man, the process whereby the inmates at Auschwitz were completely dehumanized.

The existence of Auschwitz serves as a reminder of just what humans are capable of. When we teach about Auschwitz, we must remember that the camp stands as a symbol of the failure of humanity to stand up to unchecked hatred, bigotry, and tyranny, as a symbol of the challenge that confronts good people when faced with the absolute worst of human behavior.As the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reminds us: The Holocaust did not begin with killing; it began with words.

In recent years, this noticeable rise in hate speech, antisemitism, racism, and xenophobia has provided renewed momentum to legislative efforts to fix the problem, and by the end of last year, 16 states mandated some form of Holocaust and genocide education. Even so, state boards of education rarely provide the additional resources necessary to gain specialized training on the topic. Thus, the memory of the Holocaust is actually subverted and trivialized, used by politicians to avoid doing the hard work of fixing a broken educational system. Indeed, as Alvin Rosenfeld argued in The End of the Holocaust: the very success of the Holocausts wide dissemination in the public sphere can work to undermine its gravity and render it a more familiar thing. . . . Made increasingly familiar through repetition, it becomes normalized.

Aseducators, we know that the fix to rampant and willful ignorance, baseless hatred, and vile behavior is not so simple. We need a massive investment in basic internet and information literacy to save our democracy. Our belief in democracy rests on humans ability to reason, to separate fact from fiction, myth, and conspiracy theories. Equipping people with these basic tools is a starting point. We absolutely need to teach our students about Auschwitz and about gas chambers, but we also must teach them to distinguish between historical facts and the twisted lies of conspiratorial fiction and propaganda.

Teaching the Holocaust, alone, is not the solution to confronting antisemitism, racism, bigotry, and hatred.Teaching the Holocaust, alone, out of context, will not save our democracy. We need a systematic framework that teaches students the responsibilities of citizenship, the basics of human rights, and addresses massive income disparities and wealth gaps that plague public education in this country.

Teachers need to be trained how to teach difficult topics, how to engage in difficult conversations, and not to avoid what feels uncomfortable. If teachers teach the Holocaust, they need to be able to explain how easily a democracy can be subverted, how easy it is for ordinary people to turn their heads and look away, and how a system of discrimination can evolve into a policy of extermination.

Thepervasiveness of the symbols of the Holocaust swastikas, facile comparisons to concentration camps and Nazism across the political spectrum indicate that the lessons of the Holocaust have not been learned. Indeed, they have become completely trivialized. This at a time whenNazis are literally marching in torch-light parades, carrying out pogroms in synagogues, and attempting to take over Congress.

Holocaust denial and distortion is not new, but for a long time it was fostered by a relatively small number of lunatic conspiracy theorists. The growth of the right-wing internet and social media means that a prominent space now exists, purposefully built and shared, where antisemitism, racism, and white supremacy can feed off one another.

The crowd that attacked the Capitol on 6 January not only proudly demonstrated their white supremacist beliefs but also indicated their readiness to put beliefs into action. They seek to use violence and hatred to create a world that matches their goal: destruction of those who believe in the equality of humans.

Holocaust education, by itself, will not be enough. Let us resolve to teach our young people how to determine the difference between historical fact and fiction. Let us equip our students with the tools to recognize hate speech, conspiracy theories, and dubious web resources. Let us hold big tech companies accountable for profiting off organized hate and discrimination, while hiding behind claims to free speech only when it is convenient. Let us hold them responsible for funding basic internet and information literacy. Maybe then we can help people understand why taking over Congress in an Auschwitz shirt is indicative of deep and real threats to our democracy.

Avinoam Pattis a Professor and Director of Judaic Studiesat the University of Connecticut. Laura Hilton is a history professor at Muskingum University in Ohio.

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Human Behavior

Use Your Power To Go First And Change The Way We Work And Live – Forbes

January 31, 2021 medical

Relationships changed in 2020. How, when, where, and why we interact changed, as well as what we talk about and do together. Of course, some of these changes are due to the outbreak of a deadly and contagious global pandemic, but other were a long time coming. Weve moved on from the Industrial Revolution, but many of our ways of being at work and at home have not. Children born in each subsequent year are native to ever-more technologies for communication and otherwise that are evolving at an ever-increasing rate. Social dynamics have pushed equity and justice to their right position front of mind, across racial, physical and mental ability, economic, geographic, gender, sexuality, political, and other divides.

Some of these changes, like social distancing and remote work have been largely adopted, at least in some communities. Others, like equitable hiring and just access to healthcare, remain very much aspirational. We all have a lot to do in catching up with these changes and being part of, or even accelerating the healthier, more equitable, just, inclusive, and sustainable way of interacting that is possible.

Making these changes offers massive rewards for us as individuals, as well as the teams and communities were part of, and the people and planet around us more broadly. Those who do will emerge as the trusted, innovative, and resilient leaders who will win customers, employers, and investors in the next chapter. To say nothing of being happier, healthier, and more fulfilled. But it is effortful to change in these ways it requires hard, deep, and lifelong work. Some have compared it to the labor of birth, or a caterpillars transformation in the cocoon.

Caterpillars retreat to a cocoon to liquefy and rebirth themselves as butterflies.

So how do we change the way we relate to each other, at work and in our lives, to be healthier, more equitable, just, inclusive, and sustainable? The prerequisite foundation is improving our relationships with ourselves. We must take the time to understand our unique way of being how do we think, what do we need to recuperate, who do we benefit from spending time with, when do we focus best, or not at all. We can also learn how to best care for ourselves through the universal elements of human experience, including grief, joy, shame, pride.

Evolving our relationship with ourselves in this way is the only path to upgrading our relationships with other people to the level called for in a healthier version of capitalism. Reverend angel Kyodo williams put it clearly in a conversation with Krista Tippett: To transform as a society we have to allow ourselves to be transformed to be transformed as individuals. And Jerry Colonna says, to lead means to be a better person, or more succinctly: better humans make better leaders.

OK, so we have to transform into better humans. Is that all it takes to build the relationships required for an economic system that works for everyone? Well, no, there are a lot of policy, organizational, and interpersonal shifts that will be required. But if when we each do the work required to be our best selves, those policy changes are a lot more likely come up on the legislative agenda and get passed. CEOs and line managers will design meetings and hiring processes and performance management systems that recognize the power of diversity for their teams performance. Because very few humans on the face of this Earth, in their best selves, want to eradicate polar bears or perpetuate racist or misogynistic workplaces. But we are doing both of those things in our current status quo because we have allowed media, habits, inertia, and fear to prevent us from uncovering and acting on our true best selves.

There are lots of how-tos out there about becoming your true or best self. Which is a good thing, because it is a very personal process that each of us do somewhat differently. But its also important to recognize a point raised by Brene Brown in her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, which is that knowing the steps to do something is not sufficient to make it happen. There are things that get in the way, and prevent us from doing things even when we want to do them and know how to do them.

Most human behavior is aimed at keeping us safe and/or making us feel loved or respected. And doing things differently is not generally associated with safety or celebration. So our natural drive for safety and acceptance prevent us from making the changes necessary to work and live in a way thats healthier, more inclusive, equitable, just, and sustainable.

Jerry Colonna emphasizes Growing Up as the key to effective leadership.

In a recent webinar, Colonna identified a critical element of shifting the way we

interact, so that we could achieve this new way of relating. Someone has to go first. Theres a bit of a prisoners dilemma here, in that we now have the research and experience to know a lot of the ways of relating that would be conducive to healthier, more inclusive, equitable, just, and sustainable teams and organizations. But we remain humans, with innate drives to stay safe and loved. So we are loathe to change our behavior.

What is required, Colonna said, is that someone go first. He suggests that those of us who have some kind of status power age, seniority, race, title be the one to take the risk of acting differently, since it is not actually risking our safety or loved-ness at all in that context. This might be at home, in your office, with friends, or on a board or committee where you serve. And the issue might be a trivial one that joke was offensive to me or strategic we have to remove our preference to hire Ivy League graduates. The important thing is that you recognize a source of power that is keeping you safe, and then take the not-so-significant risk to interact differently.

And of course, keep doing the work on yourself, toward recognizing the truth that you can be safe and loved, even if you choose to relate to other people differently, and indeed making those changes will improve your well-being, performance, and life satisfaction.

Email us for a free worksheet to think about how and why you might want to go first in 2021. And read more about how to connect your mundane daily habits to larger purpose here.

Do you want to be a butterfly enough to enter a cocoon?Do you dare be the first to go in?

Link:
Use Your Power To Go First And Change The Way We Work And Live - Forbes

Human Behavior

Verified: More Parking Puts More Cars on the Road – Sightline Institute

January 31, 2021 medical

Do cities create greener lifestyles? Or do they just enable them?

Its very, very, very clear that people who live closer to other people drive less. But how much of this is due to the fact that people who were already predisposed to driving lessthose of us who dont particularly enjoy driving, for exampleare deliberately living where parking is scarce and buses are frequent?

A forthcoming academic paper finally begins to answer this crucial question. Its breakthrough conclusion: Bigger parking lots make us drive more.

Even if we ignore the breathtaking economic costs of dedicating scarce urban space to car storage, mandatory parking isnt an all of the above strategy that simply lets people choose their favorite mode of transportation. Instead, as UCLA professor Donald Shoup put it in 1997, parking spaces are a fertility drug for cars.

Speaking scientifically, the key to proving a cause-and-effect relationship is finding a randomized sample of human behavior.

And in their new paper, What Do Residential Lotteries Show Us About Transportation Choices?, four Californian academics found such a sample: the free, site-specific lotteries that San Francisco uses to select who gets to live in the price-regulated homes of new apartment and condo buildings. (Because this is San Francisco, a two-person household generally can qualify while earning up to $118,200, equivalent to 120 percent of city median income. So these findings dont apply only to people who would struggle to afford a car.)

Its so hard to do this kind of research, wrote Jessica Roberts, a principal at Portland-based Alta Planning + Design and one of the countrys leading experts on the science of transportation behavior. Their elegant experimental design is a huge breakthrough.

After surveying the auto ownership and basic transportation habits of the residents of 2,654 homes in 197 projects built since 2002, the authors (Adam Millard-Ball, Jeremy West, Nazanin Rezaei, and Garima Desai) found that projects with more on-site parking induce more auto ownership:

Buildings with at least one parking space per unit (as required by zoning codes in most U.S. cities, and in San Francisco until circa 2010) have more than twice the car ownership rate of buildings that have no parking, the authors write.

Do buildings with less parking and car ownership limit the job prospects of their occupants? Apparently not. The team found no correlation between parking supply and employment status at the time of their 2019 survey.

They also found that more parking led to more driving, less transit use, and less walking. And they checked the locations of the 197 projects and found that non-automotive transportation choices seem to be induced by higher AllTransit scores (a measure of nearby mass transit quality by street address), higher WalkScores (a measure of the diversity of destinations within walking distance, inspired in part by an old Sightline blog post), and higher BikeScores (a measure of the quality of nearby bike networks).

Its not just that people who enjoy walking to the store will choose to live near stores. Its that living near stores makes us more inclined to walk, and less inclined to drive.

We shape our buildings, Winston Churchill said. And afterward, our buildings shape us.

This paper doesnt close the book on the questions of how much our buildings shape us, and in which ways, and which of us they shape more or differently. Its one study in one city from one year.

But it is a big new confirmation of one of the central hypotheses of the modern pro-housing movement.

Weve known that Amsterdam, built mostly before the automobile was invented, has much lower energy use per person than Seattle, despite their comparable population and wealth. Weve known that this pattern holds within countries, too. When youre measuring greenhouse emissions per person within a country, density is all but destiny. Weve known that if everyone on the world could consume energy like Netherlanders rather than like Cascadians, it would be far easier to find our way to a planet that can remain both prosperous and habitable for human life.

But at least here in the States, we havent actually had much solid evidence that building cities differently will actually change our behavior enough.

This new study strongly suggests that its possible, all these centuries later, to build new Amsterdams.

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Verified: More Parking Puts More Cars on the Road - Sightline Institute

Human Behavior

Global Societal Surveillance Market Research 2021: COVID-19 has Dramatically Reinforced the Notion that Surveilling Citizens Provides a Net Benefit to…

January 31, 2021 medical

Dublin, Jan. 27, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Global Societal Surveillance Market by Technology, Solution, Applications, and Services 2021 - 2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

This research evaluates the companies, strategies, technologies and solutions involved in this emerging surveillance society market. It provides analysis and forecasting for key technologies and solutions including digital identity, tracking, mobile payments, blockchain technology, social credit systems, social distancing solutions, digital twins, augmented and virtual reality.

Based on several key drivers, there is a major cultural shift underway towards a surveillance society, which entails primarily observation, tracking, and analysis of human behaviors. Rapidly becoming a social norm in some parts of the world, surveillance gained substantial societal support due to the need to surveil certain individuals that may be foreign state-actor supported terrorists, or in some cases, domestic enemies of the state.

However, other factors, such as state control over civilian behavior have taken the fore with the rise of social credit monitoring and the advent of COVID-19, which have dramatically reinforced the notion that surveilling citizens provides a net benefit to society. Recent concerns and threats stemming from the pandemic have added a new dimension of safety and security to protect human lives. The new expectation will have a longer-term impact of routine behavior and processes. In addition to physical threats associated with pandemics, bad actors also seize the opportunity to engage in various threats against cyber infrastructure.

By way of example, a recent initiative known as the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI), was formed by leading technology companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and others for purposes of tracking COVID-19 vaccinations. More specifically, the VCI's stated purpose is to empower individuals with digital access to their vaccination records based on open, interoperable standards so they can achieve two things: (1) protect and improve their health, and (2) demonstrate their health status to safely return to travel, work, school and life while protecting their data privacy.

When viewed as a whole as positive, the notion is that societal surveillance provides greater benefits than losses in terms of overall personal privacy. These benefits may include the ability to mitigate the impact of pandemics. On the other hand, the downside of civil surveillance is considered trading safety for liberty. Especially in the United States, the freedom to act anonymously is considered by many to be a core right of democracy in terms of civil liberties identified in the Bill of Rights.

The post-pandemic era provides ample justification for persistent citizen identification and continuous tracking and tracing of location and social interactions. All of the key technologies used are evaluated throughout this research, which includes radio communications with devices, optical analysis via video and still pictures, and even via advanced biometrics such as unique biological signatures and presence as may be detected by ubiquitous sensors with reads transmitted via IoT and evaluated via AI-enabled analytics.

Many of the technologies used for machine-related monitoring and analysis, such as computer vision for autonomous vehicles, shall be augmented for use in the social distancing solutions market in terms of identification, tracking, and tracing human behaviors. For example, real-world physical access is anticipated to be impacted in a big way due to the pandemic. Accordingly, the publisher sees a keen need for physical access controls, transforming how citizens travel, use public places, and interact with other people. These social distancing market technologies will provide the basis for solutions that enable tracking/identifying people for access to airports, parks, sporting venues, and other public places.

The ability to identify, track, and correlate digital and physical identity is of paramount importance to the societal surveillance market. By way of example, digital currencies such as Bitcoin provide for a certain level of anonymity in terms of financial transactions. However, the underlying technology in support of crypto-currencies, blockchain technology, is being adopted by China as it looks to unveil a digital-only version of its currency, which would provide unprecedented governmental oversight and control over transactions. This fits with their drive towards a social credit society in which every citizens' actions are observed and considered.

There is an emerging market for surveilling society, which includes observation, tracking, and data analytics to gather and analyze data. This market also involves the use of additional technologies such as the combination of digital twin technology, augmented and virtual reality to provide an improved means of observing and interacting with citizens. Additionally, governments may leverage the ability to observe citizen behaviors by tracking digital payments in an increasingly cashless global society.

This market also includes the ability to score citizens as part of an overall social credit system that goes beyond "acceptable" and "unacceptable" individual behaviors to focus on government mandates such as compliance with public safety rulings associated with virus outbreaks.

Select Research Findings:

Target Audience:

Key Topics Covered:

Asset Tracking Market by Technology, Infrastructure, Connection Type, Mobility, Location Determination, Solution Type, and Industry Verticals

1. Executive Summary

2. Asset Tracking Market Segmentation

3. Introduction

4. Asset Tracking Solutions

5. Asset Tracking in Industry Verticals

6. Company Analysis

7. Asset Tracking Market Forecasts 2021 - 2026

8. Conclusions and Recommendations

9. Appendix: Slap-and-Track Asset Tracking Solutions Market 2021 - 2026

Blockchain Technology Market by Service Type, Applications, Solutions, Industry Verticals

1. Executive Summary

2. Introduction

3. Blockchain Ecosystem and Marketplace

4. Blockchain Market Outlook and Forecasts 2021 - 2026

5. Blockchain Vendors

6 Conclusions and Recommendations

Human and Machine Trust/Threat Detection and Damage Mitigation Market by Technology, Solution, Deployment Model, Use Case, Application, Sector (Consumer, Enterprise, Industrial, Government), Industry Vertical, and Region

1. Executive Summary

2. Introduction

3. Technology and Application Analysis

4. Company Analysis

5. Market Analysis and Forecast 2021 - 2026

6. Conclusions and Recommendations

Social Credit Market by Physical and Cyber Infrastructure (Sensors, Cameras, Biometrics, Computer Vision), Software (Machine Learning, Data Analytics, APIs), Use Cases, Applications, Industry Verticals, and Regions

1. Executive Summary

2. Introduction

3. Social Credit System Technologies and Applications

4. Company Analysis

5. Social Credit Systems Market Analysis and Forecasts

6. Conclusions and Recommendations

7. Appendix: Social Credit Market Supporting Technologies

Social Distancing Solutions Market by Technology, Gear, and Applications in Industry Verticals

1.0 Executive Summary

2.0 Introduction

3.0 Technology and Application Analysis

4.0 Social Distancing Solutions Company Analysis

5.0 Social Distancing Market Analysis and Forecasts

6.0 Conclusions and Recommendations

7.0 Appendix

Digital Twins Market by Technology, Solution, Application, and Industry Vertical

1. Executive Summary

2. Introduction

3. Digital Twins Company Assessment

4. Digital Twins Market Analysis and Forecasts

5. Conclusions and Recommendations

Artificial Intelligence in Information and Communications Technology: AI and Cognitive Computing in Communications, Applications, Content, and Commerce

1. Executive Summary

2. Introduction

3. AI Intellectual Property Leadership by Country and Company

4. AI in ICT Market Analysis and Forecasts 2021 - 2026

5. AI in Select Industry Verticals

6. AI in Major Market Segments

7. Important Corporate AI M&A

8. AI in ICT Use Cases

9. AI in ICT Vendor Analysis

10. Summary and Recommendations

11. Appendix: Key AI in ICT Patents

Big Data Market by Leading Companies, Solutions, Use Cases, Business Cases, Infrastructure, Technology Integration, Industry Verticals, Region and Countries

1. Executive Summary

2. Introduction

3. Big Data Challenges and Opportunities

4. Big Data Technologies and Business Cases

5. Key Sectors for Big Data

6. Big Data Value Chain

7. Big Data Analytics

8. Standardization and Regulatory Issues

9. Key Big Data Companies and Solutions

10. Overall Big Data Market Analysis and Forecasts 2021 - 2026

11. Big Data Market Segment Analysis and Forecasts 2021 - 2026

12. Appendix: Big Data Support 0f Streaming IoT Data

Next Generation Mobile Payments by Implantable Technology

1. Executive Summary

2. Introduction

3. Mobile Payment Technologies and Solutions

4. Mobile Payments Ecosystem

5. Regional Mobile Payment Market Analysis and Forecasts 2021 - 2026

6. Conclusions and Recommendations

Augmented and Mixed Reality Market by Technology, Infrastructure, Devices, Solutions, Apps and Services in Industry Verticals

1. Executive Summary

2. Introduction

3. Augmented Reality Ecosystem

4. Augmented and Mixed Reality Market Drivers and Opportunities

5. Company Analysis

6. Market Analysis and Forecast

7. Conclusions and Recommendations

Original post:
Global Societal Surveillance Market Research 2021: COVID-19 has Dramatically Reinforced the Notion that Surveilling Citizens Provides a Net Benefit to...

Human Behavior

Neuroscientists Find Thin Line Between Love and Hate in the Mouse Brain – SciTechDaily

January 24, 2021 medical

Mounting behavior, that awkward thrusting motion dogs sometimes do against your leg, is usually associated with sexual arousal in animals, but this is not always the case. New research by Caltech neuroscientists that explores the motivations behind mounting behavior in mice finds that sometimes there is a thin line between love and hate (or anger) in the mouse brain.

The research, which appears in the journal Nature, was conducted in the lab of David Anderson, the Seymour Benzer Professor of Biology, Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience Leadership Chair, investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and director of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience.

Our lab is interested in understanding how social behaviors and underlying emotional states are controlled by the brain, explains lead author Tomomi Karigo, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech. While we were studying social behaviors in mice, we sometimes noticed that male mice would mount other males, in a way similar to how they would mount females, Karigo says.

It was unclear whether these male mice tried to mate with a male because they simply mistook it for a female or if they knew it was a male but intended to establish dominance over it. The researchers hoped to understand whether a male mouse mounting another male mouse reflects a different intent than a mouse mounting a female mouse, and how mounting behavior is regulated in the brain.

To find out, the researchers first recorded videos of males mounting both male and female mice. Using machine learning, a type of software that learns and adapts through experience, they analyzed the videos to see whether there was anything different in the mounting behavior that was exhibited toward a male versus that toward a female mouse. The machine-learning analysis revealed no obvious difference in the mechanics of the mounting behavior.

The researchers then looked for other clues in the mounting males behavior that might differentiate female-focused versus male-focused mounting.

One clue was that male mice appear to sing to females while mating with them. These songs, known as ultrasonic vocalizations, are too high-pitched for humans to hear, but can be picked up with a special microphone. Karigo and the team found that mounting mice sing only to female mice, not to males. In addition, when a male is mounting another male, the two animals usually end up fighting after a short period of mounting. This does not happen in the case of a female mounting partner.

These results suggested that mounting behavior toward a female has a different meaning than mounting behavior toward a male. Specifically, mounting toward a male is probably the expression of dominance or mild anger (aggressive mounting) and not a reproductive (or so-called affiliative) behavior.

Next, the researchers explored which brain regions are responsible for each type of mounting behavior.

When a male mouse mounted male or female mice, the researchers observed neural activity in an area of its brain called the hypothalamus, which controls, among other things, hunger, thirst, metabolism, and defensive behaviors. In particular, two regions of the hypothalamus seemed to be involved: the medial preoptic area (MPOA) and the ventrolateral subdivision of the ventromedial hypothalamus (VMHvl). The MPOA showed high levels of activity when the male mouse was mounting, and singing to, a female; conversely, the VMHvl showed high levels of activity when the male mouse was mounting, but not singing to, a male.

The team then took a closer look at the activity of individual neurons in the MPOA and VMHvl. They found that distinct groups of neurons were activated during reproductive mounting and aggressive mounting, in each brain region. In addition, the researchers discovered that they could train a computer to correctly predict whether the mounting was sexual or aggressive, based purely on the pattern of neuronal activity in these two regions.

The researchers then tested to see if those brain regions actually controlled the two mounting behaviors, or if activity in the regions was simply correlated with the behaviors. They did this using a technique called optogenetic stimulation, in which light is used to trigger the firing of neurons. By directing the light to specific areas of the brain, researchers can induce neuronal activity there, and thus induce behaviors.

When the researchers presented a female mouse to a male mouse, the male mouse began to sing and mate with a female. But when the researchers stimulated the males VMHvl, the male stopped singing and started to show aggressive mounting behavior toward the female. Conversely, if a male mouse was engaging in aggressive behaviors toward another male and the researchers stimulated its MPOA, the aggressive mouse would stop fighting, begin to sing, and attempt to mate with the other male.

Karigo and Anderson liken this to a seesaw of love and hate. Activity in the MPOA tilts the seesaw toward love, while activity in the VMHvl tilts it toward hate (or aggression).

In this study, we used mounting behavior as an entry point to understand the underlying neural mechanisms that control emotional or motivational states, Karigo says. She says their findings advance our understanding of how the mouse brain, and more broadly the mammalian brain, works to control emotions, and she adds that they may one day help us to better understand human behaviors.

The paper describing their findings, titled, Distinct hypothalamic control of same- and opposite-sex mounting behaviour in mice, was published online by Nature on December 2, 2020. Co-authors are Ann Kennedy, formerly of Caltech and now at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University; neurobiology graduate students Bin Yang and Mengyu Liu of Caltech; Derek Tai, formerly a research assistant at Caltech and now at the Touro University Nevada College of Osteopathic Medicine; Iman A. Wahle (BS 20), a Schmidt Scholar at Caltech; and David J. Anderson.

Reference: Distinct hypothalamic control of same- and opposite-sex mounting behaviour in mice by Tomomi Karigo, Ann Kennedy, Bin Yang, Mengyu Liu, Derek Tai, Iman A. Wahle and David J. Anderson, 2 December 2020, Nature.DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2995-0CaltechAUTHORS: 20200909-142458487

Funding for the research was provided by the National Institutes of Health, the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience, of which Anderson is the director.

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Neuroscientists Find Thin Line Between Love and Hate in the Mouse Brain - SciTechDaily

Human Behavior

The coronavirus in winter may be worse than scientists thought – Quartz

January 24, 2021 medical

A year after the emergence of the disease that has killed 2 million people, humans keep underestimating the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

This winter, Covid-19 is turning out to be even more dangerous than epidemiologists and public health officials had fearedand not just because of the more contagious variants now circling the globe. As recently as October, Nature reported it was too soon to say whether COVID is seasonal like the flu. Evidence hinted that winter weather could increase transmission of the virus: In the lab, the virus persisted under cold, dry conditions and was inactivated by the ultraviolet rays in sunlight.

There was reason to hope that wasnt the case. Coronaviruses, which generally showless seasonal variation than the influenza virus, tend to have a weak response to changing temperatures. Outbreaks such as the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in 2002 were not thought to be seasonal at all, although the outbreak ended too quickly for scientists to definitively test that idea.

Yet SARS-CoV-2 appears to be different. New research on the viruss response to colder temperatures reveals the world may face a bigger fight this winter than expected. People are thinking theyre looking at something like influenza, and its a lot worse, says Richard Carson, a professor in the economics department at the University of California San Diego, who published a preprint in November analyzing Covid-19 death rates as temperatures changed in the early months of the outbreak.A lot of things people were doing in the summer we thought were working was actually hotter temperatures giving the appearance these things were working.

A lot of things people were doing in the summer we thought were working was actually hotter temperatures giving the appearance these things were working.

Carson and his co-authors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Wake Forest University suggest that SARS-CoV-2s reaction to changing temperatures, known as its temperature response curve, may be even more pronounced than influenza, the ultimate seasonal virus.

They arrived atthis conclusion by excavating a unique data set: states death certificate records. Statistics on Covid-19 case counts and deaths in the US are notoriously noisy. Local and state governments do not report standardized data. Labs overwhelmed with tests may delay reporting positive cases long after administering tests. Deaths reported on any given day may have occurred weeks before. All these inaccurate counts stymie attempts to measure temperatures role in transmission rates.

But Carsons team, with experience applying econometric techniques to modeling and forecasting environmental impacts, found a solution in Massachusetts Covid-19 statistics reporting last year. Buried deep in the report was an alternative death count by the date on the death certificate, he said. Once we found it, took us two months to get that data from most of the big states. By pulling dates from death certificates, the team could match trends in Covid-19 deaths against maximum daily temperatures over a three-month period between Apr. 16 and Jul. 15.

According to theresearch(pdf) now undergoing peer review, the data show thevirulence of the virus increases below 31C (88F). Its sweet spot, says Carson, is around 4.4C (40F), but thats only its preferred condition. Temperatures between 5C and 10C (41F to 50F) favor transmission and infection.

The studys model revealed a strong correlation between changing temperatures and the number of Covid-19 cases and deaths from a baseline of 31C, the US mid-summer average. By the time the weather drops to a chilly 5C, the model shows deaths rising by 160% due only to the influence of cold weather, even after controlling for state shelter-in-place orders.

Covid-19 transmissions showed an even stronger effect. Four times more new Covid-19 positive cases are expected when temperatures drop to 5C, assuming no other interventions such as masks or social distancing. Only when temperatures drop a few degrees below freezing, the point when water droplets quickly freeze in the air, do Carson and his team project transmission to slow.

Its a real frightening paper, says Carson. We know the temperature response curve for influenza. This one is much steeper.

For most of the US, sitting in the northern hemisphere, a temperature response curve like this makes for a treacherous winter. Any delay in responding to elevated virus activity, the data imply, will lead to a rapid escalation in cases because of the feedback loop between cold temperature and the viruss exponential growth curve. The patterns of the outbreak in mid-December almost exactly match what the temperature response would predict, says Carson.

Adam Kaplin, a physician and public health researcher at theJohn Hopkins University School of Medicine, was not surprised. Its really hard to see it any other way, he said having reached a similar conclusion in his research recently submitted (pdf)to the journal PLOS ONE. Virus transmission is going to up because of the temperature. Thats clear.

Virus transmission is going to up because of the temperature. Thats clear.

Kaplin analyzed SARS-CoV-2 transmission rates and daily temperature records in 50 countries between January and April 2020, a period before most mask orders took effect, allowinghis international team of researchers to isolate the influence of temperature. They found for each degree temperatures fell between 30F and 100F, the rate of transmission rose 3.7%

If this strong and robust association is correct, the paper states, countries must spend their spring and summer months containing the virus to have any hope of containing winter outbreaks given the effects of decreasing temperatures. This is a race we should have been running a lot earlier, says Kaplin. We should have been way ahead of it. We blew this and many people died who didnt need to die.

Viruses kill millions of people each year, yet we know shockingly little about why their virulence fluctuates from season to season. The flus winter spread is commonly attributed to human behavior patternsstaying inside, where germs spread more easilybut that explanation has been questioned.I dont think youll find a uniform answer to this question, says Joe Eisenberg, chair and professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigans School of Public Health.This research was not prioritized in the past.

Carson was not able to tease out the relative influence of viral biology and human behavior on SARS-CoV-2s response to cold temperatures. His research could only eliminate humidity as a likely factor in transmissibility; temperature and UV light (which fluctuates in lockstep with temperature) were much better at explaining Covid-19 transmission patterns.

But Kaplin thinks the evidence points to a very strong candidate. Its the biology of the virus, he argues. Yes, people are going inside more but its playing much less of a role than biology. Nothing in the scientific literature, he notes, supports the idea that this seasonality is driven by human behavior. In the journal Medical Hypotheses, a 2016 paper could find no evidence that winter crowding drives seasonal viral transmission, noting that time spent indoors in the US changes less than 10% between summer and winter. Evidence in the tropics, where the flu circulates year-round, contradicts this hypothesis, too.

Reducing the transmission rate will mean redoubling mask and social distancing efforts. Now preventative measures must escalate merely to keep the epidemics rate of spread in check.

Its a grim treadmilland were already slipping off. The big policy notion is every week the temperature drops, you have to reduce the effective contact rate to keep the virus in check and prevent exponential growth, says Carson. People arent doing that, and thats why youre seeing those outbreaks.

The big policy notion is every week the temperature drops, you have to reduce the effective contact rate to keep the virus in check and prevent exponential growth.

The new variant adds a wild card to the mix. This new variant is more transmissible, but it may still have a strong seasonal signal, says Eisenberg. We just dont know.

So far, policymakers have waited too long to respond to Covid-19s winter surge. In the UK, cases began piling up again this fall after a brief summer respite. Hospitals warned of a crush with the arrival of colder weather. But national restrictions werent reimposed until Jan. 9, when the healthcare system was already in crisis battling the more contagious variant. Today, the UKs per capita death rate from Covid-19 is among the highest in the world and more than 40,000 Covid-19 patients are hospitalized, roughly double last years peak.

The US is in even worse shape. The country never got the pandemic under control. Although transmission slowed over the summer, the virus has come roaring back. The US now accounts for 20% of the worlds Covid-19 deathsdespite having less than 5% of its populationand is on track to reach 600,000 deaths in 2021. The only immediate solution is to establish herd immunity before next winter through a mass vaccination campaign that reaches more than 70% of the population. If the pandemic continues to spiral out of control, far more deaths will be unavoidable.

But we can prevent this winter from getting even worse, say Eisenberg. The public health measures were already taken need to ramp up if were going to keep SARS-CoV-2 in check. It intensifies our recommendations, he says, but doesnt change our recommendations.

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The coronavirus in winter may be worse than scientists thought - Quartz

Human Behavior

3 Explosive IPO Stocks to Buy in 2021 – Motley Fool

January 24, 2021 medical

2020 was a record year for initial public offerings (IPOs), with 480 companies going public on U.S. stock exchanges, and more stocks doubling in their first day of trading than ever before. 2021 is on track to be another huge year for IPOs, and some innovative companies making public market debuts could go on to deliver tremendous returns.

With that in mind, we asked three Motley Fool contributors to profile a recent or upcoming IPO stock that looks primed to be a big winner. Read on to see why they identified PubMatic (NASDAQ:PUBM), Instacart, and Coinbase as IPO stocks that are poised for explosive performance this year.

Image source: Getty Images.

Keith Noonan(PubMatic):Digital advertising is at the heart of the internet experience. Nearly every media site and social media platform that doesn't exclusively rely on subscriptions is built around advertising, and tech giants including Alphabet and Facebook have built massive tech empires on the foundation of strong digital ad units.

The digital advertising revolution is still at a relatively early stage, and PubMatic is a promising player that could wind up delivering huge returns for patient shareholders. The programmatic advertising specialist had its initial public offering on Dec. 8, and its share price has climbed roughly 25% since market close on the day of its debut. The stock still offers explosive upside.

Data analytics and artificial intelligence technologies are revamping the way advertising campaigns are targeted and deployed, giving companies the opportunity to track real-time data results and pivot targeting on a dime. Internet media and commerce revolves around grabbing and holding attention, and PubMatic provides a cloud software platform that makes it easy to connect ad buyers and publishers and track up-to-date info on whether campaigns are effective.

Big names including Forbes, Microsoft, and Unity Softwarealready rely on PubMatic's solutions, and the advertising specialist has big room for growth as it brings new customers on board its platform and delivers results that encourage increased spending per client. With a market capitalization of roughly $1.8 billion, PubMatic is still in small-cap territory and even smaller wins amid a backdrop of momentum for its industry niche could translate to big stock gains.

Jamal Carnette (Instacart): Talk about a delivery markup: Last year soon after taking a private round of funding at a $17.7 billion valuation, on-demand grocery delivery company Instacart shocked investors by announcing it had entered a deal with Goldman Sachs to go public early in 2021 at an estimated value of $30 billion. In the long run, the company will likely be worth significantly more than that figure.

Instacart benefited from the pandemic, as the service was able to take online grocery market share away from Walmart during the lockdown. However, it's folly to believe the bearish argument there will be mass exodus when we return to normal as this doesn't account for human behavior. Much like e-commerce, once users discover the convenience of online grocery delivery, they tend to continue or at least adopt a hybrid shopping model.

The online grocery market is quickly resembling the e-commerce market of 10 years ago and battle lines are being drawn now. Amazon is moving forcefully to build out distribution centers and Amazon Fresh stores that double as critical last-mile delivery centers. Target and Walmart spent big to beef up their e-commerce operations: Walmart acquired Jet for $3 billion in 2016 and Target acquired Shipt for $550 million in 2017.

If the remaining grocers are looking to compete against behemoths in this space quickly, cheaply, and at scale, there's no better solution than Instacart. Keep an eye on this IPO.

Joe Tenebruso (Coinbase): Bitcoin is once again making headlines after its price soared to new all-time highs above $40,000. If you'd like to profit from bitcoin's popularity -- without the risks of investing directly in cryptocurrency -- buying Coinbase's stock could be a great way to do so.

The leading U.S. cryptocurrency exchange is prepping for its stock market debut. Coinbase's initial public offering will reportedly take place as early as February, in what's widely expected to be one of the biggest IPOs of the year.

Coinbase is no doubt benefiting from the rising interest in bitcoin and other digital assets among investors. Trading volumes tend to increase along with prices, which, in turn, boost profits for exchanges.

With bitcoin becoming a more accepted investment among hedge funds and family offices now that respected investors -- such as Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller -- have added the cryptocurrency to their widely followed portfolios, trading volumes are likely to rise even further in the coming months. Coinbase's revenue and earnings could thus be poised to soar. All of this bodes well for Coinbase's upcoming IPO, which is likely to be well received by professional and individual investors alike.

Early valuation estimates for Coinbase vary widely. Crypto market analysis company Messari valued the exchange at $28 billion in December, while recent reports have Coinbase's market value reaching as high as $75 billion. Coinbase's final IPO price will be determined after more investors have had the opportunity to peruse its as-yet-undisclosed financials. But based on what we do know, if Coinbase's IPO settles at the lower end of that price range, its stock could be an attractive buy for long-term investors.

Human Behavior

Work for success and work for satisfaction – Daily Excelsior

January 24, 2021 medical

Prof. A.N. SadhuHuman life is a long journey. It involves a bodily effort to sustain oneself along the time path from birth to death. The evolution of human society necessitates an organized form of physical and mental activity to bring about sustainability and scientific advance for exploration and enhancement of quality of life that humans need to work, both, on mental and physical front is a natural requirement. The human activity may be categorized as work for success and work for satisfaction. People do work out of necessity. They also work for status progression as also for economic progression. Obviously, their focus is on work for success. Human nature and necessities of life demand that people should work to fit in the social system evolved over time. Normal human behavior would warrant that people work for success. This is necessitated by the requirement of sustaining self and family besides meeting other desirable and unavoidable expenditures in everyday life. The distinction between work for success and work for satisfaction may look philosophical and spiritual but, in real life, it is distinct on humanitarian principles. However, people born with silver spoon, do also work for physical fitness and robust health. They hardly realize either the necessity or the desirability of distinguishing between work for success and work for satisfaction. Their lack of this understanding on the one hand and the clout of a rich legacy on the other, makes them a social liability. They consume their capital at the cost of their future.The work for success is a normal human behavior. Career advancement and urge for recognition is a natural instinct. What is important is the means adopted for success. It is observed that if success alone is set as a goal for work people may adopt dubious ways to scale up the ladder of success and their work may be more pretentious than substantial. The poor content of their work is often camouflaged by sycophancy and it sells well in the mediocre officialdom. Substance takes the backseat against the salesmanship and showoff resulting into, many a times, people succeeding in selling barley for wheat. Unfortunately, the developing countries that emerged after the World War II have fallen in this trap. Success as a goal is a natural instinct but it should be pursued legitimately. The goal should be achievable within the means of hard and sincere work, honest handling of the assigned roles and skillful management for public good. Frequent scandals, that surfaced in the developing countries in the recent past have betrayed the public faith in the systems that have been evolved overtime. These tendencies could perhaps have been minimized if not eliminated had people set their goals not only for success but for satisfaction as well. Work for success is exclusive while as work for satisfaction is inclusive in character.The work ethos demands that one should work for satisfaction which automatically includes work for success as well. The exclusivity of work for success may tend to be devoid of ethics and result into corruption- both mental and material. Such a work is carried out in violation of basic principles of humanity; truth, honesty, commitment and sincerity in work. This restricts the evolution of healthy practices in the individual organizations as also in the overall systems of a nation. Success should be an honest pursuit which will lead a person highly satisfied at the end of the day. This success should not be stolen by cheating, it should come of its own as a reward for honest work. Work and morality should go together; that culminates in the work for satisfaction. Success through dubious means may be devoid of satisfaction and cause lot of regret in the long run.Work for satisfaction demands missionary zeal, sublime temperament and commitment to serve the society with higher ideals. Vivekananda has said that life is to be helpful to others and it is death not to be helpful to others. Work for satisfaction implies that it should not be only self-serving it should be serving the society as well. The work for satisfaction is self-realization at a higher pedestal. Attachment to cause and detachment from worldly temptations is a prerequisite of work for satisfaction. Look within to realize the essence of life. Dont assess yourself; let others do it. The work for satisfaction emanates from the environment one creates for oneself which in turn requires that people around you are happy because of your work and not that you alone are happy because of the work that you do. Work for satisfaction would also require that besides enhancing your competence, you also promote your social quality. Speak to enlighten, work to help and think to elevate yourself in comprehending the subtilities of social domain. One should not belong to the sole but to the whole. The work leading to ones success brings a smile on his face but the work leading to satisfaction brings a smile to the society. Men should remember; they belong to the society and do not live in isolation.If in an organization you are given a responsible position, the rest will look at you as a leader and leader is one who supervises, guides and transforms his team of workers into an asset. The leader does not command he only inspires. The motivation is a strong force to cultivate the spirit of teamwork. The satisfaction of work lives with the performer on everlasting basis when the success does not live beyond a point of time. Men in the lasting memory of the world have all worked for satisfaction and not for success alone. History is replete with stories of outstanding persons who worked throughout their life for satisfaction and success followed them and made them the men of all times such as Vivekananda and others.feedbackexcelsior@gmail.com

The Leading Daily of Jammu and Kashmir , India

Human Behavior

Revolutionizing the future of Human-Machine-Interaction – ARY NEWS

January 24, 2021 medical

Do you remember the Minority Report? Imagine you arrive home and you enter your bedroom: Widgets fly around enabling the control of your IoT devices, feeding you with relevant information, and providing you with data-driven action proposals for the start of your weekend.

According to Incari HMI Development Platforms CEO Osman Dumbuya it wont take 2054 until most people control their devices in mid-air. His company created an HMI development platform that forces HMI design from the backrooms of highly specialized teams of engineers, developers, and technicians to the toolkit of every creative.

But what is this HMI and what kind of challenges does it impose?

Human-machine-interface refers to every kind of configuration that integrates the interaction between human behavior and technological devices. These arrangements have a long history going back to the pre-industrial age when the first machines were created and the requirement to command and control them arose. Following the enhancing performance of technological innovations, we could observe an increasing interdependency between them and their human counterparts. While the mechanical fabrications had initially been concocted to solve human problems, technological problems became human problems and called for enhanced usability to handle the continuously increasing complexity of the human-machine-entanglements.

With the uprise of the mass-market computer age, mankind rapidly advanced in creating new ways of human-machine interaction. Buttons and punch-cards turned into keyboards and were made accessible to the mainstream by Amiga and Spectrum. In 1984 it was the Macintosh from Apple that displayed its functionalities through a graphical user interface and came along with the mouse as the primary input device. Only one year later the first Nintendo Entertainment System arrived and opened new realities that interacted through a ramified system comprising your hands, the controller, the TV, and most likely your cohabitants. Nowadays touchscreens, voice-controlling technologies, and motion control have become everyday standards in mass-market human-machine interfaces. For the upcoming decades, one of the central goals of human-machine interface manufacturing will target the development of brain-computer interfaces that will be commanded through the sheer power of your mind.

The user interface of the future wont be just on screens. Paul Jankowski, Lead of Business Development from Incari platform states. Working in an environment that is rapidly revolutionizing human behavior calls for a different approach when thinking about development. That is why Incaris scope is not limited to the user interface design but focused on the greater effort of creating a unique and user-centred experience. Whether it is the latest haptics technology, voice and gesture control, AR/VR/SR, 3D audio, eye tracking or stereoscopic displays, companies like Incari collaborate with the biggest innovators of future HMI technologies to create a seamless interplay of upcoming innovations long before the respective hardware arrives. For this purpose, Incari provides the bricks to create connectivity, a set of integrated, predefined nodes that are ready-to-use plug-ins and are continuously reworked along with the evolution of the corresponding technologies.

Already known in the German Automotive industry for its modular architecture that streamlines the cross-department-collaboration during recent years Incari HMI Development has evolved as the platform to connect and conduct the orchestra of the multifarious instruments that create the unique symphony of your individual environment. Back in the days, CGI Studio GmbHs Incari started with HMI projects for Porsche and Volkswagen until they decided to create their one-stop solution for the entire HMI-production process. Ever since Incari has been adopted by more and more German car manufacturers for the future-proof technology it provides. Today HMI creation is simplified through their native 3D engine and the visual coding that allows designers to work on content in the same window as their colleague engineers who program the connectivity of different components. Incari is one of the platforms that provide the opportunity of a visual coding editor that enables the coding without writing a single line of code.

What will the future of HMI bring?

Rooted in the automotive industry, due to its special needs for innovative and secure connectivity solutions HMI platforms are spreading out to all areas of life. Years ago companies like Incari already blurred the disciplinary boundaries in the HMI development processes. Today they continue to smudge the boundaries between human and non-human-activity to simplify the operation of our devices as well as our lives. Tomorrow there will likely be an operating system, specifically designed to interconnect the multifariousness of immersive technologies, which will not only circulate through automotive, medical devices and engineering processes but is easy to use and affordable enough to become the futures every-day standard for basically everyone.

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