Human Behavior

Cognition, Brain, & Behavior | Department of Psychology

Research in the Cognition, Brain, and Behavior (CBB) group includes studies of sensation and perception, learning and memory, attention, mental imagery, conceptual representation, aging, language, emotion, motor control, social cognition, moral decision making, and neurological disorders. The subjects for these studies range from normal human adults and infants to brain-damaged patients, and various non-human primate and avian species. Methodologies include computer-based behavioral tests and web-based surveys to assess functional patterns in behavior, as well as functional neuroimaging techniques (such as magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography and transcranial magnetic stimulation) to study the neural bases of various components of cognition and behavior.

CBB Research Seminars

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Cognition, Brain, & Behavior | Department of Psychology

Human Behavior

Can Genetics Explain Human Behavior? | The Scientist Magazine

As author George R.R. Martin would attest, good writing takes time. For eons, DNA has been writing genetic scripts for survival machines, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkinss term for living organismstheir primary purpose being to live long enough to propagate their DNA. As author Samuel Butler recognized in 1877, A hen is only an eggs way of making another egg.

But our planet has limited resources, so survival machines that had a leg up on the competition won the DNA replication relay. Selfish genes were locked in an arms race to craft survival machines that were better, stronger, faster. About 600 million years ago, an ancestral neuron emerged that heralded a new weapon: intelligence. It took nearly 4 billion years, but DNA has finally built a survival machine intelligent enough to expose DNAs game. We are the first species to meet our maker.

The realization that were an apparatus for the dissemination of genes is quite different from traditional creationist narratives. It is even more humbling to reflect on the power of a related revelation: instead of passively watching genetic stories unfold, we can now become the authors. Are we ready for this awesome responsibility? In just a half century, we resolved the structure of DNA, made genome sequencing easy, and discovered ways to edit genes. Although we dont fully understand its language, some are now eager to take a red pen to the genome. With the help of the first human genome, published in 2003, researchers have revealed genes involved in certain diseases, and this knowledge is guiding the discovery of novel therapeutics.

But what about more-complex phenotypes like personality and behavior? We regularly hear news about the identification of a gene for procrastination, extraversion, alcoholism, liberalism, adultery, andwell, you name it. One study claims to have found genes that influence when a person loses their virginity! DNA screening services promise to illuminate ancestry, predispositions for disease, even certain behavioral tendencies. But is gazing at ones DNA sequence a robust method for predicting future outcomes, or is it a modern form of phrenology? This is one of the key questions that prompted me to write Pleased to Meet Me, a book that describes how genes work with other factors to make us who we are.

Developmental biologists have long suspected that there must be more to survival machines than their genes, vaguely calling it epigenetics (beyond genes). If all cells in the body possess the same DNA sequence, why do some become brain cells and others heart cells? DNA sequences do not change over our lifetimes, so what brings about the dramatic transformations of puberty? Long story short, the expression of the genome is just as important as the genome itself. Of course, much of this is determined by genes encoding transcription factors that regulate gene expression. But remarkably, increasing evidence suggests that our environment also affects the expressed genome through epigenetics, by chemically altering DNA itself or the proteins associated with it. Genetic analysis of children who suffered abuse and later became suicidal, for example, showed increased DNA methylation at their glucocorticoid receptor gene, which compromises the ability to manage stress.

Epigenetics demonstrates that nature and nurture are two sides of the same coin. The phenotypes arising from our genes are highly contextual, and the you that exists today might have been very different had you been conceived or raised in a different environment. Studies have also found that our microbiomes and nefarious parasites like Toxoplasma gondii(which dwells in the brains of billions of people) produce factors that may alter gene expression in the host. More recent studies show that mRNA can also be modified in ways that affect protein synthesis, a process called epitranscriptomics that adds yet another layer of complexity to the prediction of phenotypes from genotypes.

For some, the realization that biological forces shape who we are is disconcerting, but this knowledge is power. By understanding how genes, epigenetics, and epitranscriptomics function in the context of our microbiome and environment, we will be in a better position to develop new approaches to treat undesirable behaviors. Weve met our maker, but with the advent of gene editing, the development of epigenetic drugs, and the ability to remodel our microbiome, were on course to take control of our own destiny.

Bill Sullivanis a professor of pharmacology and microbiology at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, where he studies infectious disease and genetics.Read an excerptofPleased to Meet Me: Genes, Germs, and the Curious Forces That Make Us Who We Areat the-scientist.com.

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Can Genetics Explain Human Behavior? | The Scientist Magazine

Human Behavior

The Integrated Liberal Arts Approach: The Curricular Vaccine Higher Education Needs Now More Than Ever – Diverse: Issues in Higher Education

May 19, 2020 | :

by Pareena G. Lawrence

There is both hope and important lessons we can glean from the experience of the Antonine Plague that nearly ended the Roman empire 200 years ahead of schedule. Roman society, however, under Emperor Aurelius rebounded after the Antonine Plague of 165 CE, the exact nature of which remains unknown. The empire under Marcus Aurelius, according to historian Edward Gibbon was a time when the human race was most happy and prosperous, even though it encountered enormous and enduring human misfortunes.

There are important parallels between the Roman Empire of the second century CE and current US societyas both enjoyed superpower status when it came to military might and dominance with respect to culture, economics, and politics. The success of the Roman empire was attributed to good governance that emphasized community, planning, and working together to rebuild. So, which lessons are transferable as we navigate through the present global pandemic and crisis?

As leaders and members of the higher education community, we have an important role to play by drawing from these lessons and implications, from rebuilding community outreach and partnerships, engaging in new research with an increased emphasis on fiscal and social responsibility, to providing lessons in wide-ranging broad-based planning and coordination. In this essay, I could focus on the financial implications and the decimated business model or the new modes of more effectively delivering education from online learning to stackable micro-credentials. Nor is this article about the wraparound services that are necessary for our students to succeed in college, services like advising, tutoring, access to technology, a support structure of friends and other members of the community, healthcare and counseling, and basic needs such as food and safe spaces.

Here I focus on one critical question that is relevant to the future of higher education institutions: what can you teach me that specializing in my discipline/major cannot? Or the bigger question, why should I attend a traditional college that was founded on the principles of a liberal arts education? What will I learn that is so different?

A recent article, The End of Economics, by Fareed Zakaria, reminded me of how academic specialization and the division of various academic fields by subject matter have impacted the academy, research programs, policymaking, and the workplace. My discipline, Economics, typically studies the allocation of scarce resources with prices serving as the primary signaling mechanism, and the construct of markets and economic organizations. Disciplines can also be defined by methodology or approach; for example, Economics could be defined by how it approaches decision-making, centered on models of rational optimization. However, as one might suspect, subject matter and methodology do not perfectly intersect or line up together.

Dr. Pareena G. Lawrence

As an example, for the past 30 years, Behavioral Economics has established an increasingly strong foothold in understanding the role of human behavior in economic decision-making. Leading research in the fields of Neuroscience, Psychology, Anthropology, and Sociology among others, influence our understanding of the behavior of consumers, producers, workers and investors as economic agents and question the dominance of the rational optimizing model as the primary framework to study economic problems. Methodologically, Economics has learned a lot from the use of randomized control trials that first originated in the field of early medicine and then psychology. These connections across disciplines are easier to make if one is intentionally exposed to different approaches across the curriculum, and we purposefully spend time on reflection and making meaningful connections across the core curriculum.

And that is a good thing for all of us, especially those of us that have argued that disciplinary boundaries are human-made and they must be questioned and crossed to better understand the messy world we live in and to address the complex problems that we face that are not solvable within the domain of a single discipline. The often-maligned liberal arts core curriculum, also called the general education program when done right offered by universities and colleges in the United States, offers the best solution to train our minds to think creatively in holistic ways that are not confined to disciplinary thinking and a single way of knowing. This curriculum founded on the principle that there are multiple ways of knowing and developing an understanding of how human knowledge allows us to step outside of our disciplines and our familiar methodology of addressing problems to think outside our disciplinary box.

The coursework that makes up the core liberal arts curriculum develops breadth of knowledge and perspective as students explore how the study of history helps us to understand the human experience and evaluate and conduct historical research. A course in science helps us better comprehend the natural world and the processes of scientific experimentation to create scientifically literate citizens. This approach is precisely what we need if we are serious about addressing complex real-world problems that do not nicely fit into one of the human-made disciplinary confines we have created.

However, the all too typical smorgasbord approach to general education (or core curriculum) that we currently have, where students take these required courses from a long list of alternatives to get them out of the way, is the wrong approach. At many schools, students must take anywhere between 30 to 60 credits of core curriculum coursework. That is a full one to two years of coursework. What a shame if we treat it as something to get out of the way or those unjust requirements we impose on our students, which keeps them from learning what they came to college to learn, be it Business, Pre-Med, or Political Science. We must be more intentional in our approach as we craft a core curriculum that delivers on developing breadth in knowledge and exposes our students to how different disciplines approach the pursuit of knowledge and understanding issues in their respective fields. It is not enough to introduce our students to the different disciplinary dots we must help them to connect these dots in a coherent way.

Further, it must go beyond coursework. As we re-envision pedagogy and engagement and blur the boundaries between the academic world and the world that surrounds us, how can we more intentionally connect our students to engaging with and understanding and untangling messy complex problems in our communities? Can we develop community-based learning projects that engage students with their communities and ask them to use their multidisciplinary skills to better understand and seek creative solutions?

Perhaps the COVID-19 pandemic that we are all battling on a global scale will serve as a great reminder that we need an integrated multidisciplinary lens to create better models, predictions, and policies to understand, prevent and contain the pandemic. That the lack of clear answers and contradictory theories is how we stretch the boundaries of knowledge and the dogged pursuit of understanding the issues and finding solutions is how we acquire agency. It could be the catalyst to help us refocus on the purpose of the core curriculum and how we deliver on its promise, pushing us out of our comfortable disciplinary silos and pushing us towards the unknown and the unmastered curriculum. This will require tools that go beyond technical skills and experience.

The global economic and other consequences of this pandemic and policy responses can be best understood via the lens of philosophy (utilitarian theory), history (past plagues), geography (spatial human interaction patterns), politics (government and power structures), science (understanding scientific research methodology and protocols) and the limitation of technology (assuming it will solve all our problems) to list a few interconnected disciplines. I cannot think of a better way to prepare leaders, change-makers, and professionals of the future than grounding them in the foundational principles of the liberal arts curriculum thats built on intentionality, seeing connections and understanding diverse disciplinary perspectives and traditions, understanding ambiguity, confronting the fact that we do not know and do not understand, and integrating that knowledge when solving complex problems or confronting messy conundrums. We must reclaim who we are, even as we adapt and lead in meeting current and future societal needs. We are more than a credentialing center, we are first and foremost a learning and a knowledge creation center, serving the greater good, that is intrinsically connected to our surrounding communities and region which makes standardization in higher education both difficult and undesirable. Reclaiming our larger diverse purpose is critical as the very future of higher education depends upon it.

Dr. Pareena G. Lawrence is a visiting fellow at the MacMillan Center at Yale University. She is the former president of Hollins University.

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The Integrated Liberal Arts Approach: The Curricular Vaccine Higher Education Needs Now More Than Ever - Diverse: Issues in Higher Education

Human Behavior

WSU study: Parts of the world will be too hot for 3.5B people if we don’t do something drastic – Pacific Northwest Inlander

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Photo by flickr user flowcomm (Creative Commons)

If nothing dramatic changes, about one-third of people on Earth will live somewhere with an average temperature as hot as the Sahara Desert in 50 years, and most of those 3.5 billion people will likely be forced to migrate based on human behavior over the last 6,000 years, according to a new study.

When a group of researchers from China, Japan, Europe and the U.S. set out to answer that question, the results were so shocking they spent another year analyzing the numbers to make sure they were on the right track before publishing the results earlier this month.

The concerning results were the same: In 50 years as many as 3.5 billion people could be pushed to migrate away from their homes, because the places where they live will have become uncomfortably hot, outside the "niche" temperature range that humans have gravitated toward for the last 6,000 years.

For every degree centigrade of warming that's avoided, 1 billion fewer people would likely move. But even under the scenario with the most action by governments around the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change, the researchers still estimate 1 billion people could be displaced 50 years from now.

That's staggering if you consider the political tensions that already exist with only a few hundred million people worldwide living somewhere other than their birthplace, explains Tim Kohler, an archaeology professor at Washington State University who helped look at human behavior over the last 6,000 years for the study.

"If 1 billion people is the best-case scenario, that's huge," Kohler says. "For a little bit of context, there's something on the order of 250 million people right now living outside the countries they were born in."

Most people don't want to leave the place they were born, Kohler says. But if you look at human history over the last several thousand years, most people have migrated to zones of the Earth that tend to have average temperatures of 11 to 15 degrees Celsius (52 to 59 degrees Fahrenheit), with most of the remainder living in places with an average of 20 to 25 degrees Celsius (68 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit).

"Migration is ordinarily not a first choice for populations. Normally they like to stay where they are and at least make do," Kohler says. "The more investment you have in a place, the harder it is to leave. People would mostly rather stay and adapt, but thats not going to be such an easy job in most places."

It was somewhat surprising to Kohler that the temperature niche was so constant over time, whether people were hunter-gatherers or farmers with developed agriculture. That's not to say that all people live in that niche, but the vast majority do, he says, and importantly, the most successful civilizations tend to be in that range.

The researchers used potential warming scenarios outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The headline-grabbing figure the one showing 3.5 billion people could be displaced is based on the status quo,Kohler says. If governments don't take drastic action, most people will live in places that are 7.5 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial averages. Under that scenario, nearly one-third of the world's people would live somewhere warmer than 29 degrees Celsius on average (84.2 degrees Fahrenheit).

But there's reason to believe that investments in clean energy and movement away from fossil fuelscould already be putting us on the path to a somewhat smaller increase, Kohler says.

Unfortunately, while migration is already something that causes tension, Kohler says, another complicating factor is that the places that will see the largest increase in temperature are also the most likely to see a boom in population. And again, even in the best-case scenario in the study, four times as many people as currently live outside their homelands would likely be displaced.

"The very places that are going to be most difficult for people to remain in are the places right now where the population growth rates are the highest," Kohler says. "So you have this unfortunate collision between population and climate futures."

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WSU study: Parts of the world will be too hot for 3.5B people if we don't do something drastic - Pacific Northwest Inlander

Human Behavior

The Key to Building a Successful Remote Organization? Data. – Harvard Business Review

The Covid-19 crisis forced many businesses to suddenly adapt to having an entirely remote workforce. And once we all got past the novel challenges of family interruptions, #funnycatvideos, and virtual etiquette, a more complex problem raised its head: How do you work together when you are, in fact, alone?

For a virtual organization to function, geographically dispersed teams need the ability to communicate effectively. But thats only half the story. Decision-making has to be delegated and decentralized as well and that means using data to shake up your culture.

Centralized offices have one big advantage: you can get everyone in a room until they solve a problem. But when you work virtually, you have to plan every part of the decision-making process, especially when it is asynchronous. Small things that we take for granted in physical meetings such as body language, non-verbal agreement, and interpersonal connections require a different kind ofattentionwhen you work remotely. That, however, may be an advantage.

Consider a company that was born digital, like workflow automation company Zapier, which was designed to operate with virtual teams from the outset. The coronavirus crisis didnt force the company to manage a complex transformation in work style. For them, there is no such thing as remote work only work.

I spoke with Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, who is adamant that the discipline that comes with distributed decision-making can bring out the best in us. In his view, when it comes to managing people and outcomes, traditional organizations let leaders get away with too much: In traditional organizations, leaders can manage by presence you can see your folks, and you can see work getting done, he says. But when you cant see your team, when youre not sure whats happening, or you literally dont know if theyre at work or not you have to redesign how you manage your workforce from the ground up. That forces you to be a better leader and a better manager.

For many traditional organizations, sending teams home was a direct response to emergency stay at home orders not an organizational design choice. When your entire head office decamps to WFH, the hardest part to manage is not the technology or connectivity, but the culture shock.

Didier Elzinga, CEO of Culture Amp, a software firm that helps organizations track employee engagement and performance, believes that the shift to remote work will have profound implications for the organizational culture of big companies, especially when it comes to giving distributed teams autonomy to make their own decisions.

Leaders struggle to delegate when they wrongly believe that only certain people in the hierarchy can make a particular decision someone who has earned the right to do so on account of their experience or skill. Actually, he says, it is because they have the context that somebody else doesnt have. Fortunately, data is a pathway to context.

When the pandemic hit, the first thing Culture Amp did was to address the impact that the crisis was having on the speed of their decision-making. Weve created a daily situation room, he says, where we track everything thats changed overnight, internal to the business, but also in the external world.

The situation room at Culture Amp is a daily meeting with about 20 leaders where they run through a deck of the latest information related to the crisis, which is then published on an open channel on Slack. Once they gave people the data they needed to contextualize their decisions, Elzinga and his team made an exciting discovery. Leaders were more comfortable distributing authority and allowing teams to make their own informed decisions, without wasting time chasing down information and approvals. Autonomy means getting to make your own decisions, and being trusted to make your own decisions, argues Elzinga. But it also means trusting others to make decisions on your behalf, too.

When it comes to building trust, a little bit of structure goes a long way. At Zapier, distributed teams use a framework called DACI, which stands for driver, approver, consulted, andinformed. Anyone involved in a decision will play one of four roles: a person responsible for driving the work and collecting the relevant data; an approver who gives the go-ahead; consultants who can provide expert opinions; and finally the informed, who need to know about the outcome because it impacts the work that they do. Knowing decision roles upfront speeds up team interactions and avoids ambiguities that can cause delays or friction.

Transparency is critical at both of these organizations. Major decisions at Zapier are documented in a decision logcalled Async, which is an internal tool that they built.The purpose of Async is to surface important conversations that might get lost in fast-paced Slack forums. It replaces internal email and acts as a searchable archive for anyone on the team to reference old discussions and keep up with company updates. According to Foster, Slack is where the teams at Zapier talk about work, while Async is where they share work with the rest of the team.

In this respect, distributed organizations are typically ahead of more traditional ones where documentation can be sparse or buried in private email chains. In theory, explains Foster, this means we should get better at making decisions over time because everyone can benefit from the organizational decision-making muscle.

A good decision will still be wrong if it takes too long. Mars, Incorporated, makers of treats and services for humans and pets alike, was already well advanced in their plans for digital transformation before the crisis hit. However, when I spoke to Sandeep Dadlani, the companys Chief Digital Officer, he explained that the pandemic led Mars to embrace a new internal clock speed. Typically, big global consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies develop a rigid annual plan with their retailers that covers their products, promotions, and inventory. However, in this new world, with rapidly shifting consumer patterns and unpredictable events, rigidity no longer works. In week one of the coronavirus crisis, getting your groceries was not a challenge, says Dadlani. But by week six, suddenly buying groceries online had become 15% of the American market, a number that Mars was trackingto reach five years from now.

With speed now of the essence, or as they call it at Mars, delivering value at 100x,Dadlani realized that the organization needed to reduce some of the subjectivity in communications and decision-making, and encourage their newly remote teams to frame problems in a way that led to scaled-up solutions. Dadlani told me, Our supply chains are built of wonderful leaders who have known each other for many years, who pat each other on the back, and who know how things run because theyre in the factories. They watch the trucks, pick up the phone, and get calls from the retailers. They nudge their other friends and workers to push another batch out or to get another production line changed. But, as the crisis accelerated, Dadlani noticed a behavioral shift. Now that the logistics and technology teams have lost their in-location perspective of the supply chain and can only access raw data about inventory, supplies, materials, and packaging, their interactions have changed. Conversations between remote team members have become more focused and less subjective, productivity has improved, decisions have become more data-driven, and new, more probing questions are being asked: Why is inventory at this level? Can the raw materials in these factories be moved elsewhere? Can we drive a higher throughput? It was, in other words, what the digital transformation team had been trying to achieve for some time.

Organizations like ours have to pivot to identify trends, pick the right business models, fail a few times, and then succeed, he says. At Mars, we call it the Digital Engine: find the problem, solve the problem, and then scale the solution as fast as we can.

Notwithstanding the importance of agility and response time, as companies and teams become more digital, there is a corresponding need for leaders to be able to grasp the nuances and risks of data-driven thinking. At Culture Amp, Elzinga coaches his clients and employees on recognizing the limits of AI and other statistical models especially when it comes to predicting human behavior, or making sensitive hiring and firing decisions. The challenge for us as an industry and for HR in general, he says, is that we have to work not just on finding the answers, but also on data literacy.

Data literacy is a hard-won skill. It does not come easily, even to a generation fluent with apps, emojis, and hashtags. To get there, organizations need to invest in dedicated training and education. At Mars, Dadlani was shocked when an email intended for his technology team inviting them to a course on machine learning accidentally went out to thousands of employees at the firm, and much to his surprise many of those unintended recipients showed up, which changed his thinking about how ready everyone in the organization was to take on the challenges of new technology.

Foster has actively encouraged data literacy programs at Zapier, offering employees a five-part mini-course called The Golden Path to Data, which provides training on using data tools, creating queries, and interpreting results. As a further incentive to upgrade skills, requests to the data team are prioritized for people who have actually done the course.

Foster says, You dont need everyone to be an expert, but the real benefit starts to happen when every team has a data power user in it, which can help the team respond to new questions and challenges faster. And that increases the decision-making velocity thats happening inside the organization.

Data will never be a substitute for genuine social interactions or company culture, but as we build more global, distributed, and virtual organizations, what it offers is something just as important: a common language for transformation.

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The Key to Building a Successful Remote Organization? Data. - Harvard Business Review

Human Behavior

DEM offers tips to prevent conflicts with coyotes – Valley Breeze

5/18/2020

PROVIDENCE DEM has announced that Rhode Islands coyotes are on the move again. Coyotes are intelligent, adaptable, and willing to eat almost any available food whether natural, including small animals, birds, insects, and fruits; scavenged roadkill; or easily obtainable human-provided sources such as garbage, pet food, birdseed, and compost.

DEM officials say that typically, adult male and female coyotes breed in late winter and the female gives birth to a litter of four to eight pups in April. Consisting of the adult pair and the pups, this social unit will be maintained until the pups become yearlings and disperse or get booted out by the parents. Noisy, hungry pups must be fed. That means adult coyotes will be seen and heard foraging and hunting for food in rural, suburban, and even urban Rhode Island neighborhoods over the next several months. As daylight hours increase, adult coyotes may spend more time actively foraging during daytime than they would at other times of the year. DEM advises Rhode Islanders that the best way to minimize interactions and conflicts with coyotes is reducing food sources available to them, either intentionally or unintentionally around our homes and neighborhoods. Coyotes that rely on natural food sources remain wild and wary of humans. Feeding coyotes or any wild animal makes them less fearful of people and they can become casual or even bold when encountering people.

If you see coyotes that are bold and brazen, its often directly related to intentional feeding or easy and reliably available food sources associated with human activities, said DEM wildlife biologist Charles Brown. Intentionally feeding wild animals habituates them, causes them to lose their inherent fear of humans, and may lead to brazen behavior. It also leads to a whole series of problems, including frequenting areas close to homes and preying on domestic animals such as chickens, cats, and small dogs.

Coyotes play an important ecological role by controlling populations of rodents, resident geese, and in some cases white-tailed deer, Brown said. Shy and elusive by nature, most coyotes usually make every attempt to avoid interactions with people. Coyote attacks on people are rare. On the other hand, more than 4.5 million people are bitten by dogs each year in the United States, over half of dog bite injuries occur at home with dogs that are familiar to us, and over 800,000 receive medical attention for dog bites, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

How to cut down on coyote conflicts:Remove attractants from your yard. This means removing all food and water sources like pet food dishes and birdfeeders and keeping barbecue grills clean of grease. Dont put meat or sweet food scraps in your compost pile, and keep compost in secure, vented containers. Put your trash in containers with secure lids and store them in sheds and garages away from doors if possible. Put garbage for pickup outside on the morning of collection, not the night before. If you have fruit trees, pick up fallen fruit.

Cut back brushy edges and dense weeds from around your yard and structures like sheds. These areas provide cover for coyotes and their prey.

Chase coyotes off your property. Keep coyotes wild by hazing them, which means doing things to scare them or chase them away. According to the website CoyoteSmarts.org , the following actions are effective hazing tactics:- Be as big and loud as possible. Do not run or turn your back.- Wave your arms, clap your hands, and shout in an authoritative voice.- Make noise by banging pots and pans or using an air horn or whistle. The sounds also can alert the neighbors.- Throw small stones, sticks, tennis balls, or anything else you can lay your hands on. Remember: the intent is to scare and not to injure.- Shake or throw a coyote shaker a soda can filled with nuts and bolts, pennies, or pebbles and sealed with duct tape.

Protecting pets. Keep pets, particularly cats, indoors. Coyotes dont distinguish between domestic and wild animals and are likely to view cats and small dogs as potential food and larger dogs as competition. For the safety of your pets, always keep them leashed when outdoors and feed them indoors. Outdoor feeding can attract many wild animals. Do not leave small dogs outside unattended, especially at night.

When confronted by a coyote. Stand up and look big. Wave your arms. Yell loudly. Dont lose your head. Keeping an assertive posture and making eye contact will convey a message of authority that coyotes will typically respect. Maintain eye contact. If the coyote does not retreat, walk slowly away toward the house. Do not turn your back on the animal.

Report aggressive behavior. Coyotes that exhibit bold or aggressive behavior towards humans should be treated with caution and reported to authorities. Also, animals that appear or act aggressively or are noticeably sick should be reported to the DEM Division of Law Enforcement (401-222-3070) or to your local animal control officer. Also, any contact between a coyote and a dog or other domestic animal should be immediately reported to your veterinarian and animal control officer.

Never feed coyotes. Feeding coyotes or other wild animals causes behavioral changes that will almost certainly cause unintended problems for neighbors and the animals that were meant to benefit. Report neighbors that are feeding coyotes to the DEM Division of Law Enforcement (401-222-3070) or to your local animal control officer.

Adult female coyotes typically weigh 33-40 pounds, while males typically weigh 34-47 pounds. They often look heavier because of their thick fur. The first appearance of coyotes in Rhode Island occurred in the mid-1960s, part of a range expansion into the eastern United States that began at the end of the 19th century. Coyotes can currently be found in all Rhode Island communities except New Shoreham. They may hunt and travel alone or sometimes will travel as a group, usually an adult pair with their offspring from the most recent litter. In our area, coyotes are mostly nocturnal, mainly to avoid interactions with people. They remain active year-round and do not hibernate. Coyote pairs are territorial and will exclude other coyotes from their established territory.

Coyotes are now well established as part of our native fauna and unless you live on Block Island, you can expect that coyotes occur in your town or neighborhood and at some point, you may actually see one in your yard, on the bike path, or crossing a farm field, said DEM wildlife biologist Charles Brown. Not all coyotes exhibit bad traits and those that do have likely been encouraged or conditioned to behave that way because of human behavior.

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DEM offers tips to prevent conflicts with coyotes - Valley Breeze

Human Behavior

More people are speeding during the pandemic, but tickets are down 93% – IndyStar

Drone video above Downtown Indianapolis on Monday, March 23, 2020, shows a drastic reduction in people and traffic during the coronavirus pandemic. Indianapolis Star

Traffic is down. Speeds areup.

But speeding tickets written by State Policeare down, too. They're down more than twiceas muchas traffic volume.

The reason for the disproportionate decrease in tickets, State Police say,has to do with the reason traffic was down in the first place: safety precautions around the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Traffic declined in the weeks after Gov. Eric Holcomb's first stay-at-home order took effect at 11:59 p.m. on March 24.

The number of vehicles on the roads in the Indianapolis area March 24 through April 30 dropped 40%fromlast year, according to an IndyStar analysis of data from seven locations monitored by the Indiana Department of Transportation. The locations include two interstates, a U.S. highway, three state routes, and Binford Boulevard.

And when fewer vehicles are on a roadway, drivers are likely to drive faster. It's science.

Civil engineering professor Darcy Bullock teaches this to his undergraduate engineering students at Purdue University.

Violating the order:How police, prosecutors decide whether to punish

Different scientific modelsshow this, but he said the core of it is simple: When there are fewer cars out there, people drive faster.The civil engineer said the exact reason whyis beyond his expertise. Its not good or responsible for me to speculate on human behavior, he said.

The science has become reality. Ron Galaviz, an Indiana State Police spokesperson, said speeds are up "across the board" not just in Indiana but nationwide.

Some of it is extreme. He referenced a driver Michigan State Police ticketed for going 180 mph on a 70 mph highway.

"We have seen an increase of high speeds," said Sgt. John Perrine, an Indiana State Police public information officer for the Indianapolis area.

If you sit somewhere long enough, youre bound to find somebody driving ridiculously fast," he said."But the combination of that and the lack of traffic on the road kind of opened the door for people that wanted to drive a little bit faster.

With higher speeds comes more opportunity for speeding tickets, yet that's not what happened.

The number of speeding tickets written by Indiana State Police troopers in Indianapolis and the doughnut counties March 24 through April 30 dropped by 93%fromlast year to this year, according to data from State Police. That is more than twicethe decrease in traffic volume over the same days.

The tickets include anything related to speed, which may include offenses like reckless driving.

The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department has also written fewer speeding tickets since the governor's stay-at-home order, Chief Communications OfficerAliyaWishner said. She said city police haven't seena great increase in speeding on city streets. This may be because the increase in speed caused by less traffic volume is even more common on large multi-lane routes like interstates.

The difference in citations issued by State Policeis caused in part by officers trying to follow social distancing guidelines, Perrine with ISP told IndyStar. He said officers are thinking about the safety of the person they're stopping in addition to their own safety.

Our officers were using their discretion in an effort to keep everyone safe. We cant just ignore the violations of course, but we also have discretion, and that discretion allows us to pull over the most dangerous of the drivers.

Can they pull me over?What to know about driving during Indiana's stay-at-home order

Perrine said troopers are getting creative to encourage drivers to slow down without being ticketed, though he wouldn't share many details.

"Those are the kind of things we want to keep closer to the vest," Perrine said."For a very broad example, we encouraged our troopers to sit in the crossovers on the highways so that people could see them. ...Instead of sitting in a hiding spot, we wanted them to sit out in the open so theyre visible, and hopefully that in itself could generate some of that compliance."

Engineering professor Bullock said law enforcement, like the troopers often seen oninterstates,is effective at getting people to slow down while they're out there, but the effect goes away when the troopers do.

When officers are out patrolling, there are brake lights and people slow down, he said. But "as soon as they're gone, there's no kind of history of them being out there." Drivers resume the speed they would otherwise travel.

"It's challenging for law enforcement," Bullock said."They can work hard, but it's really, really hard for them to get ubiquitous coverage consistently."

Bullock is looking at the bright side, though.

"The glass half full is let's hope the economy improves and Hoosiers are out there driving and the problem goes away."

EmailIndyStar digital producer Ethan May at emay@indystar.com.Follow him on Twitter @EthanMayJ.

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More people are speeding during the pandemic, but tickets are down 93% - IndyStar

Human Behavior

EGBA: concerns over forced limitations – Gambling Insider – In-depth Analysis for the Gaming Industry

The European Betting and Gaming Association (EGBA) supports the Spelinspektionens advice against government-imposed mandatory deposit limits. The Swedish gambling regulator is concerned over channelisation.

Swedens health minister Ardalan Shekarabi proposed a list of restrictions related to online gambling, including a weekly deposit limit of 5000 SEK (471). Spelinspektionenwarned the restrictions could do more damage than good if players turned to illegal operators where they wouldnt have the protection and security.

In agreement, EGBA states the new regulations could harm gambling and tax revenues. EGBA secretary general Maarten Haijer said EGBA understands the governments point of view, as it aims to protect citizens during hard times. But she also stressed the regulations could have an opposite effect on the players. Many Swedes are already gambling on unlicensed websites and these restrictions will make unlicensed websites which dont apply any limits even more attractive to them. We must remember gambling is human behavior, consumers will always make their own choices and top-down regulation rarely works.

Haijer warned the limits on gambling would end up pushing the players towards the unlicensed sites because while they are less secure, those websites wont interfere with the players experience. EGBA also stated European countries didnt register an increase in online gambling after lockdown began.

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EGBA: concerns over forced limitations - Gambling Insider - In-depth Analysis for the Gaming Industry

Human Behavior

Lost world and extinct ecosystem in South Africa revealed in new research – Fox News

Scientists have discovered the earliest evidence for human behavior, projectile weapons and much more at an amazing archaeological site in South Africa, a previously lost world revealed in new research.

Researchers in the area have always faced a challenge in understanding the context of these evolutionary milestones, since most of the landscape used by the ancient people who lived there is submerged underwater. The archaeological remnants are from caves and other areas that now look out on to the sea.

Now, the publication of 22 articles inQuaternary Science Reviews examines this "lost world" in a profound new way, thanks to the efforts of Arizona State University Institute of Human Origins Director Curtis Marean, who began assembling a team to build the ancient landscape's ecology a decade ago.

The work started by using the high-resolution South African regional climate model -- running on U.S. and South African supercomputers as a way to simulate glacial climate conditions. That climate output then fed into a vegetation model that allowed scientists to recreate the vegetation landscape.

ALASKAN LANDSLIDE COULD CAUSE ENORMOUS TSUNAMI, SCIENTISTS WARN

Looking out at the Palaeo-Agulhas Plain from the cave entrance at the Pinnacle Point, South Africa, research site--left, 200,000 years ago during glacial phases and lower sea levels, and right, today where the ocean is within yards of the cave entrances at high tides. (Erich Fisher)

Scientists then harnessed things like marine geophysics and deep-water diving for sample collection to validate the model and adjust its output.

"Pulling the threads of all this research into one special issue illustrates all of this science," said Marean in a statement."It represents a unique example of a truly transdisciplinary paleoscience effort, and a new model for going forward with our search to recreate the nature of past ecosystems. Importantly, our results help us understand why the archaeological records from these South African sites consistently reveal early and complex levels of human behavior and culture."

PLACES WITHOUT SOCIAL DISTANCING HAVE 35 TIMES MORE POTENTIAL CORONAVIRUS SPREAD, STUDY FINDS

The Arizona State University IHO's field study site of Pinnacle Point sits at the center of diverse and rich ancient record, both geographically and scientifically, having contributed much of the evidence for different milestones on the road to humanity's modern evolution.

"This unique confluence of food from the land and sea cultivated the complex cultures revealed by the archaeology and provided safe harbor for humans during the glacial cycles that revealed that plain and made much of the rest of the world unwelcoming to human life," Marean said.

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Lost world and extinct ecosystem in South Africa revealed in new research - Fox News

Human Behavior

Sentiment Speaks: You Need To Show Your Grandchildren This Chart – Seeking Alpha

Yogi Berra was quoted as saying that its tough making predictions, especially about the future.

However, there are times when one is able to at least obtain a probabilistic reading about the future based upon an understanding of mass human sentiment and human psychology.

In fact, back in the 1940s, an accountant named Ralph Nelson Elliott identified behavioral patterns within the stock market which represented the larger collective behavioral patterns of society en masse. And, in 1940, Elliott publicly tied the movements of human behavior to the natural law represented through Fibonacci mathematics.

Elliott understood that financial markets provide us with a representation of the overall mood or psychology of the masses. And, he also understood that markets are fractal in nature. That means they are variably self-similar at different degrees of trend.

Most specifically, Elliott theorized that public sentiment and mass psychology move in 5 waves within a primary trend, and 3 waves within a counter-trend. Once a 5 wave move in public sentiment has completed, then it is time for the subconscious sentiment of the public to shift in the opposite direction, which is simply the natural cycle within the human psyche, and not the operative effect of some form of news.

This mass form of progression and regression seems to be hard wired deep within the psyche of all living creatures, and that is what we have come to know today as the herding principle, which gives this theory its ultimate power.

And, over the last 30 years, many social experiments have been conducted throughout the world which have provided scientific support to Elliotts theories presented almost a century ago.

But, even before these more recent studies have begun to support Elliotts understanding of the market set forth 80 years ago, Elliott provided us with an extraordinarily bold stock market prediction. Allow me to present you with the following prediction made by Ralph Nelson Elliott in August of 1941:

[1941] should mark the final correction of the 13 year pattern of defeatism. This termination will also mark the beginning of a new Supercylce wave (V), comparable in many respects with the long [advance] from 1857 to 1929. Supercycle (V) is not expected to culminate until about 2012.

For those of you that do not understand this quote, Elliott was predicting the start of a 70-year bull market in the face of World War II raging around him. Quite an amazing prediction, no?

Now, the rally that Elliott was predicting seems to have gone beyond his expectations from a timing standpoint. In fact, if we follow through with Elliotts original assessments, and we take into account the actual structure we have seen over the last 70 years, I believe the rally he was forecasting will last considerably longer than his expectations, especially when we now can fill in the wave structure of the rally he expected. You can see what I am speaking of on the attached chart compiled by Garrett Patten of Elliottwavetrader.

Specifically, what it tells us is that the market could very well be in the final stage of a multi-year rally off the 2009 lows, which, in our work, has a minimum target in the 4000 region. Yes, that means that we will still likely see higher market prices in the coming years. Moreover, as you can see from this much longer-term perspective chart, it even has potential to rise as high as the 6000 region in a blow off top. (I will have a much better idea of that topping target within the next year or so).

Yet, the main take away for those investing over the coming decade is that we are likely approaching a point in time where the market can enter into a multi-decade bear market in wave [IV], as outlined on the chart above. While that would likely be the next generational buying opportunity, it seems to suggest that the last half of the current decade will result in a lot of pain for investors.

At a minimum, I would expect the next bear market would have us revisit the 1800SPX region in the second half of the new decade. So, enjoy the profits of this last hurrah over the coming several years, as we are likely setting up for a once in a century event, which can rival the Great Depression, as it is of the same long-term wave degree. Remember, while history does not exactly repeat, it certainly does rhyme. And, those that are unwilling to learn from history are certainly bound to repeat it.

But, in the meantime, I still think we reach at least the 4000 region, but there is strong potential for us to target as high as 6000 in the SPX. After this next segment of the market rally off the 2009 low completes, I will then move into the bear camp for quite some time. But, for now, there are still profits to be gained on the long side of the market for the next few years.

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Disclosure: I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it. I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

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Sentiment Speaks: You Need To Show Your Grandchildren This Chart - Seeking Alpha