Human Behavior

Tuskless Elephants: Is These Animals’ Tusklessness a Result of the Mozambican Civil War? – Science Times

Recently published research describes animals as well adapted to the conditions, including the behavior of other creatures like humans.

Such a human behavior,The Economistreported, can force radical changes on "species an evolutionary eyeblink."

Princeton University biologist Shane Campbell-Staton investigates how animals adjust to human creations such as pollution and cities.

As indicated in the report, his interest was piqued by a movie featuring tuskless female elephants of Gorongosa National Park located in Mozambique.

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(Photo : tontantravel on Wikimedia Commons)Tuskless bull Asian Elephant in Huai Kha Khaeng wildlife sanctuary

The absence of tusks of these elephants was believed to be a result of another man-made creation, specifically the Mozambican civil war, as described in theMass Atrocity Endingssite, which started in 1977 and ended in 1992 and was partly paid for by elephant killing for their ivory.

Approximately 90 percent of pachyderms that lived in Gorongosa are believed to have been killed. According to biologists, they wondered if rising tusklessness might be an adjustment to make elephants less attractive to their human predators.

Dr. Campbell-Stato said it was a possible theory, although no one had actually tested it. Through a combination of surveys and old video footage, he, together with his colleagues, concluded that approximately 18 percent of the female elephants in Gorongosa were "tuskless" prior to the war.

Thirty years after, after it was over, the number had gone up to 50 percent. As suggested by computer simulations, the possibility of such a drastic change occurring by chance, even in a reduced population, was little.

Elephant X Chromosome

ANewsAroundWorldreport said, aside from verifying the change, the researchers were able to unravel these animals' genetic roots. As the study specified, tusklessness is a result of a mutation in a gene on what the authors describe as the elephantine X chromosome, which is described in general by theNational Library of Medicine. As with humans, two X chromosomes would make a female, and an X and Y would make a male.

Regrettably for males, researchers said, "mutation is a package deal" that comes with changes to genes nearby that delay the development of the embryo.

Males who are inheriting the mutant gene are dying before birth. Females, on the other hand, can avoid the deadly side effects if one of the two X chromosomes they have has a non-mutated gene, although they will still grow up tuskless.

Fortunately, for the females, the details of the manner the mutant gene is inherited are making it possible for them to inherit two copies.

Since mutant males are dying before birth, those surviving to reproductive age carry just the non-mutated versions of the X chromosome, guaranteeing their daughters will have at least a single copy, as well.

Currently, the continuous reintroduction of non-mutant X chromosomes from pales is setting a limit on the extent to which tusklessness can spread through the female populace.

Dr. Campbell-Staton explained that given time, as well as genetic recombination, evolution might unravel the "mutation for tusklessness from the maladaptive mutations" specifically in its nearby genes, opening the door for males to shed their tusks, as well.

He added, rumors have spread, of tuskless male elephants in the wild, although, so far at least, there's no concrete evidence.Finding one now seems unlikely. With the war over, the evolutionary pressure from poaching has eased. Tusks have gone back to being useful tools, helping their owners strip bark from trees and dig for water.

In recent years, the prevalence of tuskless females has dropped to roughly 33 percent. However, the speed of the change serves as a reminder that wars can change evolutionary history, as well as humans.

Related information about tuskless elephants in Mozambique is shown on News Headlines CN1's YouTube video below:

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Tuskless Elephants: Is These Animals' Tusklessness a Result of the Mozambican Civil War? - Science Times

Human Behavior

Washington’s hospital occupancy could stay high through the year as delayed surgeries are expected to resume – The Spokesman Review

Hospital occupancy will likely remain high throughout the winter as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, a new modeling report from the Washington State Department of Health shows.

While hospitalizations due to COVID-19 have declined in recent weeks, modelers project that hospitals will be quite busy due to increases in people seeking health care and elective procedures deferred at the peak of the delta surge, as well as staffing shortages, the report says.

The influenza season could also keep hospitals busy throughout the winter.

What COVID activity will look like this winter largely depends on human behavior, and how much people use masks, travel, gather or spend time indoors.

Modelers estimate that 63.5% of the total population have immunity either from getting COVID-19 or being fully vaccinated in Washington, which leaves a little more than a third of the total population vulnerable to the virus.

If COVID cases increase modestly, COVID hospitalizations could continue to decrease through December. If COVID cases moderately increase, however, COVID hospitalizations might decline until the end of November, when they would begin to increase again.

Public health officials continue to encourage vaccination for those who have not received a COVID-19 vaccine, as well as booster doses for those who are eligible.

Statewide, 72% of the eligible population are fully vaccinated. In Spokane County, 59% of the eligible population are fully vaccinated.

The Spokane Regional Health District reported 325 new COVID-19 cases and no additional deaths on Thursday.

There are 139 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in Spokane.

The Panhandle Health District reported 354 new COVID-19 cases and 14 additional deaths.

There have been 578 deaths due to COVID-19 in Panhandle residents.

There are 133 Panhandle residents hospitalized with the virus. Kootenai Health is treating 135 patients with COVID-19, including 44 in the critical care unit.

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Washington's hospital occupancy could stay high through the year as delayed surgeries are expected to resume - The Spokesman Review

Human Behavior

LIVING WITH CHILDREN: Stop parenting and start childrearing instead – YourGV.com

QUESTION: A friend recently pointed out that I constantly nitpick my 9-year-old sons behavior. Her words were, Youre on his case all the time. Why do I nitpick and how can I stop?

ANSWER: Nitpicking a childs behavior is almost always the consequence of personalizing, which is believing that any fault in your child reflects a fault of equal or greater magnitude in yourself.

Many, if not most, of todays parents moms, especially have fallen prey to the myth that childrearing is deterministic. Why moms, especially? Because mothers are the primary consumers of childrearing materials, and overwhelmingly so. And because many a modern mom believes in childrearing determinism, she personalizes. And because she personalizes, she is beset by anxiety and feelings of inadequacy. Thus, she complains that childrearing is the hardest thing Ive ever done.

We have come full circle. Mothers, because they read entirely too much, believe in psychology. Because they believe that childrearing is deterministic, moms are more likely to personalize when their kids behave badly. Because they personalize, they nitpick. Nitpicking is a form of micromanagement, all forms of which are driven by anxiety.

People believe in psychology the same way they believe in any other unproven hypothesis: to wit, psychology has been marketed such that most people believe it is a science and, therefore, full of facts. Psychology is not a science. Thats a fact. It is a philosophy of human nature. It is also a fact that none of psychologys theories concerning human nature have ever survived the scrutiny of the scientific method. They are speculations. In fact, whenever a psychologist says that someone is behaving a certain way because (fill in the blank with a psychological explanation of human behavior), he is theorizing/speculating. He cannot prove that what he is saying is true.

When mothers did not read parenting books, they did not say things like, Raising a child is the hardest thing Ive ever done. And by the way, a mother who says such things is not thinking straight because raising a child, approached with a proper attitude (i.e., one that does not give credence to the musings of professional psychological speculators), is a simple matter.

I am a psychologist who writes parenting books. More accurately, I write books on mere childrearing, which is very, very different from what we now call parenting. The reason so many parents these days are experiencing so many problems is because they are parenting a post-1960s aberration based on bogus psychological theory. Mere childrearing is done with common sense, which most parents still have unless they have been parenting for so long that they cant break the bad habit. The difference between the two approaches is a matter of their goals. The goal of parenting is to raise a child who is happy and successful. The goal of mere childrearing is to emancipate a responsible citizen in the shortest possible time.

All of which is to say, if you stop parenting and begin merely childrearing, you will relax, stop nitpicking, and have a much happier parenthood.

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LIVING WITH CHILDREN: Stop parenting and start childrearing instead - YourGV.com

Human Behavior

Reading the signs – National Catholic Reporter

Why do you not know how to interpret the present time? (Luke 12:59).

Rom 7:18-29a; Luke 12:54-59

Jesus would make a good meteorologist as he describes just how predictable the sky is about future events. Clouds blowing from the west signal it will rain. Or if the wind is coming up from the south, it means a hot day. Palestines location by the Mediterranean to the west and above the deserts of Arabia to the south made predictions easy if you recognized the direction of the wind.

But of course, his purpose in taking about the weather was to challenge the crowds for failing to draw the same obvious conclusions about the signs of the times. Human events also stirred up predictable storms. Tensions were evident in the activity of the Zealots against the Roman occupation that made it easy to predict the dangerous conflicts building in the nation. The ministry and preaching of John the Baptist had increased the expectation of Gods intervention.

In fact, Jesus wanted the crowds to recognize that his preaching and presence was itself a call to repentance and conversion. Why were they so blind to what was happening spiritually? He uses the example of someone going before a judge who fails to settle early with his opponent and is thrown in jail. Failure to reconcile when you have the chance can lead to deeper problems, so be reconciled.

The added detail of finding yourself in prison until you pay the last penny is a brilliant metaphor for just how conflicts, if allowed to take hold and lead to bitterness that lasts until we resolve them totally, without any residual trace of hurt or resentment. Marriage counselors know the value of early resolution and urge couples to never let the sun go down on their anger, for by morning even some small ill feeling will be deeply embedded.

St. Paul also reflects in his letter to the Romans how evil desires hide in our best intentions. I want to do the right thing, but compulsively do the opposite. Selfish habits trip us up on to way to some disciplined intention, trapping and humiliating us. This unconscious conflict within human behavior is resolved only because God is merciful. Failure aids in teaching us humility. No one is without faults, especially those who cannot admit their weaknesses.

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Reading the signs - National Catholic Reporter

Human Behavior

Brian Laundries parents behavior while searching Carlton Reserve is not normal as theyre not frantic,… – The US Sun

BRIAN Laundries parents werent acting frantic enough while searching for their fugitive son on Wednesday at a Florida nature reserve, according to a body language expert.

Patti Wood told The Sun: What were seeing is different from that norm."

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The norm is to behave with a sense of urgency, walk together and be constantly shifting their heads to find any clue.

Wood didn't see that in the Chris and Roberta's behavior during the short couple video clips she evaluated.

"Theyre not together and not doing normal sweeping to side to side motion or looking low, at a regular level and looking up and away," she said. Theres not a franticness.

The FBI identified the skeletal remains found yesterday belonged to their 23-year-old son using his dental records.

"On October 21, 2021, a comparison of dental records confirmed that the human remains found at the T. Mabry Carlton, Jr. Memorial Reserve and Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park are those of Brian Laundrie, a statement by the FBI reads.

Two detectives shared their findings by paying a visit to the Laundrie's home in-person on Thursday evening.

The FBI also confirmed the identification in a statement.

"On October 21, 2021, a comparison of dental records confirmed that the human remains found at the T. Mabry Carlton, Jr. Memorial Reserve and Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park are those of Brian Laundrie," it read.

Authorities had been searching Brian since his parents Chris and Roberta reported him missing on September 17.

Laundrie had told his parents that he was going for a hike at the 24,000-acre Carlton Reserve on September 13 - which was the last time they saw him.

The fugitive has been on the run since his fianc Gabby Petito was found strangled to death in Wyoming on September 19.

The FBI confirmed the shocking discovery during a press conference on Wednesday, where they also characterized the death of Gabby as "murder" for the first time.

Chris and Roberta Laundriewere at the scene after joining the search when the remains and personal items were found.

During Wednesdays fruitful search at the swampy reserve, the parents were shadowed by authorities and reporters sifting through the rough terrain. <<>>

At one point, Chris can be seen veering into an isolated bramble while Roberta continues walking several yards ahead on the main trail.

Wood thought their different actions on that walk were especially telling.

I found it interesting that instead of walking and moving and doing the search together they separate out, she said.

They go off in different directions.

I find it interesting that he goes directly into a secluded, dark more challenging, and secretive area - and she walks away to a clear, you can see over a distance path.

They separate out like that.

Wood explains that the demeanor of the Laundrie parents struck her as outside the norm.

...Shes not walking that much far ahead of him even though hes going through deep brush, said Wood.

The lack of urgency by the head movements of Chris and Roberta as they looked around the wilderness for their missing son stood out to Wood.

Typically when youre searching like that, your body and head or upper part of face would be sweeping side to side, head down looking side to side, be on [the] same standing looking side to side, and looking up side to side, she said.

"Chris didn't want to pick the bag up because he wanted law enforcement to see it," their attorney Steven Bertolino said, adding: "This was caught on camera."

Bertolino explained that it was Chris who foundBrian's white plastic dry bag in full view of a news reporter who was about 20 feet off the trail, while police uncovered his backpack and human remains.

"Chris couldn't find the law enforcement because they were then out of sight, because Chris had been in the woods, so he didn't want to leave the bag there with the news reporter standing nearby, so he picked it up."

Once he found the item, Bertolino insists that Chris informed authorities.

"They looked at the contents of the bag," the lawyer explained.

"At that time, law enforcement officers showed him a picture on the phone of a backpack that law enforcement had located also nearby, and also some distance off the trail."

In a separate moment captured by Fox News, Chris and Roberta can be seen conversing with a police officer on a hiking trail in Myakkahatchee Creek after Brians belongings and partial skeletal remains were found and the park closed down.

In the clip, the officer at one stage seems to tell them "we've found something" and advises the pair to go home.

The officer places his hand on Chris Laundrie's right shoulder during the exchange.

Roberta then gazes up at face him and wipes his left cheek.

The tender moment between the parents struck Wood revealing how strong their loving bond is.

When theyre informed of what appears to be the findings of human remains, Wood notices Chris and Roberta collapse down of the arms as they come closer in to the sides to touch - to gain security and show some fear as his shoulders hunch over.

She then notices him settling a hand in his pocket suggesting something is shifted quite radically between left and right side.

As far as Roberta wiping Chriss tear-marked cheek, Wood is convinced the motion is intimate and proves their very close relationship.

What shes doing is an indication of great intimacy and caretaking.

Shes touching - the brush is going downwards - any touch in that intimate zone of the face would indicate that they have a very close relationship, [the] kind of touch shes done before or been in that area to do it out in public.

Wood compared it to a mother nurturing their child.

She said its similar to a mum wiping a childs face with a Kleenex.

She added: Its the same kind of maintenance and care thats very very intimate.

Chriss reaction to his wifes tender hand is also very informative.

She noticed how Chriss response is not to pull away.

Instead, his response is yes, thats it ok. I feel comforted by that.This kind of grooming behavior while learning their child may be gone,speaks to a long relationship, Wood said.

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Brian Laundrie timeline

Brian Laundrie has not been seen since the morning of September 13. Here is a timeline of Laundrie's latest whereabouts:

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Brian Laundries parents behavior while searching Carlton Reserve is not normal as theyre not frantic,... - The US Sun

Human Behavior

Doctor offers optimism — and caution — as COVID numbers improve – Rapid City Journal

As COVID-19 numbers tick down in the region, Dr. Shankar Kurra acknowledged encouraging signs surrounding the pandemic. He also offered a caution.

These are definitely encouraging signs that things are getting better, said Kurra, vice president of medical affairs at Monument Health Rapid City Hospital, talking in his office on a recent morning. The only thing I would point out is that these come in waves And its human behavior that causes waves.

Kurra said people tend to become more careful when cases rise, and then tend to let up when the situation looks brighter.

On Wednesday, active cases in South Dakota totaled 5,723, according to the South Dakota Department of Health, down from 7,325 at the beginning of the month.

Despite the improving numbers, Kurra said, hospitals are still operating at capacity.

Across the state, all three (health) systems are completely full, he said. At Monument, we are at capacity. We are managing. We still have to provide care not just for COVID patients but for regular folks who also have chronic diseases who need care.

Kurra said the Rapid City Hospital has approximately 260 patients in an in-patient setting, about 50 of whom are COVID-19 patients. He said the hospital had only three COVID-19 patients in June a number that peaked in August at more than 100.

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The numbers are going down, but theyre not down to where we were in June, and thats where we need to get to, he said.

Kurra reiterated the importance of the vaccination.

We have a vaccine that works, thats safe, thats effective and that prevents hospitalization and death, he said. Were talking about 90% protection for those vaccinated versus those who are not.

Kurra said about 190 million people in the country have been fully vaccinated.

They are doing very well, he said. So far, the evidence is strong, very clear.

In South Dakota, 66% of people 12 years old and older have received at least one vaccination, according to the South Dakota Department of Health.

The three vaccines in circulation are all effective at preventing serious illness and death, Kurra said, even though studies have shown some differences among the vaccines.

The real story is that all three vaccines are effective at preventing deaths, he said. If you got the vaccine it doesnt matter which one you got your risk for death (from COVID-19) is almost negligible.

Kurra touched upon the recent death of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was fully vaccinated but who died from complications related to COVID-19. Kurra noted that Powell had multiple myeloma, a form of cancer that impeded the vaccines effectiveness.

People who have such conditions, Kurra said, along with young children not eligible for the vaccine, are especially dependent upon other people becoming vaccinated.

These folks are reliant on society acting as a firewall to prevent the disease from getting to them, he said.

Kurra mentioned recommendations regarding mask-wearing, as well, regardless of vaccination status.

If youre indoors and if youre with a lot of people, then you definitely want to wear a mask because you cannot distance yourself, he said. Ventilation is another reason why we recommend wearing a mask indoors.

Outdoors, he said, no masking is needed unless youre in a crowded stadium or a large gathering where its difficult to maintain that distance.

Such facts particularly about vaccines are presented frequently, Kurra acknowledged, often from faraway sources who may not harbor the trust of people who have not yet opted to receive the vaccine. And so he described the benefits of face-to-face conversations, noting that hes been holding in-person sessions about the vaccine, sometimes at the request of employers.

Ive had people tell me after the session was done that if only someone had explained this, I would have been more willing to get the vaccine, he said.

These sorts of close, one-on-one conversations, he said, are often vital for people wondering what the best thing for them to do might be.

Talk to your doctor, talk to your provider, talk to your pharmacist, he said.

As Kurra explained the importance of vaccines, and of people protecting each others health, he reflected on the larger framework of science.

Science is a humanistic tradition, he said. Its all meant to alleviate suffering and harm. The only way we can get folks who are still hesitant is to get the message to them that this is actually helpful and will prevent death and disease.

He stressed, too, that in an atmosphere of deep discord, thoughtful conversation creates the strongest path to conveying knowledge.

In the end the person receiving the message is another human being, Kurra said. It is very important to give them the information and let them decide. You cannot do that in a judgmental manner.

Kurra said the latest information about COVID-19, including news about potential booster shots, can be found on the website for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at https://www.cdc.gov/.

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Doctor offers optimism -- and caution -- as COVID numbers improve - Rapid City Journal

Human Behavior

Does raising the minimum wage kill jobs? The elusive answer shows why economics is so difficult but data su – pennlive.com

Veronika Dolar, SUNY Old Westbury

For decades it was conventional wisdom in the field of economics that a higher minimum wage results in fewer jobs.

In part, thats because its based on the law of supply and demand, one of the most well-known ideas in economics. Despite it being called a law, its actually two theories that suggest if the price of something goes up wages, for example demand will fall in this case, for workers. Meanwhile, their supply will rise. Thus an introduction of a high minimum wage would cause the supply of labor to exceed demand, resulting in unemployment.

But this is just a theory with many built-in assumptions.

Then, in 1994, David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of this years Nobel winners, and the late Alan Krueger used a natural experiment to show that, in the real world, this doesnt actually happen. In 1992, New Jersey increased its minimum wage while neighboring Pennsylvania did not. Yet there was little change in employment.

When I discuss their work in my economics classes, however, I dont portray it as an example of economists providing a definitive answer to the question of whether minimum wage hikes kill jobs. Instead, I challenge my students to think about all the ways one could answer this question, which clearly cannot be settled based on our beliefs. But rather, the answer requires data which in economics, can be hard to come by.

Economics studies the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. And so, like other social sciences, economics is fundamentally interested in human behavior.

But humans behave in a wide variety of often hard-to-predict ways, with countless complications. As a result, economists rely on abstraction and theory to create models in hopes of representing and explaining the complex world that they are studying. This emphasis on complicated mathematical models, theory and abstraction has made economics a lot less accessible to the general public than other social sciences, such as psychology or sociology.

Economists also use these models to answer important questions, such as Does a minimum wage cause unemployment? In fact, this is one of the most studied questions in all of economics since at least 1912, when Massachusetts became the first state to create a minimum wage. The federal wage floor came in 1938 with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

And its been controversial ever since. Proponents argue that a higher minimum wage helps create jobs, grow the economy, fight poverty and reduce wage inequality.

Critics stress that minimum wages cause unemployment, hurt the economy and actually harm the low-income people that were supposed to be helped.

Most students in my introductory microeconomics class can easily show, using the standard supply and demand model, that an increase in the minimum wage above the level that the market sets on its own should drive up unemployment. In fact, this is one of the most commonly used examples in introductory economics textbooks.

However, this result assumes a perfectly competitive labor market in which workers and employers are abundant and employees can change jobs with ease. This is rarely the case in the real world, where a few companies frequently dominate in what are known as monopsonies.

And so others theorized that because monopsonistic companies had the power to set wages artificially low, a higher minimum wage could, perhaps counterintuitively, prompt companies to hire more workers in order to recover some of their lost profitability as a result of the increased labor costs.

How can economists tell which of these two theories may be right? They need data.

Studying the real world is difficult, and its constantly changing, so it is not easy to obtain all the relevant evidence.

Unlike in medicine or other sciences, economists cannot conduct rigidly controlled clinical trials, a method vacinologists used to test the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. Due to financial, ethical or practical constraints, we cannot easily split people into treatment or control groups as is common in psychology. And we cannot randomly assign a higher minimum wage to some and not others and observe what will happen, which is how a biomedical scientist might study the impact of various treatments on human health.

And in studying the minimum wage, we cannot simply look at past times when it was increased and check what happened to unemployment a few weeks or months later. There are many other factors that affect the labor market, such as outsourcing and immigration, and its virtually impossible to isolate and pin down one factor such as a minimum wage hike as the cause.

This is where the pioneering work of natural experiments like the ones Card and Krueger have used over the years to study the effects of raising the minimum wage and other policy changes comes in. It began with their 1994 paper, but theyve replicated the findings with other studies that have deepened the amount of data that shows the original theory about the minimum wage causing job losses is likely wrong.

Their approach isnt without flaws mostly technical ones - and in fact economists still dont have a clear answer to the question about the minimum wage that I posed earlier in this article. But because of Card, Krueger and their research, the debate over the minimum wage has gotten a lot less theoretical and much more empirical.

Only by studying how humans actually behave can economics hope to make meaningful predictions about how a policy change like increasing the minimum wage is likely to affect the behavior of the economy and the people living in it.

Veronika Dolar, Assistant Professor of Economics, SUNY Old Westbury

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Does raising the minimum wage kill jobs? The elusive answer shows why economics is so difficult but data su - pennlive.com

Human Behavior

The Seven Ways Equinix is Plugging the Holes in NGAV with DTEX – Security Boulevard

Next-Gen Anti-Virus (NGAV) technology has greatly improved many organizations abilities to detect, identify and stop malware from infecting their endpoints, servers and networks. Its efficacy over legacy solutions is undebatable. So why are we continuing to hear about the frequency and severity in data breaches increasing? Its simple really humans. Users remain the elusive missing link whos behavior has the most impact on an organizations risk posture.

In a recent webinar, we heard from Stephen Seljan, Security Operations Manager at Equinix, who shared how Equinix is super-charging its NGAV tool with behavioral DLP and human activity forensics with the help of DTEX.

Below, weve summarized the key points highlighted within the webinar for those not able to listen for the full hour. Hopefully, learning about the seven ways Equinix is utilizing workforce cyber security alongside NGAV will help other organizations emulate what the company has done successfully to improve their own security posture.

1. Root Cause Analysis Back in February, Equinix had a user whose Office 365 account was compromised with a known MFA bypass vulnerability. This led the company to ask a number of questions: Was this a drive by? Was this scanning? How did this happen?

With DTEX, Equinix was empowered to go back through this particular users history in detail to see that he unknowingly fell victim to a targeted phishing attack. With the ability to duplicate everything that happened, the company was able to determine how the attack occurred in addition to identifying other weaknesses introducing areas of vulnerability. This level of visibility and root cause analysis proved crucial in explaining this first attack and preventing future attacks.

2. Data Exfiltration All companies continuously strive to prevent data exfiltration. Equinix worked with DTEX to help solve part of this challenge by looking at the amount of data and specific files an individual transfers. For instance, with the capability to see file names and distinguish whether files are sensitive, IT teams have the granularity needed to create rules that identify sensitive file paths so IT can be notified in the event that any employee accesses those directories. With this visibility, IT teams are able to confirm whether the individuals accessing the data should be able to have access, helping to prevent the exfiltration of sensitive files.

3. Work-From-Home (WFH) Engagement Monitoring The shift to remote work has made it increasingly difficult for businesses to tell what employees are doing. With DTEX, Equinix is able to anonymously compare the processes of team members alongside one another to evaluate productivity. This helps the organization to balance workloads more effectively, spot any activities that shouldnt be occurring and support team members to increase productivity.

4. Malicious Insider Detection Equinix, along with other organizations, is constantly working to deter the activity of malicious insiders. DTEXs workforce cyber intelligence and security solution enables the company to anonymously identify what users are engaging in these types of behaviors. So, for example, if a user creates a fake email to send anonymous notes, the organization would be able to see that the anonymous user was engaging with that address through their device. From there, they would be able to identify the individual and address the malicious activity head-on.

5. Shadow IT/ Unwanted Applications Unwanted applications are a huge problem today, especially given the shift to remote work and the friction between IT teams and other members of the organization. In the case of unwanted apps, Equinix is able to look at the most used and least used apps in its environment. With this intel, the company can pinpoint what the least used apps are and evaluate whether theyre necessary. This has enabled the company to spot malicious actors and negligent users introducing risk, and to identify potential licensing issues.

6. Early Ransomware Detection Equinix has benefited from creating alerts for network share discovery. So, anytime files are found on a network share, DTEX helps to rewrite those files and encrypt them. By detecting early whether a system is accessing any network shares out of the norm for that host, the company can stay one step ahead of these types of attacks.

7. User Lockout The ability to lock users out of their system is crucial, especially with users working remotely and in the case of malicious insiders. With this lockout, if users try to login to their system, they will immediately be logged out. This is essential in preventing data exfiltration.

NGAV technology on its own has helped to improve many organizations abilities to detect, identify and stop malware from infecting their endpoints, servers and networks. However, data breaches still occur as a result of NGAVs missing link humans.

With Workforce Cyber Intelligence & Security, organizations like Equinix are empowered to understand the human element and the sequences of human behavior that are impacting an organizations risk posture so that it can be improved.

Interested in learning more about how DTEXs insights are providing an extra layer of security protection? Please reach out to us at [emailprotected] or send us a note here. We look forward to working with you.

The post The Seven Ways Equinix is Plugging the Holes in NGAV with DTEX appeared first on Dtex Systems Inc.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Dtex Systems Inc authored by Jonathan Daly. Read the original post at: https://www.dtexsystems.com/blog/the-seven-ways-equinix-is-plugging-the-holes-in-ngav-with-dtex/

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The Seven Ways Equinix is Plugging the Holes in NGAV with DTEX - Security Boulevard

Human Behavior

Cellphone data shows that people navigate by keeping their destinations in front of them even when that’s not the most efficient route – The…

Think of your morning walk to work, school or your favorite coffee shop. Are you taking the shortest possible route to your destination? According to big data research that my colleagues and I conducted, the answer is no: Peoples brains are not wired for optimal navigation.

Instead of calculating the shortest path, people try to point straight toward their destinations we call it the pointiest path even if it is not the most efficient way to walk.

As a researcher who studies urban environments and human behavior, I have always been interested in how people experience cities, and how studying this can tell researchers something about human nature and how weve evolved.

Long before I could run an experiment, I had a hunch. Twenty years ago, I was a student at the University of Cambridge, and I realized that the path I followed between my bedroom at Darwin College and my department on Chaucer Road was, in fact, two different paths. On the way to Chaucer, I would take one set of turns. On the way back home, another.

Surely one route was more efficient than the other, but I had drifted into adapting two, one for each direction. I was consistently inconsistent, a small but frustrating realization for a student devoting his life to rational thinking. Was it just me or were my fellow classmates and my fellow humans doing the same?

Around 10 years ago, I found tools that could help answer my question. At the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we were pioneering the science of understanding cities by analyzing big data, and in particular digital traces from cellphones. Studying human mobility, we noticed that, on the whole, peoples routes were not conservative, meaning they did not preserve the same path from A to B as the opposite direction, from B to A.

However, the technology and analytical methods of that time prevented us from learning more in 2011, we could not reliably tell a pedestrian apart from a car. We were close, but still a few technological steps short of tackling the enigma of human navigation in cities.

Today, thanks to access to data sets of unparalleled size and accuracy, we can go further. Every day, everyones smartphones and apps collect thousands of data points. Collaborating with colleagues at the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and other international scholars, we analyzed a massive database of anonymized pedestrian movement patterns in San Francisco and Boston. Our results consider questions that my young self at Cambridge didnt know to ask.

After we analyzed pedestrian movement, it became clear that I am not the only one who navigates this way: Human beings are not optimal navigators. After accounting for possible interference from people letting Google Maps choose their path for them, our analysis of our big data sets fueled several interconnected discoveries.

First, human beings consistently deviate from the shortest possible path, and our deviations increase over longer distances. This finding probably seems intuitive. Previous research has already shown how people rely on landmarks and miscalculate the lengths of streets.

Our study was able to go a step further: developing a model with the capability to accurately predict the slightly irrational paths that we found in our data. We discovered that the most predictive model representing the most common mode of city navigation was not the quickest path, but instead one that tried to minimize the angle between the direction a person is moving and the line from the person to their destination.

This finding appears to be consistent across different cities. We found evidence of walkers attempting to minimize this angle in both the famously convoluted streets of Boston and the orderly grid of San Francisco. Scientists have recorded similar behaviors in animals, which are described in the research literature as vector-based navigation. Perhaps the entire animal kingdom shares the idiosyncratic tendencies that confused me on my walk to work.

Why might everyone travel this way? Its possible that the desire to point in the right direction is a legacy of evolution. In the savanna, calculating the shortest route and pointing straight at the target would have led to very similar outcomes. It is only today that the strictures of urban life traffic, crowds and looping streets have made it more obvious that peoples shorthand is not quite optimal.

Still, vector-based navigation may have its charms. Evolution is a story of trade-offs, not optimizations, and the cognitive load of calculating a perfect path rather than relying on the simpler pointing method might not be worth a few saved minutes. After all, early humans had to preserve brain power for dodging stampeding elephants, just like people today might need to focus on avoiding aggressive SUVs. This imperfect system has been good enough for untold generations.

However, people are no longer walking, or even thinking, alone. They are increasingly wedded to digital technologies, to the point that phones represent extensions of their bodies. Some have argued that humans are becoming cyborgs.

This experiment reminds us of the catch: Technological prostheses do not think like their creators. Computers are perfectly rational. They do exactly what code tells them to do. Brains, on the other hand, achieve a bounded rationality of good enoughs and necessary compromises. As these two distinct entities become increasingly entangled and collide on Google Maps, Facebook or a self-driving car its important to remember how they are different from each other.

Looking back on my university days, it is a sobering thought that humanitys biological source code remains much more similar to that of a rat in the street than that of the computers in our pockets. The more people become wedded to technology, the more important it becomes to make technologies that accommodate human irrationalities and idiosyncrasies.

[The Conversations science, health and technology editors pick their favorite stories. Weekly on Wednesdays.]

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Human Behavior

Researchers propose targeted interventions to contain the pandemic with minimal societal disruption – News-Medical.Net

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to more than 218 million infections and over 4.5 million deaths as of Sept. 3, 2021. Nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), such as case isolation, quarantining contacts, and the complete lockdown of entire countries, were implemented in an effort to contain the pandemic. But these NPIs often come at the expense of economic disruption, harm to social and mental well-being, and costly administration costs to ensure compliance.

Given the slow rollout of vaccination programs worldwide and the rise of several mutations of the coronavirus, the use of these types of interventions will continue for some time. In Chaos, by AIP Publishing, researchers in China use a data-driven agent-based model to identify new and sustainable NPIs to contain outbreaks while minimizing the economic and social costs.

Based on the proposed model, we proposed targeted interventions, which can contain the outbreak with minimal disruption of society. This is of particular importance in cities like Hong Kong, whose economy relies on international trade."

Qingpeng Zhang, Study Author, American Institute of Physics

The researchers built a data-driven mobility model to simulate COVID-19 spreading in Hong Kong by combining synthetic population, human behavior patterns, and a viral transmission model. This model generated 7.55 million agents to describe the infectious state and movement for each Hong Kong resident.

Since mobile phone data is difficult to obtain in most countries, the researchers calibrated their model with open-source data, so it could be easily extended to the modeling of other metropolises with various demographic and human mobility patterns.

"With the agent-based model, we can simulate very detailed scenarios in Hong Kong, and based on these simulations, we are able to propose targeted interventions in only a small portion of the city instead of city-level NPIs," said Zhang.

The researchers found that by controlling a small percentage (top 1%-2%) of grids in Hong Kong, the virus could be largely contained. While such interventions are not as effective as citywide NPIs and compulsory COVID-19 testing, such targeted control has the benefit of a much smaller disruption of society.

The proposed model leading to the targeted interventions has the potential to guide current citywide NPIs to achieve a balance between lowering the risk and preserving human mobility and economy of the city.

"Our findings also apply to other major cities in the world, such as Beijing, New York, London, and Toyko, as COVID-19 is likely to be around indefinitely, and we have to learn how to live with it," said Zhang.

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Researchers propose targeted interventions to contain the pandemic with minimal societal disruption - News-Medical.Net