Human Behavior

ABAC and VSU sign new articulation agreements to bring needed skills to rural communities – Moultrie Observer

TIFTON, Ga. Two freshly-inked articulation agreements between Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College (ABAC) and Valdosta State University (VSU) aim to provide students the skills needed to help build Americas rural communities.

The agreements guarantee qualified Bachelor of Science degree graduates in Rural Community Development from ABAC an interview and consideration for admission into VSUs Industrial-Organizational (I-O) Psychology or Counselor Education masters degree programs.

These new agreements are intended to make advanced training in key areas more accessible to our Rural Community Development program graduates, while also keeping them in the region for their graduate studies, said Matthew Anderson, dean of ABACs School of Arts and Sciences.

We are thrilled to provide a pathway for ABAC graduates to stay in the area by pursuing their graduate degree at VSU, Heather Kelley, interim department head of VSUs Department of Human Services, said. At the conclusion of their graduate program, we hope these new professionals will stay in South Georgia to enhance and build our local communities.

Adrian Israel Martinez-Franco, ABAC department chair of Rural Studies, saidABACs interdisciplinary bachelors degree program in Rural Community Development is designed to prepare students to make a positive impact in rural communities.

In the Rural Community Development program, we prepare students by emphasizing problem-solving skills, Martinez-Franco said. We develop leaders who can find trustable information and make decisions based on evidence with an ethical attitude toward society and our environment. These agreements will help our students become experts in a specific area to create positive change.

The VSU Master of Science degree program in I-O Psychology prepares students for the understanding and application of the science of human behavior in the workplace. I-O psychologists can play a key role in increasing workplace productivity and enhancing organizational development.

Our faculty focus on training our students to aid businesses with a variety of core functions, such as personnel selection, employee development, strategic planning, organization development, job analysis, and program evaluation, Jeremy Bauer, program coordinator of I-O Psychology at VSU, said. Our program places an emphasis on helping local businesses thrive in rural communities.

The VSU Master of Education degree program in Counselor Education prepares students in one of two tracks, either School Counseling or Clinical Mental Health. School Counseling track students go on to careers in P-16 educational settings. Clinical Mental Health students are broadly trained for counseling work in a variety of settings. Professionals with these skills are desperately needed, particularly in rural communities.

Counselor Educators are committed to infusing considerations of culture including regional factors such as those in rural areas, Lee Grimes, program director of Counselor Education at VSU, said. In this program, students have the opportunity to intern in urban, suburban, and rural settings to understand the unique qualities of each.

For more information on the Rural Studies program at ABAC and the application requirements, interested persons can contact Martinez-Franco atamartinezfranco@abac.edu.

We are making critical coverage of the coronavirus available for free. Please consider subscribing so we can continue to bring you the latest news and information on this developing story.

Read more from the original source:
ABAC and VSU sign new articulation agreements to bring needed skills to rural communities - Moultrie Observer

Human Behavior

Daily Habits That Can Help You Become A Saver – Femina

Source: Pexels

Why do some people succeed at saving while others do not? Read that carefully. I'm not asking why some people are successful investors, while others are not. What I'm asking is why do some people save while others do not save. Or, if they do save, it's not much more than whatever they are forced to do through EPF or NPS or tax-saving, etc.? They never choose to save.

This is something that all of you would have observed. With some people, it almost seems like a law of nature that they will save while with others, it seems to be the opposite. I'm sure you can think of many explanations and so can I. These explanations may or may not be correct. There may be many different explanations, which apply to different people. It does not matter, it's not very interesting actually.

What IS interesting is whether the non-savers can be converted into savers. Those of us who are non-savers, what do we do when we become self-aware of this unfortunate condition and would like to fix it? It isn't easy to drop a life-long habit. It is a habit, you know. Come to think of it, not saving may have more in common with addictions like smoking than anything to do with finance. Which means that what we are talking about has more to do with human behaviour and psychology than with anything else.

Therefore, this is about breaking one habit and taking up another one. Drawing graphs of compounding returns and SIP growth is fine for those who already have the habit of saving, but it does little to convert those who do not yet have the habit. As it happens, habit creation is something that a lot of people from psychologists to self-help authors have paid much attention to. Of course, 'self-help author' sounds a little disparaging but personally, I believewith experience--that for a subset of readers, and a subset of authors, self-help books do help.

About a couple of years ago,I'd written about a book named The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. The book detailsthrough anecdote and science how our routine behaviour is driven mostly by habit or the absence of habit. It also delves deep into how habits get created and changed, and how this can be achieved consciously. Duhigg's book convinced me that investing was not a choice in the normal sense but a matter of habit. However, the how-to part of that book was hard to work at.

Source: Economic Times

Recently, I came across another book, one by a social scientist named B.J. Fogg. Fogg is the founder and director of the somewhat ominously named Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, which was later renamed as Behavior Design Lab which means the same thing. He has written a fascinating book called Tiny Habits. The book goes deep and yet easy into the process of conscious habit formation. Of course, the actual anecdotes and examples are all from the kind of things that people commonly struggle in terms of habits. However, everything that Fogg describes fits very well into modifying personal financial behaviour. It's hard to briefly lay out the methodology that Fogg prescribes in a way that it can be followed here, nor am I going to attempt to short circuit an entire book in a few hundred words. Fogg says that there are three ways to change behaviour: have an epiphany, change the environment, or to create tiny habits. It goes without saying which is the only one achievable for almost all of us.

However, it is well understood by those who do not save that all you have to do is to make a beginning. If you have gotten as far as reading my columns then you probably also know that the ideal first habit to form is to start investing a small regular amount through an SIP. To those who haven't done it, it's hard to believe how change builds upon change and how behaviour changes. Tiny Habits can help.

This article was originally published in Economic Times and has been reproduced with permission.

Go here to read the rest:
Daily Habits That Can Help You Become A Saver - Femina

Human Behavior

Glued to Your Phone? You Could Have These Disorders, New Study Says – MSN Money

It seems everyone is glued to their phones these days, constantly scrolling social media and refreshing their email. However, if you find yourself feeling anxious when your phone dies or when you head out of the house without your phone, you may have what some experts are referring to as "nomophobia." Nomophobia, short for "no-mobile-phone phobia," is not recognized as a formal diagnosis yet, but researchers have been examining how common it is among young people. And one recent study is looking at the concerning link between nomophobia and other psychological disorders.

The study, published in the August-December 2020 edition of Computers in Human Behavior Reports, used a questionnaire to evaluate phone use and the psychopathological symptoms of 495 adults, aged 18 to 24, in Portugal. Researchers found a positive correlation between nomophobia and certain disorders, meaning that if someone has one of these specific mental health conditionsfor example, depressionthey are more likely to also experience anxiety when away from their phone. Each condition correlated with nomophobia has its own symptoms, ranging from insomnia to delusions to digestive problems.

While the researchers acknowledged the positive contributions phones bring to our lives, they reminded readers that there can be negative side effects when people become dependent on their phones. The study showed that the more participants used their phones daily, the more stress they reported feeling without their phone.

These are the nine disorders associated with nomophobia, according to the study, along with the percentage of subjects who experienced them. And if you want to make sure you're keeping yourself healthy, check out these 25 Secret Ways You're Hurting Your Mental Health Without Realizing It.

Original post:
Glued to Your Phone? You Could Have These Disorders, New Study Says - MSN Money

Human Behavior

Could the COVID-19 Epidemic Fade This Fall Without New Lockdowns? – Reason

Human beings are often terrible at foresight and generally learn hard lessons chiefly from failure. That has certainly been the case for the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health officials, politicians, and the public, by means of repeated policy failures, are still learning what works when it comes to mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic.

A partial list of initial failures in the U.S. includes underestimating the virulence of the pathogen by some public health officials; a massive bureaucratic screw-up by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that delayed the rollout of diagnostic testing as the pandemic was taking off; the belief that airborne transmission was not a significant route of infection but instead the virus was chiefly passed along via direct contact with infected people and indirect contact with surfaces in the immediate environment; the early assertion that citizens didn't need to wear face masks to protect themselves from infection; epidemiological models making worst-case projections of millions of COVID-19 deathsby assuming that people wouldn't change their behaviors; the claim that the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine was a "game changer" as a COVID-19 treatment; and a president who has doggedly insisted since February that the virus would miraculously fade or disappear soon.

So what has been learned over the past eight months? While conclusions are still preliminary, researchers now calculate that the COVID-19 coronavirus is about three times more contagious than seasonal flu; the availability of diagnostic testing in the U.S. has greatly improved but is still nowhere near where it needs to be; airborne transmissioncontributes significantly to the spread of the disease; when the background rate of infections is high the widespread adoption offace masksis aneffectiveand very economically valuable method for stemming COVID-19 infections; when epidemiological models took into account actual changes in human behavior, their COVID-19 death projections declined steeply; and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has concluded that hydroxychloroquine is not a useful COVID-19 therapeutic. But what about President Donald Trump's oft-repeated prediction that the virus will one day soon just disappear?

Epidemiological research suggests that COVID-19 will only fade away once the threshold for herd immunity is reached. Herd immunity is the resistance to the spread of a contagious disease that results if a sufficiently high proportion of a population is immune to the illness. Some people are still susceptible, but they are surrounded by immune individuals who serve as a barrier, preventing the microbes from reaching them. Herd immunity can be achieved via mass infection or mass vaccination. Epidemiologists estimate that the COVID-19 threshold for herd immunity is around 60 to 70 percent.

Some of Trump's fans have recently been touting the idea that COVID-19 herd immunity is closer than initial epidemiological projections have suggested. I, too, have reported that very preliminary studies on unsuspected preexisting T-cell immunity to the coronavirus and speculative modeling results suggest that the effective herd immunity threshold may actually be close, at least, in some countries and some regions of the U.S. (In other words, the possibility of a lower herd immunity threshold is a lucky accident, not the result of presidential prescience.)

Now a new modeling study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team of researchers associated with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign suggests that the COVID-19 "heterogeneity-modified herd immunity" threshold has already been reached in some metropolitan areas of the U.S. Their model stands in contrast to many of the epidemiological models noted above that are based on the homogeneous assumption that basically every individual is equally liable to become infected and then to transmit their infection on to others.

The Illinois researchers define heterogeneity as the biological and social susceptibility of individual members of the population to COVID-19 viral infection. Biological heterogeneity takes into account differences in such factors as the strength of immune responses, genetics, age, and comorbidities. Social heterogeneity reflects variations in the number of close contacts that each individual has with different people. Basically the more social a person is, the more likely they are to get infected early in the epidemic and then become immune. The researchers combine biological and social heterogeneity to derive what they call an immunity factor.

The team tests their model on real-world empirical data from hospitalizations, intensive care unit (ICU) occupancy and daily deaths from New York City and Chicago to figure out changes over time in the effective reproduction number for the virus in those cities. The effective reproduction number is the number of people to whom an individual can transmit infection at any specific time, and it changes as more of the population becomes immunized through either infection or vaccination. In addition, the effective reproduction number is affected by people's behaviors such as social distancing and widespread mask-wearing.

Taking the effects of biological and social heterogeneity on COVID-19 transmissibility, the researchers calculate that the herd immunity threshold is likely somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the population. According to recent reports, more than 20 percent of New York City residents have probably been infected with the coronavirus.

Seeking to see what might happen this fall, the researchers model possible outcomes of the second wave of the COVID-19 epidemic in New York City and Chicago. They consider what they call a "worst-case scenario" in which all current mitigation efforts are fully relaxed and bars, theaters, and restaurants open with negligible social distancing and mask-wearing. Their heterogeneity-modified model projects virtually no second wave of COVID-19 cases in New York City which indicates that herd immunity has likely been achieved there.

On the other hand, they calculate that Chicago has not passed the herd immunity threshold. Nevertheless, the effects of biological and social heterogeneity would still result in a substantial reduction of the magnitude of the second wave there, even under the worst-case scenario. The possible good news is that their results suggest "that the second wave can be completely eliminated in such medium-hit locations [as Chicago], if appropriate and economically mild mitigation measures are adopted, including e.g. mask wearing, contact tracing, and targeted limitation of potential super-spreading events, through limitations on indoor bars, dining and other venues."

Based on data from late May, researchers also calculate that most states were then still far away from reaching their heterogeneity-modified herd immunity thresholds. However, this summer's surge in COVID-19 cases may have brought some states closer to herd immunity. While the coronavirus may not just fade away, these calculations imply that the U.S. has a good chance to avoid a potentially disastroussecond wave this fall if the public maintains reasonable social distancing and mask-wearing efforts.

The rest is here:
Could the COVID-19 Epidemic Fade This Fall Without New Lockdowns? - Reason

Human Behavior

Podcast 262: Jack Alton of Neuro-ID – Lend Academy

It is a conundrum for every online lender. Why is it that such a small percentage of the borrowers who start at the top of the marketing funnel make it all the way through the online journey? And then a portion of those that do complete the journey are fraudsters.

Our next guest on the Lend Academy Podcast has made it his mission to help solve these problems. Jack Alton is the CEO of Neuro-ID, a new company that is taking the online lending industry by storm, providing new insights that helps reduce friction and recognizes fraud in new ways.

This episode of the Lend Academy Podcast is sponsored byLendIt Fintech USA 2020. The worlds largest fintech event dedicated to lending and digital banking is going virtual in 2020.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION SESSION NO. 262-JACK ALTON

Welcome to the Lend Academy Podcast, Episode No. 262. This is your host, Peter Renton, Founder of Lend Academy and Co-Founder of LendIt Fintech.

(music)

Todays episode is sponsored by Lendit Fintech USA, the worlds largest fintech event dedicated to lending and digital banking is going virtual. Its happening online September 29th through October 1st. This year, with everything thats been going on, therell be so much to talk about. It will likely be our most important show ever. So, join the fintech community online this year where you will meet the people who matter, learn from the experts and get business done. LendIt Fintech, lending and banking connected. Sign up today at lendit.com/usa

Peter Renton: Today on the show, I am delighted to welcome Jack Alton, he is the CEO of Neuro-ID. Now, Neuro-ID is one of the most fascinating companies in fintech right now, in my opinion. They have a very unique product, they call themselves Human Analytics for the Digital World and we get into exactly what that means, but, basically, theyre able to detect real-time fraud and reduce friction really for any company operating online. But, theyve really focused on the fintech space, particularly in the unsecured consumer lending space, and Jack will describe the company and describe the offering in some detail.

We get into all kinds of different examples, but I think what theyve been able to do, and theyve got lots of patents on this, is provide insight where there was limited insight and this is something that chief risk officers/chief marketing officers are crying out for even today with the reduced originations. Everyone wants zero fraud and a perfect kind of customer journey, but thats really what Neuro-ID is all about and we get into this in some detail. It was a fascinating interview. I hope you enjoy the show.

Welcome to the podcast, Jack!

Jack Alton: Thank you, Peter. Greetings from big sky country up here in Montana.

Peter: So, Ive got to ask you.I know this is a podcast, maybe this will entice them to go to YouTube and youve got a great background, a great Zoom background that is pretty spectacular. So, tell us a little bit about that.

Jack: Yeah. Thats actually our family farm, the big reason we moved back to Montana, to raise our kids here and try to keep doing technology things where we wanted to live and that picture is actually this morning. I was on a walk and the sunrise was so amazing that I stopped and took a couple of pictures and I thought this would be a great way to share it with everybody else. Even after growing up here and being five generations from Montana, when you wake up to a sight like that, its hard not to stop and take a picture.

Peter: That is spectacular, spectacular indeed. So, go to YouTube, youll be able to see it there, everybody. Okay so, lets get started by basically giving the listeners a little bit of background, tell us what you did before Neuro-ID.

Jack: Sure, yeah. So, I grew up in Montana, my wife and I both went to college here and then we moved down to Austin, Texas and I got involved in several VC-backed companies. I was involved with a company that invented WiFi which was later on sold to AT&T so that was super exciting and then moved back, wanted to take all that experience I had in Texas and apply it here in Montana. So, Neuro-ID is the third company that Ive done since I returned home here about 12 years ago and its been super cool to be able to demonstrate that you can live, kind of work and play where you want and COVID has really punched that out more than ever. I think our population here in Montana has probably tripled in the last five months.

Peter: Wow! Thats funny because you can live anywhere you want these days if youre just doing Zoom calls. So, yeah, maybe lets just talk about Neuro-ID and what you guys do. I know youve got this tagline on your website, Human Analytics for the Digital World, so lets just dig into that and tell us what you guys do.

Jack: Yeah. Its been super fun, its a cool story of kind of research and scientific discovery and patented technology all coming together to solve a really big need we have right now. You know, lots of scientific research shows that a foreign person, our own AI that we have in our head and in our eyes and in our ears, allows us to make really accurate judgments on trustworthiness and competence and frustration. But, when we moved online, all of that was lost so our two founders who have over 30,000 Google scholar citations in the field of human computer interaction, theyre literally the leaders in the world, they had this question, they said, what if we could digitally communicate the way we used to when we are in person.

That kicked off a bunch of research across several universities. In 2015, the company was founded and then in 2017, after they had proven that this technology, literally how we tap, type and swipe, could be used to understand your intent, to understand your identity, to really facilitate companies and customers online communicating better, they decided they wanted to take it to market so thats when I came in as the CEO of the company and started forming a team together, raising a couple of rounds of capital.

And now, 60 million customer journeys later, were quickly being adopted by leading fintechs, insurance companies and merchant inquirers as they realize whats missing is the human analytics, the human exchanges that we have when we are in person are gone when we moved online. So, thats what were doing, we install our Javascript and literally like a light being turned on, they can, all of a sudden, realize where is the friction in my current process and where is the fraud that I cant see today in historical data.

Peter: So, maybe lets talk about that and talk about the online customer journey that every e-commerce companyanyone whos doing commerce online and wants to optimize that. So, what are some of the things that youve seen thats bad about customer journeys today?

Jack: Yeah. I think that the thing that was most shocking to us ..I think if you dig deeper, you talk to the analyst community, youll see the ugly truth behind our digital transformation, so far, 15 years into that weve stalled out. Weve tried to take the friction out of a customer journey, but we get to that same point where we may have made our offer, selection process easy and your purpose of your loan or your credit card, but then we go to the chief risk officer and here she has a really difficult task of determining, of these 100 people that are coming through, who are my 95 customers that have, you know, a legitimate intent, they are who they say they are and their intent is good and then who are the five that are disguised as good customers but really are fraudsters. And, because we havent had access until now into this in-session behaviors, you know, kind of whats going on as theyre filling out or interacting with your brand online, theyve been forced to make all those decisions on historical data alone.

So, theyre looking at your FICO score, theyre looking at your past credit performance, theyre looking at all kinds of historical data and theyre trying to predict something in the future and the gap that were filling is they still use all that historical data, but now, were giving them a real-time view into how did that customer journey unfold, where are the sticking points and thats really been the big game changer for everybody.

Peter: Right, right. So, Im curious because what you just said there is applicable to just pretty much any industry thats operating online and Im curious about why you decided.I mean, you did mention insurance and merchant acquiring, but why focus on online lending as one of sort of the first places to go?

Jack: Yeah, its a great question. You know, we had patented the technology and validated it in the lab and through research, but we really hadnt commercialized it and used it in the wild. What we found in unsecured consumer lending, specifically, is massive data sets, sophisticated data science teams and teams & organizations that were really trying to figure out how do I improve my customer experience and how do I also detect fraud and they really work hand in hand.

What we found is that if you could see your fraudulent customers better and be more sure about that, you could start to kind of release some of the pressure that youre putting on your best customers so allow them to really start to differentiate and see those good behaviors versus those fraudulent behaviors. Unsecured lending was just a great space for them to share those outcomes for us to train all of our models and then once were able to train those models to these behaviors, were able to move it from vertical to vertical after that.

Peter: Right, right, okay. So, I want to sort of get into.Id love to get a real life example. I mean, you did a session on LendIt Fintech Digital a little while back and did a great kind of visual run through of how this works. So, maybe in the audio kind of environment, maybe you can show us, demonstrate, as best as you can, a real life example of a customer journey and how it looks after youve implemented Neuro-ID.

Jack: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Its literally.our customers have said things like, its like youve turned the light on, I cant believe how blind we were before. You know, once someone sees the demonstration of our technology.one of the things weve heard is, you know, I was literally taking just the last answer that the customer input, if we were sitting across a table from one another and I asked you for your social security number and you wrote it down and then you left and you came back and you changed it four or five times, that would make me ask additional questions.

Today, were blind to that when were just looking backwards to predict the future. And so, when we talk about the customer journey theres always been big blind spots on key fields that are really important if youre going to be optimizing experience or youre going to be trying to detect fraud. There are really two camps we look at, our third party fraud so identity-based fraud. How familiar is Peter with the information that hes putting in, right? We get very familiar with how we put in our first and last name, our date of birth, our social security; those are things that should come literally to the tips of our fingers, whether were using a touch or a mobile device. You shouldnt see a lot of manipulation in that, thats something we ask for on a common basis so, our algorithm is looking for anomalous behavior on that perspective.

The other area that weve come into and its part of our name, you know, if you think of the ID portion of our name a lot of people think its for identification, but really, its for Intent Detect. The technology can also start digging into difficult forms of fraud like first party fraud where theres an intent to fraud someone. In the past, this has been a really difficult field and it was one of the things that was very encouraging to us when we first took our technology to unsecured consumer lenders. They said, you guys are picking up on family fraud that weve never been able to pick up on. They have the credentials, they may live in the same address, but it is not that person that is trying to get a loan.

So, the two areas that were really using it to improve the customer journey are two. Answer that first question, is Peter who he says he is, that identification question, the third party fraud question, but also to look at .in an environment post-COVID, as an example, if we ask are you currently employed and we have 20% unemployment rates, those are things that really had people pulling back on issuing loans because they just couldnt get comfortable with what the current state was and thats what were giving visibility into.

Peter: Right, right. Lets just dig into that a little bit because when you did a demo for me months and months ago, I was blown away because you could see in real-time. You also said that you could see when there was an intent to be fraudulent and like you somehowyou have these profiles that a normal person..obviously, everyone has their own typing style and you really get granular with this, like how someone is typing in a field and you can tell with a lot of accuracy whether this is a human or a bot because bots can try and imitate humans, but you said you can pretty much figure that out so, tell us a little bit about that technology.

Jack: Yeah, yeah, its a great.the analogy we use is in person we have body language that were exchanging even if when were on a Zoom call, but when we move online, youre also portraying or projecting a digital body language as you move through. And if youre moving through an application process or an interaction and youre confident and it is you and you are who you say you are and your intent is good, your digital body language will reflect that.

When we see machine-type behavior or bot behavior, the fact of the matter is its pretty much impossible, almost impossible to replicate human behavior because were all different, but what our technology uniquely does is were able to baseline you against you and then you against the journey that youre on. So, it allows us to be able to really understand that digital body language, whats consistent and what is inconsistent.

Peter: So, when you say you against you, you mean you build a profile.like someone is typing in their first name, is that what youre doing? I mean, what does you against you mean?

Jack: Yeah. From the moment you, as an anonymous customer, we collect no PII. From the moment someone arrives on a mobile or a cursor device, our algorithms starts baselining their movements and looking at how you answer questions and comparing them to how you answer other questions.

So, if youre looking at it through a fraud lens, if youre asked a risk-relevant question like do you foresee a change in your income or your ability to pay back a loan and you first answer no, I dont, and you change it to yes, I do and then you go back to no, I dont because you realize you probably wont get the loan, thats behavior that our customers have no access to today that if we were in person would cause you to probably ask a few more questions.

Peter: Right, right, that makes perfect sense. So, obviously, what people get is the end result which is someone says no and thats all you know and you dont know they go back and forth. I remember one of those things you said there was likeone of the things at the demo like a social security number that was edited like 34 times.

Jack: Yeah. When people see that, thats when the light bulb really goes off and theres both an intuitive use of our technology and then the data science use of our technology. Fraud and risk teams are really good at spotting fraud and risk, they just havent had visibility that they used to have in person to be able to do that, conversely, marketing and CX teams are really good at seeing their best customers. Again, theyve just been operating kind of in a dark vacuum and havent been able to personalize that experience is all as theyre going through the journey.

Peter: Right. So, I can see the application there, but I want to also talk about the friction and the process because, particularly pre-COVID, every online lender wanted to make a frictionless process or as frictionless as possible. Some have now introduced friction as theres volumes are down so far, but regardless. So, lets assume that were back to a normal state of the economy and people want to maintain frictionless..one thing that was fascinating that I saw was you can tell not just sort of the page that someone left on, but the actual field so you can say, right, its date of birth or its income, whatever. This is the thing thats saying people get to there and they quit. Tell us about that friction piece.

Jack: Yeah, yeah. The product that we have is called the Friction Index Dashboard and what we realized is that everybodys trying to deliver the best experience possible, but no ones scientifically measured friction, they never quantified it to know where am I starting from and where am I going. Its only been measured really through conversion which doesnt really tell the whole story and, frankly, hasnt been moved upon in the last decade so, the Friction Index Dashboard was really a customer-driven product.

They loved the new scores and attributes we could use to help them build better decision models for fraud, but every time we would give them a glimpse of what their customer behavior was, we noticed that the customer would literally get up out of their chair in a board room and go toward the screen because they have been trying to understand why is it that Im putting a thousand people to the top of my funnel every day only to have, you know, 10% go through, why are 90% ending up in fraud, frustration or failure. These session level behaviors are helping them see exactly where, not just the page or the event, but actually the session.

Where is the friction happening and then what are the underlying behaviors that are causing it. So, why? When you get down to the level of understanding why somethings happening, that gives them all the data they need to make data-driven changes to their form, to their application and then the cool part with our Friction Index is it goes on and it continually monitors that friction across both mobile and cursor devices.

So, CEOs and chief product officers and chief marketing officers dont have to wonder what their customer experience looks like or send a survey out, it literally can log into the Friction Index, can see whether if the consumer friction is going up or down by question, by device type. Its really given them that last leg of visibility that theyve needed to kind of get closer to the same person interactions and move away from just digital transactions and start building a real digital relationship with the customer.

Peter: Right, right, that makes sense. So then on that, Id love to kind of get some sense of, you know, the impact of what youve done. You said a thousand people at the top of the funnel and 10% go through, what have you seen as far as impact on.when someone puts in Neuro-ID, what is the conversion rate, what can it change to?

Jack: Yeah, its a great question. Its really two things and oftentimes our ROI has a component of increasing your conversion and another one of reducing your fraud. Weve seen our technology being implemented at, you know, $70 Billion fintechs, merchant processor payment facilitator-type companies that have had a decade to build their fraud system. They have ten or more third party fraud vendors included and literally install our technology and see the ability to eliminate 35% additional fraud and the cool part is they do that without impeding their conversion. So, they both had a small bump in conversion and they were able to knock out 35% of their fraud.

If I take it to the lending use case, a lot of times lenders are using things like Plaid or Yodlee where they are asking the customer to log into their bank account. The customer may have worked really well to get the customer to the site, theyve selected their loan, theyve selected their purpose, theyve said yes, I want to do this. Their score card says, you know what, this customer looks good, but Im going to ask them to log into their bank accounts so that I can see if the income they stated is accurate and if they are who they say they are. While thats a very valuable fraud tool to verify identity and to verify that they have income there, its not such a good tool from a customer experience standpoint.

In fact, this customer was losing 40 to 50% of their customers every time they would get to that point. So, what we did is gave them a score to say, hey, here are your customers that have exhibited no anomalous behavior, theyve interactive with all of their fields as they should have. You have the opportunity to fast track them around that point on verification friction thats causing you to lose 40 to 50% of your customers every day.

From an impact standpoint, what we saw was that they customers that they fast tracked around that bank verification log-in, they were able to double their conversion without increasing bad debt so that drops straight to the bottom line. For them, it created a better experience, it reduced that unnecessary verification friction that they were putting on everybody and focused it on those that maybe were closer to the threshold of their internal score card or exhibited anomalous behavior.

Peter: Right, right, yeah, thats fascinating and I could see howthere are so many applications to that as well. I want to ask this one follow-up on that, but before I go on, you know, you say thatlike someone may be very legitimate, but they may not know their income because they just got a pay decrease, for example, so they might have been, you know, three minutes on that field typing in multiple things and thats not forging, thats just someone who just doesnt know. I mean, do you have triggers that sort of set up that kind of real behavior that is just a lack of knowledge versus fraud?

Jack: Absolutely. Its a great nuance and its something that our Friction Index Dashboard picks up really well. Example Ill cite is we had one of the lenders that was asking for annual income and the type of clientele that they lend to really look at their income on a hourly basis, what do I make per hour and maybe what do I make per month. What they saw was there was a tremendous amount of friction there a lot of time as these people were literally being forced to take their hourly wage multiplied by their weekly wage multiplied by their monthly wage to come up with a gross income wage.

It was a ton of time that our Friction Index was picking up on a lot of edits, a lot of changes that had nothing to do with fraud or malfeasance, but rather around how they were asking the question. They took this feedback, they implemented a tool tip that moved it back to an hourly rate for their applicants to put in and then they did the math and the background and all of a sudden, the friction went down, the conversion went up and satisfaction role went up as well.

Peter: Interesting, interesting. So then, who are the kind of lenders that youre working with today?

Jack: Yeah. So, they span the gamut really from, you know, I would say 550 and above all the way up to prime lenders, both consumer and business, also a lot of the top merchant processors now are using us and with our new relationship with Trans-Union, they are taking us into the interim space to kind of reinvent that digital quote and digital claim process for the interim space.

Peter: Interesting, interesting. So then, I know you havent been in business a huge amount of time, but.I mean, Id be curious when someone is hooked, when someone is running your data, running your code, I should say, how many of them just.whats your retention rate?

Jack: Yeah, its a great question. We joke around internally that once you see it, you cant unsee it, once you have access to this visibility and you know that its just one partnership away and it literally spans across all your departments to facilitate that collaboration that you need to digitally transform, we have never had a customer that has installed our Javascript move forward as a customer and ever left. In fact, the ones that are on our initial contracts signed multi-year contracts now and continue to see more value as they move from maybe chief risk over to chief marketing and chief product that these insights are invaluable throughout the customer life cycle.

Peter: You dont have lenders that have dropped their originations dramatically, theyre still keeping you on?

Jack: Absolutely. Yeah, I mean if you think about it, a lot of their credit risk models blew up during the COVID pandemic and its going to take time for those historical (garbled) as in to someones credit risk, as an example. But, if they can have it, if their customer journey is implemented with our real-time behavioral analytics, they can have a leading indicator of if theres any type of anomalous behavior, which is really what they are looking for now, is they slowly build their confidence toward lending again.

One of the things they want to do is not lend out a bunch of money and find out that that was wrong. We can give them the behaviors that are occurring in real-time and help them make better decisions as they recover. What we want to point out is the lenders definitely got hit hard, some harder than others, but other aspects of our customer-base, we have seen massive acceleration on the payment side and the merchant inquiry side as people who maybe had visible and digital properties, they are forced to push everything digital and weve seen account openings just spike, weve seen that at some of the major merchant processors out there.

Peter: Okay. So, say there is a lenders listening to the show and theyre interested, whats the process, how complicated is it to sort of just implement your code into their system?

Jack: Yeah, its a great question. Were on our third generation of our Javascript to ensure that its super easy and very light. Everyone says that, we actually do it. Our customers can typically get us up and running in less than one development day so its a pretty easy trade-off for them to go from not having visibility into their real-time behaviors to literally lighting that up in a day.

The other thing thats happened in the last year thats exciting is our first customers.it took us a while to build the models for them, now, weve been able to do what we call Day One Value. So today, when you install that Javascript, we immediately turn on your behavioral dashboard, the Friction Index Dashboard, and then you also start getting a stream of real-time behavioral analytics that feed a new source of data for your AI and ML models so, literally, day one value when you install it.

Peter: Interesting. So, I guess this is a whole. another data stream that all the data scientists can pore over and create new models from using this as a new data source, right?

Jack: Absolutely, yeah. Everything that were measuring and stuff that they havent been measuring so the data scientist would say that its orthogonal lift of the model and they get quite excited about that.

Peter: Right, right, So, you know, as were chatting here, and you know Ive been a big fan of what you guys do, Jack..I mean, when youre in a Zoom call, I guess it would be these days, like a sales call, what are the objections that people and how do you respond to those?

Jack: Were seeing that the market is rapidly adapting behavioral analytics which is terrific, I think, for everybody. Its great for consumers, its great for businesses. The biggest objection is just development cycles, product roadmaps, you know, prioritizing this integration and even if it is lightweight and most folks are stuck up six months to a year in their debt cycles so it really requires some executive sponsorship so its really our job to show this behavioral dashboard. Once we do that, that seems to pave the way to getting us integrated and up and running quicker.

Peter: Right, right. So, I know youve got a whole bunch of patents that are pending, I dont know, you tell me, whether theyve been improved. Youre the only company I know doing this, I mean, it seems to me to be something that will..you know, once people see or you get it, this type of thing will be standard at some point. Are you protected, whats stopping someone from just taking. they can see your Javascript and whats stopping someone from going up against you.

Jack: Yeah. So, we do have some really foundational patents in the space which are great, we use those, not necessarily to go after anybody, but to protect our right to do business. Theres a pretty big moat around what we do and what we found is a lot of our customers had been collecting behavior. The real challenge is taking that digital body language, that behavior they are taking.you know, scientifically, its considered a very noisy signal. Theres a big difference between how you interact and how I interact online.

Being able to baseline that, being able to surface the meaningful attributes that are the ones that can help you make better decisions, thats really the key, I think the breakthrough we had to be able to do that in real-time. So, when you think about where the real pinch point is in digital transformation today, were still having a really tough time landing a customer. Youve got one shot to get both the customer experience and the fraud signal right and the evidence is showing that were still struggling mightily there.

Were trying to strip out all of the friction, but then when we go into the verification process, the amount of verification that were throwing at customers that requires interaction, a document upload, a bank verification, a picture of yourself, its so out of the norm of what we would do if we were in person. Its really turning people off and preventing that real transformation to happen. So, were going to continue to use this patents, develop more patents, as I said, weve got four PhDs on staff and two of the brightest founders in the world so we think were at the very beginning of this, you know, kind of digital transformation being filled by behavioral analytics and were going to try to plant our Javascript everywhere we can. (Peter laughs)

Peter: Indeed, Im sure you are. Were almost out of time, but Id love to get a sensemaybe an example or two of insights that people have done that have made.we touched on it a little bit, but what Im talking about iseveryone has the customer journey, whats the theme for improvement like what do people sayeveryone is saying, oh, we need to get rid of this, we need to change that or is it really dependent upon whatever kind of lender is doing it.

Jack: Yeah, I think its a great question. I think there is a collision, a re-occurring collision thats happening every day in every digital lender and that is marketing and CX are trying to take all that friction out of an on-boarding journey so theyre asking the customer for very little information. But then, the chief risk officer is getting very little information and kind of having to start from scratch to ask them basic fundamental questions. It would be like, if we were going down a sales process and everything was going well and then I backed up and I said, well first, I need to ask you your name, are you sure thats your name and are you sure thats your address, it would throw everything that we did.

That collision continues to happen everyday and what we see happen once digital companies can see their customer through the eyes of their customer like see the fact-based behaviors that have happened.weve been in rooms where theyve said, I told you, you know, the risk officer would tell product who have been trying to get rid of a question, I told you that question wasnt causing any friction and thats an important question for us because they can actually see it in the behaviors.

Vice versa, weve seen the product or marketing teams say that question isnt worth the friction that its causing so for the first they time they can move away from these internal debates and this guessing and this endless AB testing to a data-driven approach that says, here is what happened descriptively in the customer journey and then theyre really good at making calls there now that theyre not operating blind.

Peter: Right, right. It goes from a subjective decision to an objective decision.

Jack: Absolutely.

Peter: Okay. So then, whats next for you guys, I mean, you said you wanted to conquer the world. Like in the next 12 to 18 months, what are you guys working on?

Jack: Yeah, yeah. So, the companys accelerating really quickly as you might imagine. Really great people want to work on this opportunity to bring something thats exciting to the market. Youve mentioned as well its horizontally scalable, we can take it to any vertical, any use case where theres digital interaction so next steps will be to continue to lockdown some of the biggest brands in the world across multiple verticals. But, were also be trying to democratize the technology and take it out so that everybody can use this technology, not just the largest corporations in the world.

Peter: Okay. Well, good luck, Jack, I think its fascinating what youve guys have done and its a real service to the industry, I think so. Thanks for coming on the show.

Jack: Thank you very much, Peter, appreciate it.

Peter: Okay, see you.

Jack: Bye, take care.

Peter: As I said, I am a big fan of what Neuro-ID is offering. I think its something that the industry needs and I think every industry needs if youre operating online. The one thing that I was really.one of the highlights, theyve got 100% retention rate since they started because once you see this.you go through a demo and you really see the insight. Once you seeyouve got access to this real-time data and you get to see how much real-time fraud is being detected that wasnt detected before.

I think that just shows you that people arent willing to fly blind and I think its a testament to what theyve done. I think, as I said, this is going to be standard offering online soon, certainly within five years and possibly a lot sooner. Its just something that, you know, you need to know everything you possibly can know about the person on the other end of the screen who is interacting with your website or your app so its really something that.Im very bullish on the whole idea.

Anyway on that note, I will sign off. I very much appreciate your listening and Ill catch you next time. Bye.

Todays episode was sponsored by Lendit Fintech USA, the worlds largest fintech event dedicated to lending and digital banking is going virtual. Its happening online September 29th through October 1st. This year, with everything thats been going on, therell be so much to talk about. It will likely be our most important show. So, join the fintech community online this year where you will meet the people who matter, learn from the experts and get business done. LendIt Fintech, lending and banking connected. Sign up today at lendit.com/usa.

You can subscribe to theLend Academy Podcast viaiTunesorStitcher. To listen to this podcast episode there is an audio player directly below or you candownload the MP3 file here.

Original post:
Podcast 262: Jack Alton of Neuro-ID - Lend Academy

Human Behavior

The longer we’re isolated, the less productive we get – Great Bend Tribune

COVID-19 is getting old - particularly for employees whove been working from home for months.

Thats the finding of a Wall Street Journal article, Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isnt So Great After All.

Early on, when millions stopped commuting and started working from home, many companies saw good results. Work was getting done. Most employees enjoyed it. Companies saw an opportunity to reduce future office overhead costs by making remote work part of their long-term strategy.

But that was before cracks began to emerge in the work-from-home model.

According to The Journal, initiatives now take longer. Hiring and integrating new staff is harder. Employees arent bonding or growing with each other. Efforts to collaborate online are going flat.

One CEO puts his finger on the problem: Its vital to have individuals in a room and see physique language and skim indicators that dont come by means of a display screen.

Hes exactly correct. Humans are social animals. Were at our best when we collaborate face to face. Communication theorist Nick Morgan explains why in Forbes:

(W)e share mirror neurons that allow us to match each others emotions unconsciously and immediately. We leak emotions to each other. We anticipate and mirror each others movements when were in sympathy or agreement with one another - when were on the same side. And we can mirror each others brain activity when were engaged in storytelling and listening - both halves of the communication conundrum.

As a freelance writer, working from home for years, I find myself climbing the walls many days. Too much home-office isolation makes getting things done harder.

Though online meetings are helpful, I long for face-to-face interaction. The best ideas come from in-person brainstorming - as one person jots ideas on a whiteboard and others shout out concepts. You just cant do that well in online meetings.

Furthermore, Ive worked for clients I never met in person. Such relationships are never as rich as those in which Im able to meet and work with clients in their offices over time.

In any event, as companies rediscover human natures limitations - that employees isolated at home arent as productive or as engaged with colleagues - they shed light on a growing problem in our society: Increasingly isolated inside our homes, particularly due to the virus, more people are interacting solely through social media and other online platforms.

And these detached means by which we now communicate enable our growing incivility.

This era of smartphones and social media - of nasty tweets and Facebook insults - is making rudeness, reports Psychology Today, our new normal.

The magazine cites research, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, that finds technology-enabled anonymity and a lack of eye-contact are chief contributors to our growing incivility.

This prolonged virus is getting old, for sure, and our patience is running thin. But I hope we will learn from the lessons its teaching us.

I long for a time when pubs are fully operational and we can discuss politics civilly and with open minds over pints of Guinness, with renewed hope that well figure out how to maintain our humanity and civility in our increasingly nutty world when this virus is finally behind us.

Tom Purcell is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review humor columnist. Send comments to Tom at Tom@TomPurcell.com.

Visit link:
The longer we're isolated, the less productive we get - Great Bend Tribune

Human Behavior

Natural Lithium in Drinking Water Linked to Lower Suicide Rates – American Council on Science and Health

Lithium is quite an element.

Located in the first column of the Periodic Table, it is a metal so soft that it can be cut with a knife. Yet, add a little water and the metal becomes incredibly reactive. If you do it right, you can make it explode. This is because the reaction creates hydrogen gas, which is flammable. It also produces a strong base called lithium hydroxide, which consists of Li+ and OH-ions and is highly corrosive. It's a nasty reaction.

Lithium ions are incredibly useful. Perhaps the two most famous applications are lithium-ion batteries and psychiatric medication. In the former, the lithium ions shuttle positive charges between the two sides of the battery; in the latter, lithium is considered a miraculous drug, dubbed the "penicillin of psychiatry," since it works very well to stabilize mood swings in people with bipolar disorder.

We don't know exactly how it works. Biochemical studies indicate that lithium ions interfere with the inositol signaling pathway inside of nerve cells, ultimately helping to relieve the symptoms of the "manic" phase of bipolar, which is characterized by agitation and hyperactivity. Interestingly, it also helps relieve symptoms of depression, which (as the name "bipolar" implies) is the polar opposite of mania.

Lithium in the Water Supply Linked to Lower Suicide Rates

Because lithium is so reactive, it is never found as a pure metal in nature. Instead, it forms compounds with other elements, like oxygen and chlorine. Though it makes up a measly 0.0007% of the Earth's crust, this trace amount of lithium may have been secretly influencing human behavior for millennia. How so? Through its ability to ameliorate the symptoms of depression.

Since lithium is in the Earth's crust, tiny amounts of it can work its way into the water supply. And because lithiumisn't distributed equally around the planet, some places naturally have more lithium in the water than others. This has allowed epidemiologists to take advantage of this "natural experiment" to investigate if higher levels of lithium are linked to fewer suicides.

Indeed, that is precisely what a new meta-analysis has found. Published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, researchers determined that for every additional microgram per liter of lithium in the water, the suicide rate dropped by 0.27per 100,000 people per year. That's not a lot, but it certainly could have an effect. Consider that the suicide rate in the U.S. is roughly 14 per 100,000 people per year. If everybody had an additional 4g/L of lithium in their water, maybe the rate would be 13 per 100,000.

Public Health Implications

The authors' work has substantial implications. For one thing, we should devise dietary guidelines that ensure that people get enough lithium in their diets. Additionally, the authors suggest adding it directly to the water supply, but this may be too fraught with ethical problems to attempt.

View original post here:
Natural Lithium in Drinking Water Linked to Lower Suicide Rates - American Council on Science and Health

Physiology

Senior Lecturer or Associate Professor – Teaching & Research – Exercise Science job with FLINDERS UNIVERSITY | 222798 – Times Higher Education…

Clinical Exercise Physiology

Classification:Academic Level C or DSalaryRange:Level C: $119,641 to $137,625 pa,Level D: $143,623 to $158,010 paEmployment Type:Continuing, Full-TimePosition Reports to:Dean (People & Resources), or DelegatePlease Direct Application Enquiries to:cnhs.pc@flinders.edu.auClosing Date:Monday, 21 September 2020 at 11:00 am

Position Summaries:

Senior Lecturer:

The Senior Lecturer will be a key member of the academic staff of Exercise Science and Clinical Exercise Physiology in the College of Nursing and Health Sciences. In addition to contributing to quality research, the position will contribute to administration and leadership within the College and play a lead role in the planning and delivery of topics, including development of teaching materials, delivery of lectures/tutorials or other innovative teaching and learning, including assessment and/or professional activities.

The Senior Lecturer may also be involved in teaching across other courses in the College of Nursing and Health Sciences or other Colleges, where appropriate.

The position will also involve strengthening existing partnerships or exploring new partnerships with external stakeholders that have potential for providing improved teaching, learning and/or research outcomes for the University.

The Senior Lecturer will prioritise, coordinate, monitor workflow and provide informal dayto-day feedback to research support staff and casual academic teaching staff according to the Universitys policies, practices, and standards.

Associate Professor:

The Associate Professor will be a senior member of the academic staff of Exercise Science and Clinical Exercise Physiology in the College of Nursing and Health Sciences. The position will provide leadership in research, teaching and contribute significantly to administrative processes. The Associate Professor may also be involved in teaching across other courses in the College Nursing and Health Sciences, where appropriate.

The position of Associate Professor will provide leadership in strengthening existing partnerships and exploring new partnerships with external stakeholders that have potential for providing improved teaching, learning and/or research outcomes for the University.

The Associate Professor will prioritise, coordinate, monitor workflow and provide informal day-to-day feedback to research support staff and casual academic teaching staff according to the University's policies, practices and standards.

The Associate Professor will also make a significant contribution to leadership and managerial activities of the College and/or University and be recognised for their contribution to the profession at the local, national, and international level.

Please note: Pursuant to Child Safety (Prohibited Persons) Act 2016 (SA) this position has been deemed prescribed. It is an inherent requirement of the position that the successful candidate maintains a current Working With Children Check which is satisfactory to the University.

Avalid National Police Certificate which is satisfactory to the University will also be required before the successful applicant can commence in this position.

Information For Applicants:

You are required to provide asuitability statement ofno more than three pages,addressing the key capabilities of the position description. In addition, you are required to upload your CV.

We are seeking to increase the diversity to improve equal opportunity outcomes for employees, and therefore we encourage female applicants, people with a disability and/or people from Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent to apply.

This position closes onMonday, 21 September 20202 at 11:00 am (ACST), however, we reserve the right to progress late applications.

Please note, applications sent via agencies will not be accepted.

Follow this link:
Senior Lecturer or Associate Professor - Teaching & Research - Exercise Science job with FLINDERS UNIVERSITY | 222798 - Times Higher Education...

Physiology

Scientists Explore Why Some People Are Able To Live With An Infection Unscathed – Public Radio Tulsa

One of the reasons Covid-19 has spread so swiftly around the globe is that for the first days after infection, people feel healthy. Instead of staying home in bed, they may be out and about, unknowingly passing the virus along. But in addition to these pre-symptomatic patients, the relentless silent spread of this pandemic is also facilitated by a more mysterious group of people: the so-called asymptomatics.

According to various estimates, between 20 and 45 percent of the people who get COVID-19 and possibly more, according to a recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sail through a coronavirus infection without realizing they ever had it. No fever or chills. No loss of smell or taste. No breathing difficulties. They don't feel a thing.

Asymptomatic cases are not unique to COVID-19. They occur with the regular flu, and probably also featured in the 1918 pandemic, according to epidemiologist Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London. But scientists aren't sure why certain people weather COVID-19 unscathed. "That is a tremendous mystery at this point," says Donald Thea, an infectious disease expert at Boston University's School of Public Health.

The prevailing theory is that their immune systems fight off the virus so efficiently that they never get sick. But some scientists are confident that the immune system's aggressive response, the churning out of antibodies and other molecules to eliminate an infection, is only part of the story.

These experts are learning that the human body may not always wage an all-out war on viruses and other pathogens. It may also be capable of accommodating an infection, sometimes so seamlessly that no symptoms emerge. This phenomenon, known as disease tolerance, is well-known in plants but has only been documented in animals within the last 15 years.

Hints that 'disease tolerance' is at work

Disease tolerance is the ability of an individual, due to a genetic predisposition or some aspect of behavior or lifestyle, to thrive despite being infected with an amount of pathogen that sickens others. Tolerance takes different forms, depending on the infection. For example, when infected with cholera, which causes watery diarrhea that can quickly kill through dehydration, the body might mobilize mechanisms that maintain fluid and electrolyte balance. During other infections, the body might tweak metabolism or activate gut microbes whatever internal adjustment is needed to prevent or repair tissue damage or to make a germ less vicious.

"Why, if they have these abnormalities, are they healthy? Potentially because they have disease tolerance mechanisms engaged. These are the people we need to study." - Janelle Ayres, physiologist, Salk Institute for Biological Studies

Researchers who study these processes rely on invasive experiments that cannot be done in people. Nevertheless, they view asymptomatic infections as evidence that disease tolerance occurs in humans. At least 90 percent of those infected with the tuberculosis bacterium don't get sick. The same is true for many of the 1.5 billion of people globally who live with parasitic worms called helminths in their intestines. "Despite the fact that these worms are very large organisms and they basically migrate through your tissues and cause damage, many people are asymptomatic. They don't even know they're infected," says Irah King, a professor of immunology at McGill University. "And so then the question becomes, what does the body do to tolerate these types of invasive infections?"

While scientists have observed the physiological processes that minimize tissue damage during infections in animals for decades, it's only more recently that they've begun to think about them in terms of disease tolerance. For example, King and colleagues have identified specific immune cells in mice that increase the resilience of blood vessels during a helminth infection, leading to less intestinal bleeding, even when the same number of worms are present.

"This has been demonstrated in plants, bacteria, other mammalian species," King says.

"Why would we think that humans would not have developed these types of mechanisms to promote and maintain our health in the face of infection?" he adds.

Maybe germs aren't the enemy: A more nuanced view

In a recent Frontiers in Immunology editorial, King and his McGill colleague Maziar Divangahi describe their long-term hopes for the field: A deeper understanding of disease tolerance, they write, could lead to "a new golden age of infectious disease research and discovery."

Scientists have traditionally viewed germs as the enemy, an approach that has generated invaluable antibiotics and vaccines. But more recently, researchers have come to understand that the human body is colonized by trillions of microbes that are essential to optimal health, and that the relationship between humans and germs is more nuanced.

Meddlesome viruses and bacteria have been around since life began, so it makes sense that animals evolved ways to manage as well as fight them. Attacking a pathogen can be effective, but it can also backfire. For one thing, infectious agents find ways to evade the immune system. Moreover, the immune response itself, if unchecked, can turn lethal, applying its destructive force to the body's own organs.

"With things like COVID, I think it's going to be very parallel to TB, where you have this Goldilocks situation," says Andrew Olive, an immunologist at Michigan State University, "where you need that perfect amount of inflammation to control the virus and not damage the lungs."

Some of the key disease tolerance mechanisms scientists have identified aim to keep inflammation within that narrow window. For example, immune cells called alveolar macrophages in the lung suppress inflammation once the threat posed by the pathogen diminishes.

Much is still unknown about why there is such a wide range of responses to COVID-19, from asymptomatic to mildly sick to out of commission for weeks at home to full-on organ failure. "It's very, very early days here," says Andrew Read, an infectious disease expert at Pennsylvania State University who helped identify disease tolerance in animals. Read believes disease tolerance may at least partially explain why some infected people have mild symptoms or none at all. This may be because they're better at scavenging toxic byproducts, he says, "or replenishing their lung tissues at faster rates, those sorts of things."

Asymptomatic COVID-19 infections

The mainstream scientific view of asymptomatics is that their immune systems are especially well-tuned. This could explain why children and young adults make up the majority of people without symptoms because the immune system naturally deteriorates with age. It's also possible that the immune systems of asymptomatics have been primed by a previous infection with a milder coronavirus, like those that cause the common cold.

Asymptomatic cases don't get much attention from medical researchers, in part because these people don't go to the doctor and thus are tough to track down. But Janelle Ayres, a physiologist and infectious disease expert at the Salk Institute For Biological Studies who has been a leader in disease tolerance research, studies precisely the mice that don't get sick.

The staple of this research is something called the "lethal dose 50" test, which consists of giving a group of mice enough pathogen to kill half. By comparing the mice that live with those that die, she pinpoints the specific aspects of their physiology that enable them to survive the infection. She has performed this experiment scores of times using a variety of pathogens. The goal is to figure out how to activate health-sustaining responses in all animals.

A hallmark of these experiments and something that surprised her at first is that the half that survive the lethal dose are perky. They are completely unruffled by the same quantity of pathogen that kills their counterparts. "I thought going into this ... that all would get sick, that half would live and half would die, but that isn't what I found," Ayres says. "I found that half got sick and died, and the other half never got sick and lived."

Ayres sees something similar happening in the COVID-19 pandemic. Like her mice, asymptomatic people infected with the novel coronavirus seem to have similar amounts of the virus in their bodies as the people who fall ill, yet for some reason they stay healthy. Studies show that their lungs often display damage on CT scans, yet they are not struggling for breath (though it remains to be seen whether they will fully escape long-term impacts). Moreover, a small recent study suggests that people who are asymptomatic mount a weaker immune response than those who get sick suggesting that mechanisms are at work that have nothing to do with fighting infection.

"Why, if they have these abnormalities, are they healthy?" asks Ayres. "Potentially because they have disease tolerance mechanisms engaged. These are the people we need to study."

The goal of disease tolerance research is to decipher the mechanisms that keep infected people healthy and turn them into therapies that benefit everyone. "You want to have a drought-tolerant plant, for obvious reasons, so why wouldn't we want to have a virus-tolerant person?" Read asks.

A 2018 experiment in Ayres' lab offered proof of concept for that goal. The team gave a diarrhea-causing infection to mice in a lethal dose 50 trial, then compared tissue from the mice that died with those that survived, looking for differences. They discovered that the asymptomatic mice had utilized their iron stores to route extra glucose to the hungry bacteria, and that the pacified germs no longer posed a threat. The team subsequently turned this observation into a treatment. In further experiments, they administered iron supplements to the mice and all the animals survived, even when the pathogen dose was upped a thousandfold.

When the pandemic hit, Ayres was already studying mice with pneumonia and the signature malady of COVID-19, acute respiratory distress syndrome, which can be triggered by various infections. Her lab has identified markers that may inform candidate pathways to target for treatment. The next step is to compare people who progressed to severe stages of COVID-19 with those who are asymptomatic to see whether markers emerge that resemble the ones she's found in mice.

If a medicine is developed, it would work differently from anything that's currently on the market because it would be lung-specific, not disease-specific, and would ease respiratory distress regardless of which pathogen is responsible.

But intriguing as this prospect is, most experts caution that disease tolerance is a new field and tangible benefits are likely many years off. The work involves measuring not only symptoms but the levels of a pathogen in the body, which means killing an animal and searching all of its tissues. "You can't really do controlled biological experiments in humans," Olive says.

In addition, there are countless disease tolerance pathways. "Every time we figure one out, we find we have 10 more things we don't understand," King says. Things will differ with each disease, he adds, "so that becomes a bit overwhelming."

Nevertheless, a growing number of experts agree that disease tolerance research could have profound implications for treating infectious disease in the future. Microbiology and infectious disease research has "all been focused on the pathogen as an invader that has to be eliminated some way," says virologist Jeremy Luban of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. And as Ayres makes clear, he says, "what we really should be thinking about is how do we keep the person from getting sick."

Emily Laber-Warren directs the health and science reporting program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

This story was produced by Undark, a nonprofit, editorially independent digital magazine exploring the intersection of science and society.

Continue reading here:
Scientists Explore Why Some People Are Able To Live With An Infection Unscathed - Public Radio Tulsa

Cell Biology

Cells Solve an English Hedge Maze with the Same Skills They Use to Traverse the Body – Scientific American

From the embryonic stages to late life, cells often make incredible journeys, sometimes even traversing an entire organism. They reach their destination by chemotaxis, following signals that lead them to the goal like a chemical yellow brick road. The catch is that different levels, or gradients, of a chemical drawing cells to a target only work over short distances. What guides them over the hills and valleys of a longer journey through the body has been unclear.

Findings reported on August 27 in Science show how two kinds of cellsone a dirt-dwelling amoeba and the other a mouse cancer cell linemanage these seemingly impossible journeys. The key is that the cells do not work along a preexisting gradient but create one themselves by breaking down the chemical lure as they encounter it. Like gathering string while finding ones way out of a labyrinth, the chemical-free path they leave behind keeps them binding toand followingthe guide in front of them.

Take melanoma cells, which are among the most avidly metastasizing tumor cells. Once they have broken down a chemoattractant called lysophosphatidic acid locally in the tumor, they move toward higher levels of the molecule away from the tumor. The cells forge a path into the bloodstream, where lysophosphatidic acid is relatively uniformly distributed. The melanoma cells break the chemical down as they go, leaving a high concentration of it in front of them that they follow and consume, Pac-Man-like, whereas low levels remain behind.

The research team confirmed the use of this tactic in both an amoeba and a mammalian cell line, suggesting a commonality among cells engaged in long-distance orienteering. That outcome is really interesting and demonstrates that self-generated gradients are a universal mechanism for steering directional migration of groups of cells for long distances, says Pablo Sez, a professor and group leader in the department of biochemistry and molecular cell biology at the University Medical Center HamburgEppendorf in Germany, who was not involved in the work. He adds that the result highlights the usefulness of some of the techniques the researchers used, including mathematical modeling to predict how the cells might behave and employing mazes to test those predictions.

In navigating real mazes, cells broke down an attractant chemical (purple), creating a gradient that left more of it ahead and less of it behind. This high-to-low gradient drew the Pac-Man-like cells forward. Credit: Luke Tweedy, Michele Zagnoni and Cancer Research UK

In fact, Luke Tweedy, a postdoctoral research associate at the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research in Scotland and his colleagues reasoned that following a winding path through the complex topography of an organism might be a lot like navigating a labyrinth. To test their idea, they used two kinds of cells: the amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum, or Dicty for short, and mouse pancreatic cancer cells. Dicty cells were especially of interest because of their proficiency at breaking down the chemical yellow brick road as they travel it so that the right path is always before them. With this tendency to gather string as it moves along, Dicty was an exemplary candidate for maze solvinga chemotactic prodigy, as Tweedy puts it.

Tweedy and his colleagues found that Dicty lived up to its reputation, rapidly solving a complex maze in an hour that could take the tortoiselike pancreatic cancer cells several days. The researchers tested the cells in a lot of different mazes, some with shorter versus longer dead ends and different forks. When cells faced a choice between a dead end and a true path, a few wayward ones would dispatch all of the chemoattractant trapped in the cul-de-sac, and the rest of them would orient to the other fork that was still flowing with the alluring molecules.

The most memorable test the investigators used was the one they modeled on the famous maze at Hampton Court Palace near London. They chose it, Tweedy says, for the razzle-dazzle and to capture the imagination. Dicty, the prodigy protist, not only solved this maze but also managed to use its self-generating gradient skills to find a shortcut.

Researchers also brought incomputational modelsto predict cell behavior, which could have implications for human conditions that involve migrating cells. An example is human cancer cells that have something in common with amoebaswhether that connection involves the normal migration of immune cells or the pathological journey of metastatic cancer cells They use the same fundamental mechanism of migration, [in which] receptors detect attractants and guide the cytoskeleton to move the cell.

In fact, the similarities are strong enough that Tweedy sees many ways to bridge the amoeba-human-cell gap, including applying maze-solving ideas to predicting the path that the cancer cells of glioblastoma follow.

The results could also offer a rare window into some early processes in mammalian embryos. The cells that eventually set up shop in the gonads start far away from their target early in an embryos development. These so-called germ cells have to move over embryonic hill and dale to get to the appropriate destination. If the behavior of Dicty or the much slower pancreatic cancer cells is universal, then these germ cells may use a similar tactic to get to the future gonads and avoid taking a wrong turn toward, say, the gut. The implication is that building complex organisms sometimes means that cells only get where they are going by making their own way.

Read Our 175th Anniversary Issue

Read Now

Go here to read the rest:
Cells Solve an English Hedge Maze with the Same Skills They Use to Traverse the Body - Scientific American