This puma (not involved in the study) fed on a single deer for five days. New research suggests these feedings can be interrupted by the pumas fear of humans, requiring them to hunt more often. (Image: Jon Nelson/Flickr)

We typically think of large predatory animals like mountain lions as fearless beasts thatll stop at nothing to procure a mealeven if that meal consists of human flesh. New research suggests that this view is wrong, and that big cats dont like to bump into us any more than we like to bump into them. Problem is, this fear of humans is altering the feeding behavior of big carnivores, and that may not be a good thing.

A study published led by by scientists from UC Santa Cruz and Western University in London, Ontario and published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that mountain lions in the Santa Cruz mountains, sometimes known as pumas or cougars, are spooked by the sound of human voices. These fearful encounters are causing the carnivores to flee their kill sites. Afterwards, some pumasalbeit very slowly and cautiouslywill return to their fallen prey, resulting in a 50 percent reduction in their feeding time on average. To make up for these lost meals, the pumas have to kill more deer, which often requires them to encroach upon human settings. In other words, fear of humans is altering puma behavior, and subsequently, their role in the ecosystem.

Big carnivores are scary, both to humans and the animals they prey upon. But as a new study

Were increasingly learning that large carnivores like pumas and wolves are critical to the health and stability of ecosystems. Last year, similar work by the same team of researchers confirmed a long-held notion that carnivores perform an important role in ecosystems by inducing fear in their prey. The presence of large predatory animals, the study showed, generates a landscape of fear that alters the feeding behavior of prey animals, which subsequently influences their impacts on other species down the food chain.

What this new study shows is that large carnivores like pumas can experience an almost identical situation, living within a landscape of fear generated by human activity that in turn affects the large carnivores relationship with its preyin this case, deer, said study co-author Justin Suraci in an interview with Gizmodo.

To assess a potential fear response in large carnivores, the researchers placed audio equipment at puma kill sites in the Santa Cruz mountains. Whenever a puma came to feed, its movements triggered a device that broadcast recordings of people having conversations at natural volumes. The researchers used recordings of Pacific tree frog vocalizations as a control.

A hidden camera captured images of the animals responses, revealing that pumas almost always run away from human voices, but practically never from the sounds of frogs. Across 20 experiments involving 17 pumas, 83 percent of pumas fled when exposed to human voices, and only one puma ran away when hearing frogs (wow, that must be one nervous puma).

Revealingly, pumas took longer to return to their kills after hearing human voices, reducing their feeding on these kills by half. Previous work from these scientists revealed higher kill rates of deer in more urbanized settings, and this finding is finally offering a plausible explanation as to why. Unable to eat the entire carcass in peace, the pumas are forced to kill more deer, which ironically often leads them into contact with more humans. More dead deer may seem trivial, perhaps even potentially beneficial, but the change in hunting habits could be altering the ecosystem in unexpected ways. There are often downstream effects to considerbut future work will have to suss this out.

To our knowledge this is the first direct experimental test of whether large carnivores respond fearfully to human presence, and whether this response has measurable ecological consequences, write the researchers in their study.

That mountain lions fear humans may come as a surprise to some, but theres good reason for this behavior.

For many large carnivore populations (including the pumas in our study area), humans are a primary source of mortality, and this is nothing new, said Suraci. People have been persecuting big, scary predators for thousands of years because of perceived threats to human life and livelihoods (e.g., shared prey such as big game or livestock), and pumas have been almost completely wiped out across much of North America over the past couple of centuries. Indeed several states offered bounties to kill pumas well into the 1960s. So there is plenty of cause for pumas to fear humans.

As to how pumas learn this behavior, Suraci says thats a much trickier question. All of the pumas in their study had some form of human habitation or development within their home range, and were likely to have experienced interactionssome of them potentially negativewith people. Suraci says it may also be the case that puma kittens, who spend up to a year with their mom, learn appropriate human avoidance behavior from her.

But in short, we really dont know exactly how they develop their fear of humans, he said. That they do behave fearfully towards humans, however, may be beneficial for both pumas and people, as pumas may actively try to avoid interactions with humans, reducing the likelihood of human-wildlife conflict.

It may seem counterintuitive and even dangerous to maintain populations of large carnivorous animals, but Suraci says theyre important for maintaining balanced ecosystems, preventing outbreaks of smaller predators (e.g. raccoons and coyotes) and large herbivores (e.g., deer) that act as pests to humans and can devastate biodiversity when unchecked.

What our study shows is that just having the large carnivores present may not be sufficient to allow them to fulfill this important role, if the fear of humans is changing the way they interact with their prey, he said. We need to consider how our own activities affect not just species abundance but also behavior if we want to maintain healthy ecosystems.

[Proceedings of the Royal Society B]

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Mountain Lions Are Terrified of Humansand That's a Problem - Gizmodo

Chimpanzees want to fit in with the popular kids, just like humans do researchers say chimps will change their behavior to match what others are doing.

A study in the journal Current Biology points to a specific type of behavior in these apes called the grooming handclasp. Its exactly what it sounds like: Two animals engaged in the social interaction of grooming will clasp one anothers hands. But the exact form this rare chimp handshake varies among groups, with some gripping each others palms and the others gripping wrists depending on what group they were in. Scientists studying the behavior in Zambia saidits a group-level cultural tradition in chimpanzees rather than one passed down from mothers to their young.

Read: What Monkey Brains and Social Behavior Tell Us About Human Minds

Grooming itself is a social behavior that does more than clean the chimps: It is also a bonding experience, a way to relax and an action that defers to the hierarchy of the chimp community. And only some groups of these apes perform the handclasp. The University of St. Andrews explained that because it varies among groups as opposed to chimpanzee families, this indicates that, like humans, chimpanzees have the capacity and motivation to learn from each other and fine tune their learned behavior such that it matches with the group norm.

A behavior passed down through a family line does not explain why chimps within one group will clasp hands in one way and chimps in another will clasp in another.

Some chimpanzees clasp hands while grooming, a behavior they acquire in groups rather than learn from their families. The behaviors origin shows chimps can form and adhere to cultures just like humans. Photo: University of St. Andrews

It is hard to imagine how any genetic or environmental influences could have shaped the group-specific preferences that we observed, lead author Edwin van Leeuwen said in the statement. Within the group chimpanzees converged on one particular variant of clasping. This indicates a certain willingness to match each others styles.

The study offers a glimpse into the minds of chimps, specifically whether they can form a culture and cultural traditions, which is a controversial topic. The university said becausechimpanzees can form a social tradition like a grooming handclasp behavior outside of their family unit,they are more closely mimicking human culture than previously thought.

Read: Jungle Falls Silent After Howler Monkey Disease Epidemic

Although chimpanzees are different from humans in many ways, they are similar in others. For one, the genetic differences between the species are miniscule: Humans and chimps share almost 99 percent of their DNA. Chimpanzees can use tools to get a job done, and its possible that they can live as long as humans in the wild recent research has shown if disease, food shortages, predators or other hazards dont get in the way, a chimpanzee can live almost 33 years. Thats right within the range of life expectancy for those who have similar lifestyles to apes, the human hunter-gatherers still left in the world. Those people live27 to 37 years.

Understanding the relationship between humans and chimpanzees isnt just a point of interest. It can also help scientists understand how humans evolved and, in the case of life expectancy, how different conditions changed mortality rates.

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Apes Have Social Traditions Just Like Humans, Chimp Behavior Shows - International Business Times

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry.

One of the core premises of our research is to understand technology from a deeper human level. We too often get caught up in the technology itself, and may lose sight of the basic human needs or desires technology is serving. With all the tech of artificial intelligence, augmented reality and any number of other buzzwords, I sense that the human angle is again being lost while we chase technological advancements for the sake of the technology rather than the sake of the human.

The human angle is being lost while we chase technological advancements for the sake of the technology rather than the sake of the human.

To frame my perspective, I think it is helpful to use the idea of human augmentation as a basis for our understanding of how technology serves humans and will always do so. The core definition of augment is to make something greater by adding to it. Using this framework from a historical perspective, we can observe how nearly every human technological invention was designed to augment a fundamental weakness of human beings.

Tools were invented to augment our hands so we can build faster, bigger, more complex things. Cars were invented to augment the limitations of the distance humans can travel. Planes were invented to augment humans lack of ability to fly. The telephone was invented to augment the limitations of human communications. Nearly every example of technological innovation we can think of had something to do with extending or making greater some aspect of a human limitation or weakness.

This was true of historical innovation, and it will be true of future innovation, as well. Everything we invent in the future will find a home augmenting some shortcoming of our human bodies. Technology, at its best, will extend human capabilities and allow us to do things we could not do before.

While we can analyze many different angles in which technology will augment our human abilities, there is one I think may be one of the more compelling things to augment: Our memory.

My family and I recently took a vacation to Maui. It is always nice to get out of the bubble of Silicon Valley for a more natural atmosphere to observe human behavior and technology. Going to a place where most people are on vacation provides an even deeper atmospheric layer to observe.

One of technologys greatest values to humans is in the assistance of capturing memories.

On vacation, I saw how critical and transformative the smartphone camera has been when it comes to memory augmentation. Ive long thought that one of technologys greatest values to humans is in the assistance of capturing memories. For sure, this is the single driving motivation behind most people purchasing digital cameras and video cameras through the years. With most people in developed markets now owning a memory-capture device, and comparable apps on their smartphones to enhance these memories, observing memory augmentation is now a frequent activity.

It was fascinating to see the lengths people on vacation would go through with their phones, drones (I was surprised how many drones I saw), GoPros, waterproof smartphone cases and more to capture and preserve their memories.

I saw people climbing trees, braving cliffs and hiking extreme conditions with their phones to get a unique selfie. Flying their drone overhead as they jumped off waterfalls. Putting their phones in waterproof cases to get pics of kids snorkeling. And obviously, there were lots of uses for GoPros to capture unique photos and videos of undersea creatures and experiences.

The camera sensor is, and will remain for some time, one of the most important parts of our mobile computing capabilities.

As was often the case, most of the memories captured are designed to share on social media, but the point remains that these pervasive capture devices enable us to create and capture memories we would most likely forget, or have a hard time recalling if left to our memory.

Ive argued before that the camera sensor is, and will remain for some time, one of the most important parts of our mobile computing capabilities. The desire to preserve, or capture a unique memory will remain a deeply emotional and powerful motivator for humans.

Allowing technology to take this idea a step further, we have things like Apple Photos and Google Photos, which look over our memories and make short videos to not just augment but to automate our memory creation process. As machine learning gets even better, these technologies will make creating memories from moments even easier.

As technology continues to augment more and more of our human capabilities, my hope is that the technological tool or process involved will fade so deeply into the background that it nearly disappears. This way we can get the most out of our time whether at work, school, play or vacation, and spend less time fidgeting with technology. Ultimately we will be able to do more with technology, but also spend less time with the technology itself, and more time doing the things we love.

Ben Bajarin is a principal analyst at Creative Strategies Inc., an industry analysis, market intelligence and research firm located in Silicon Valley. His primary focus is consumer technology and market trend research. He is a husband, father, gadget enthusiast, trend spotter, early adopter and hobby farmer. Reach him @BenBajarin.

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Technology is created for the purpose of augmenting the fundamental weaknesses of human beings - Recode

Leo Burnett, one of the most iconic advertising agencies in the game, is evolving the way it thinks about creative.

I've been focused on infusing technology, data and analytics to make creative more relevant, personalized and effective, said Andrew Swinand, CEO at Leo Burnett.

For Swinand, who spent time on the media side as president at Starcom Mediavest Group, data can develop the creative brief to reflect individual consumer intent and open the pathways for personalized creative.

When the creative brief is for one 30-second spot, thats what you get, he said. When its [based on]six segments andthe nuances that create relevance, its a different starting point.

But at Leo Burnett, the extent to which data is incorporated into creativity depends on changing clients mindsets and training employees to execute on this new mandate.

AdExchanger caught up with Swinand in Cannes.

AdExchanger: Whats the biggest challenge as the CEO of a creative agency today?

To be successful today, we need to have a base understanding of technology and data, but we still need to deliver our core promise of using creativity to change human behavior.

All of the data and technology in the world is worthless unlesssomeone feels, sees and engages in creative that changes their behavior. A lot of people are overly enamored with data and technology.

How is the creative brief changing?

Its both integrated and collaborative with media. [Were] starting with the sources of behavior and intelligence that allow us to connect with consumers.

Weve added a metric of prosperity to all of our briefs. How does content add value to [consumers] lives, grow [our clients] business and increase sales? That has to be a collaboration between creative and media agencies.

How do you measuresomething subjectivelike creative?

I challenge that its subjective. The idea that creative is unmeasurable is a false construct.

How so?

Theres a thousand ways now to measure consumer response. I can measure how many people engage in creative. I can bring in Nielsen data and dynamic logic.

Publicis won the media business in the UK for P&G. They built a technology that incorporates Neustar data and Artis Optimizer (a Starcom product) to [measure] creative response rate [with] Nielsen data from stores.

The technology exists. We just need to change client and agency behavior to keep up with it.

Are your clients holding you back from realizing data-driven creative?

Its a bell-shaped curve. Were doing alot of work with Allstate, who is really smart on this. Other clients are further behind. The closer you are to ecommerce, the higher the propensity and experience with digital.

How do you train your employees onprogrammaticand data?

We hold digital and programmatic days. Were one of Googles priority agencies; we have Google employees in the building. Weve done similar things with Facebook and Adobe. The onus is on us to train them.

Who should own programmatic creative: creative or media agencies?

Its a partnership. So much of the technology has been on the media side. But if you serve the same ads to six segments, its worthless. Youreusing a more expensive way to buy run-of-site.

Vendors have the ability to say, These people are drastically different from these people. Then media agencies buy [segments of] women from New York City versus women from Chicago, which are different, and we serve the same ad to them. Whats the point?

Is personalized creative at the individual level possible yet?

The capability exists. Its just not the factory thats been built. How do we change behavior and approaches? It starts with the creative brief.

Do increasingly shorter ad formats constrain creativity?

The starting point isnt How do I make a good ad? Its Whats the right tool for the job?

If you have a simple idea that communicates the client's benefit, why do I need the extra 24 seconds? Embrace the six seconds and do it efficiently. If I have a complex business problem, maybe six seconds isnt the right format.

Has sound-off, feed-based video killed creativity?

It makes you approach the problem from a different perspective. The creative challenge becomes How do I have something thats so compelling that people turn the sound on?

Its like out of home (OOH). Its just a different format for an old problem.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Cannes: Leo Burnett Gets Creative With Data - AdExchanger

This article first appeared on the Just Security site.

Last week, amid speculation that Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein may be forced to recuse himself from the expanding Russia investigation unless he gets fired first attention focused on the next in line: Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand.

Brand, it should be noted, has had a more obviously partisan career than Rosenstein, and the burning question seems to be whether she has the gumption or the will to stand up to the President if he tries to derail the investigation, for example by trying to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. (This is not to say Trump has the authority to fire Mueller Marty Lederman argues that he doesnt.)

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Does Brand have what it takes? Jack Goldsmith and Ben Wittes, both of whom know her well, affirm that she does and describe her as intelligent, fair, independent, and tough-minded.

My own answer to the question Who is Rachel Brand? is: it doesnt much matter. Its simply a mistake to focus on individual personality to predict how someone will act. Social psychologists have a long-standing name for this mistake: they call it the fundamental attribution error. Thats the error of explaining human behavior by individual character and personality traits.

The situation in which we find ourselves matters crucially, often invisibly, and to a far greater degree than common sense would suggest. This is a lesson we might apply not only to Brand, but also to Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster and other souls in this administration.

Rachel Brand, Associate Attorney General, testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington March 7, 2017. Aaron P. Bernstein/reuters

A bit of background:

In a classic 1972 experiment, a person coming out of a phone booth sees a woman spill her folder full of papers on the shopping mall floor a few feet away. (She is part of the experimental team, and she spills them on purpose.)

Will subjects help her pick up the papers?

Among one group of subjects, the answer was overwhelmingly yes: fourteen people helped and only two did not. In a second group, it was overwhelmingly no. Only one subject helped; the other 24 walked away.

What explains the difference? Something amazingly small: Those in the first group had found a dime in the telephones coin return, which apparently put them in a benevolent mood.

Those in the second group found no dime, and they stepped around the spilled papers and went their not-so-merry way. A trivial and nearly invisible manipulation of the situation led to a dramatic change in outcomes.

According to the situationist school of psychology, this experiment (along with many others, including the famous Milgram obedience experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment) shows that we deceive ourselves when we think character is the crucial determinant of how we behave.

In the Stanford experiment, one subject who described himself as a non-violent person and pacifist transformed into a brutal prison guard in a matter of days. Which was he, a self-deceiving brute in pacifists clothes, or a sensitive soul who forgot himself?

Neither one, according to the situationists. Look to the situation, not to the person. He was a prison guard, and as he explained in his diary (reproduced in a write up of the psychology experiment), This new prisoner, 416, refuses to eat. That is a violation of Rule Two and we are not going to have any of that kind of shit. I decide to force feed him. I let the food slide down his face. I dont believe it is me doing it.

For the situationists, there is nothing unbelievable about it, because the me who does it is not a constant.

This seems wildly counterintuitive, because we always think about peoples character, their virtues and vices. Isnt there a difference between a brave person and a coward?

Not necessarily, according to philosopher John Doris. In a pioneering 2002 book, Doris writes:

Its not crazy to think that someone could be courageous in physical but not moral extremity, or be moderate with food but not sex, or be honest with spouses but not with taxes. With a bit of effort, we can imagine someone showing physical courage on the battlefield, but cowering in the face of storms, heights, or wild animals. Things can get still trickier: Someone might exhibit battlefield courage in the face of rifle fire but not in the face of artillery fire. (Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior, p. 62.)

Doriss point: there is no such thing as courage across the board. Courage, like every other character trait, can be entirely situation-specific. If that seems contrary to everyday experience, its because most of us, most of the time, live in the same situation from one day to the next: we see the same family and friends today that we saw yesterday and will see tomorrow; we live in the same locale for months or years at a time, and if were employed we work at the same job.

Of course, not even the most radical situationists think individual personality is irrelevant to the choices we make. Talk about the fundamental attribution error does not deny free will or individual differences, or assert that only situations matter, one hundred percent.

Rather, the error lies in vastly overestimating character and ignoring the hidden power of the situation which we do all the time, not least when we play the blame game in criminal sentencing. (I heartily recommend the powerful podcast The Personality Myth, especially its second episode.)

My wife sometimes teaches college philosophy in a prison, where many of her students committed crimes of violence. In the classroom setting, she finds them no different from other college students, and she feels no less safe in their company.

For years, psychologists debated which variable matters more, person or situation; some tried to quantify it. Like many academic debates, this one was technically intricate and personally acrimonious in the words of psychologist John Kihlstrom, it ended up looking more like a fight in an elementary schoolyard.

Over the years, psychologists began to look beyond the sharp either/or, and instead study the way that person and situation influence each other. (In the jargon, this is person/situation interactionism.)

To take a simple example: people behave differently toward a baby depending on whether theyre told the baby is a girl or a boy. The person (the baby) transforms the situation he or she is in (in this case, the way people treat the baby). And vice-versa: how people treat girls and boys as they grow up affects the person they become.

On this line of thought, whenever you enter a room full of people, you become part of the situation of the other people in the room. You change how the others behave; they become part of your situation, and influence how you behave. Thats interactionism. The theory has been around for decades, since the pioneering work of psychologist Kurt Lewin and sociologist Erving Goffman.

Enough of the theory. What it means for the Russia investigation is straightforward: its a mistake to ask who Rachel Brand is, because there is no is. To think otherwise is the fundamental attribution error.

When she decided to join the Trump administration and the Jeff Sessions Justice Department, Brand radically changed her situation. Specifically, she overcame whatever qualms she may have felt about Trump, qualms shared by many conservatives. (After the election, I posted on why those qualms are justified.)

Eyes wide open, she joined an administration that puts a premium on personal loyalty to a narcissistic president who takes everything personally. She placed herself in an environment where the abnormal is the new normal.

Its hard to believe she did it with the intention of slowing down the presidents hectic velocity her background is, as Eric Levitz writes, a bit more partisan and decidedly more right-wing than Rosensteins. Precisely if she is a person who takes her commitments seriously, signing on to the Trump team is a loyalty commitment that, day in and day out, will challenge her commitment to the rule of law. Neither past behavior nor perceived character can predict how she will manage that challenge. If the psychologists are right, she cannot predict it herself.

In my earlier essay on serving in the Trump administration, I warned that

Once you are inside, your frame of reference changes. You see that many of the people youre working with are decent and likable. You tell yourself that decent people like these wouldnt do anything indecent. And above all, you reassure yourself of your own decency because you can contrast yourself with the real radicals, the true believers. Theyre right down the hall.

It doesnt matter if you are what moralists of my generation like to call a person of integrity a person whose principles harmonize with her conduct. Years ago, in the wake of the Enron-era corporate scandals, the law school and business school worlds endured a predictable outbreak of academic conferences on integrity.

Churlishly, I pointed out that you can harmonize your principles and your conduct by changing your principles just as easily as by changing your conduct. That too is one of the basic teachings of social psychology: we often reduce cognitive dissonance between our principles and our conduct the easy way, by unconsciously modifying our principles so they rationalize our conduct.

Of course it is comforting to know that a public official is an admirable person and not an opportunist or a scoundrel. But blind faith that persons of character will rescue us is faith in an illusion. Look to the situation, not to the person.

David Luban is Professor in Law and Philosophy at Georgetown University.

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Would Rachel Brand Stand Up to Trump? - Newsweek