Young children know that name-calling is wrong. Tweens are taught the perils of online bullying and revenge porn: It's unacceptable and potentially illegal.

But celebrities who engage in flagrant attacks on social media are rewarded with worldwide attention. President Donald Trump's most popular tweet to date is a video that shows him fake-pummeling a personification of CNN. Reality TV star Rob Kardashian was trending last week after attacking his former fiance on Instagram in a flurry of posts so explicit his account was shut down. He continued the attacks on Twitter, where he has more than 7.6 million followers.

While public interest in bad behavior is nothing new, social media has created a vast new venue for incivility to be expressed, witnessed and shared. And experts say it's affecting social interactions in real life.

"Over time, the attitudes and behaviors that we are concerned with right now in social media will bleed out into the physical world," said Karen North, a psychologist and director of the University of Southern California's Digital Social Media Program. "We're supposed to learn to be polite and civil in society. But what we have right now is a situation where a number of role models are acting the opposite of that ... And by watching it, we vicariously feel it, and our own attitudes and behaviors change as a result."

Catherine Steiner-Adair, a psychologist and author of "The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age," said she's already seeing the effects.

She said she's been confronted by students across the country asking why celebrities and political leaders are allowed to engage in name-calling and other activities for which they would be punished.

On some middle-school campuses, "Trumping" means to grab a girl's rear end, she said.

And teenagers have killed themselves over the kind of slut-shaming and exposure of private images Kardashian leveled at Blac Chyna, with whom he has an infant daughter.

"We are normalizing behaviors, and it's affecting some kids," Steiner-Adair said. "And what's affecting kids that is profound is their mistrust of grown-ups who are behaving so badly. Why aren't they stopping this?"

Social media satisfies a human need for connection. Users bond over common interests and establish digital relationships with their favorite public figures, following and commenting on their lives just like they do their friends'.

Gossip is a bonding activity, and it doesn't take a Real Housewife to know people love to share dirt about others' perceived misdeeds. Collective disapproval creates a feeling of community, regardless of which side you're on. Having a common enemy is "one of the strongest bonding factors in human nature," North said.

With 352,000 retweets, Trump's CNN-pummeling post isn't in the realm of Ellen DeGeneres' Oscar selfie (3.4 million retweets). And Kardashian's rant against Chyna paled in popularity with Beyonce's Instagram pregnancy announcement, which collected 8 million likes.

Still, Trump's attack tweets have proven his most popular, according to a new study by Ohio State University Professor Jayeon "Janey" Lee.

"Attacks on the media were most effective," Lee said of her analysis of tweets posted during the presidential campaign. "Whenever Trump criticized or mocked the media, the message was more likely to be retweeted and 'favorited.' "

Trump, who has 33.4 million Twitter followers, has defended his social-media approach as "modern day presidential."

Cyber incivility, particularly when practiced by cultural leaders, can have a profound impact on human relations, North said.

Studies show that young people who witness aggressive behavior in adults model and expand on that behavior. She pointed to Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura's famous "Bobo Doll Experiment," which found that kids who saw adults hit a doll in frustration not only hit the doll as well, but attacked it with weapons.

Social media is an atmosphere devoid of the social cues that mitigate behavior in real life, she said. When violating social norms in person, there's immediate feedback from others through body language and tone of voice. No such indicators exist online, and retweets can feel like validation.

Cruel and humiliating posts often become "an instant hit online," Steiner-Adair said. "It's one of the best ways to become popular."

Viral posts then get mainstream media attention, spreading digital nastiness into everyday conversation.

By not expressly rejecting cruel or hateful online behavior, "we are creating a bystander culture where people think this is funny," she said.

"When we tolerate leaders in the popular media like a Kardashian, or a president behaving in this way, we are creating a very dangerous petri dish for massive cultural change," Steiner-Adair said.

Young people, who may be the most plugged in, are getting mixed messages as they form their moral concepts.

"It behooves us all to question why we are participating in this mob of reactivity," Steiner-Adair said, "and what are the character traits we need to model for our children."

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From Trump Tweets to Kardashian saga, how online behavior affects kids in real life - Chicago Tribune

BOYNTON BEACH

Authorities are investigating a suspected case ofhuman trafficking involving a 26-year-old suburban West Palm Beach man and a teenage girl.

Boynton Beach police arrested Steven Snipe on June 30 on three counts of lewd and lascivious battery against a person under the age of 18. Additional charges for human trafficking and production of child pornography are pending, waiting on the completion of a search warrant for a hotel room where Snipe is suspected of selling the teen into prostitution, and for his cellphone devices, according to a police report.

As of Monday morning, Snipe remained in custody at the Palm Beach County Jail after a judge set his bail bond amount at $45,000.

At least 10 people in Palm Beach County and one in Martin County have been arrested for human trafficking this year as local-law enforcement agencies have increasingly focused on a crime described by many as modern-day slavery.

Police say that Snipe met a juvenile runaway about two months ago through the Backpage website and forced her into prostitution.

This is a developing story. Check back later for more details.

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NEW: Man accused of lewd behavior, faces human trafficking charge - Palm Beach Post

Many of the stories are about power, and the violence, both implicit and explicit, imbued in its existence. The entirety of Ants reads When I crushed a large number of ants by accident with my feet, I realized that weakness is punishment without wrongdoing. It has that special quality that give allegories their power: It seems obvious, but only after you finish it. Many of the stories use animals or household objects as a window into the human. Later, in Greatest Creatures, a mother ant and a son ant are discussing which species is better, humans or ants. The story ends when the mother points out that, though humans have many geniuses among them, theyve been unable to prevent the catastrophic from occurring, and the fact that ants have prevented it makes them better. Like Alomars best work, it makes a point that is equal parts silly and compelling: By most metrics, humans seem a great deal more important than ants, but it also seems obvious that whichever species finds a way to avoid destroying itself is the better one.

In Who Deserves a Muzzle? a dog watches his owners shout at one another and considers whether it makes sense that he be required to wear a muzzle and collar when his behavior is so much better than theirs. Later, in They Dont Know How to Bark, two dogs reflect with sympathy and pity on humans poor sense of smell and ugly language. Again, Alomar is being fundamentally ridiculous while making an odd sort of sense: Hes writing against the arrogance that can come from a limited perspective. But these are not childrens fables: Alomar often centers greed, arrogance, cruelty, and above all, folly. When inanimate objects attempt to replicate what they see from humans as a means of self-determination, it has disastrous consequences, like in the collections title story:

Some of the teeth of the comb were envious of human class differences. They strived to increase their height, and, when they succeeded, began to look with disdain on their colleagues below. After a little while, the combs owner felt a desire to comb his hair. But when he found it in this state, he threw it in the garbage.

In Alomars world, human behavior seems destructive, even to people, as long as theyre not the ones theyre observing. The change in perspective is what reveals human beings as ridiculous: If it is ridiculous for a comb to be vain, how ridiculous is it for a person?

Throughout the stories, humanity is often portrayed as the enemy of everything within its striking distance. But the harm is often inflicted in the background, like its just something that happens. When Alomar turns his attention to the elements that make that harm possible, things begin to feel much less silly. In A Taste, the devil tastes a drop of human hatred, is poisoned, and dies. Alomar hits this note again in Human Malice, where an argument between a nuclear bomb and a grenade over which is more evil is ended when human malice intervenes and points out that it created them both. Alomar posits hatred and malice as elements of human nature, not its sum total, but in emphasizing their destructive powers, he recognizes their control over the way huge swaths of the world lives. The effect is that Alomars stories give brief flashes of insight into the magnitude of human evil, like staring directly into the sun for a moment before having to look away.

Its not that Alomar is cynical; hes exhausted. Journey of Life, the first story in The Teeth of the Comb, follows a nameless, sexless character as they pour over maps and walk through crowds shouting for a beloved they never find. The true object of the search is only revealed in the last line: I stood on my shaking legs and continued my journey, searching for humanity until the last moment. The character maintains hope because they are willing to continue searching, but the reader can see the truth: theyll be looking forever. Importantly, Alomar does not denigrate his character for their wrongheadedness; instead, he casts the quest as noble, in spite of its futility.

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How a Syrian Writer Takes on War - New Republic

In a world wherepost-truth was 2016s word of the year, many people are starting to doubt the efficacy of facts. Can science make sense of anti-science and post-truthism? More generally, how can we understand what drives peoples beliefs, decisions, and behaviors?

Scientists have developed many theories to describehow people process and think about information. Unfortunately, theres an increasing tendency to see people as creatures whose reasoning mechanisms are largely dependent on a narrow set of processes. For example, one popular theory suggests that if we just communicate more accurate information to people, their behavior will change accordingly. Another suggests that people will reject evidence if it threatens their deeply held cultural worldviews and associated feelings.

Its more important than ever that our approach to communication is evidence-based and built on a strong, theoretical foundation. Many of these models contribute valuable insights and can help us design better communication, but each on its own is incomplete. And science communicators have a tendency to oversimplify, focusing on a single model and disregarding other theories.

We suggest that this is a dangerous practice and less effective thana more nuanced and holistic view. The apparent choice between fact and feeling, or between cognition and culture, is a false dilemma. In reality, both are related and address different pieces of the decision-making puzzle.

One well-known theory about how people absorb new facts is the information deficit model. The main idea here is straightforward: If you throw more facts at people, theyll eventually come around on an issue.

Most behavioral science scholars agree that this model of human thinking and behavioris clearly incomplete people rely on a range of other cues besides facts in guiding their attitudes and behavior. For example, sometimes we simply act based on how we feel about an issue. Unfortunately, the facts dont always convince.

But the term information deficit is problematic, too. People tend to have limited information in most areas of life. For example, we often dont know the thoughts and feelings of other people we trust and value. Similarly, we might have limited knowledge about appropriate cultural norms when traveling to a new country, and so on. Information deficit isnt a very meaningful term to use to theorize about human thinking.

Another theory about human thinking is called cultural cognition. In brief, it suggests that our cultural values and worldviews shapehow we think about science and society.

Its easy to be duped into thinking of the human brain as a sponge that soaks up only the information it wants to believe. For example, the theory suggests that peoples position on divisive issues such as climate change is not informed by scientific evidence, but rather by the strong commitment people have to their political groups and ideologies. The idea is that to protect our cultural worldviews, we actively reject evidence that threatens them think of someone who fears that government action on climate change undermines the free market.

In short, this narrative sounds appealing on the surface, as humans organize themselves in groups, and much psychological research has shown that we derive part of oursocial identities from the group affiliations we maintain.

Yet, its focus is overly narrow, and theres a logical fallacy in this conception of human thinking. We belong to many groups at any given time and we juggle many different public and private identities. The real question is about nuance; when and under what conditions is someone motivated to reject scientific facts in favor of their cultural worldview?

To throw all our fact-disseminating eggs into one or the other theoretical basket is oversimplistic and deprives us of important insights.

A more nuanced perspective recognizes that facts and information are embedded in social and cultural contexts. For example, peoples perception of expert consensus matters a great deal, especially on contested issues, and is often described as agateway belief that influences a range of other attitudes about an issue. The near-unanimous consensus that vaccines do not cause autism or that climate change is human-caused are all scientific facts. At the same time, consensus information is also inherently social: It describes the extent of agreement within an influential group of experts.

People often want to beaccurate in their views, and, in an uncertain world bounded by limited time and effort, we make strategic bets on what information to take into account. Consensus acts as a natural heuristic, or mental shortcut, for complicated scientific issues.Numerousstudies have found that highlighting scientific agreement on human-caused global warming can help neutralize and reduce conflicting views about climate change.

Similarly, while some studies have found a limited effect of knowledge on judgment, when you dig deeper into the data, a more nuanced and insightful picture emerges. For example, some studies claim that adeficit in scientific knowledge does not explain why people are divided on contested issues such as climate change. But whats being measured in these experiments matters. Indeed, indicators such as how well people understand numbers or their scientific literacy which is what some of these studies actually quantify are categorically different from measuring specific knowledge people have about a topic such as climate change. In fact, a survey across six countries found that when peopleunderstand the causes of climate change, their concern increases accordingly, irrespective of their values. Similarly,otherstudies show that explanations about the mechanisms of climate change can reduce biased evaluations of evidence as well as political polarization.

In short, facts do matter.

Indeed, there is no need to throw outthe baby with the bathwater. Instead, we need to dispel false dichotomies and folk psychology about human thinking that currently dominate the media. Repeating the story that people dont care about facts runs the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. A holistic view acknowledges that people rely on cognitive shortcuts and emotions, care about social norms and group identities and are sometimes motivated in their reasoning, but it also recognizes the research showing that most people want to fundamentally hold accurate perceptions about the world.

This is particularly important as the public is currently hampered by misinformation and fake news. In two separatestudies, we each found that misinformation about climate change has a disproportionate influence on public attitudes and opinion. However, we also found that inoculating people against the false arguments neutralized misinformations influence, across the political spectrum. In essence, teaching people what false arguments might be deployed helped them overcome their cultural biases. Other work similarlyshows that the politicization of science can be counteracted with inoculation.

People are complex, social, and affected by a diverse range of influences depending on the situation. We want to hold accurate views, but emotion, group identities, and conflicting goals can get in the way. Incorporating these different insights into human thinking enriches our understanding of how people form opinions and make decisions.

Effective science communication requires an inclusive, holistic approach that integrates different social science perspectives. To simplistically focus on a single perspective paints a limited and increasingly inaccurate view of how humans form judgments about social and scientific issues.

Link:
Even in the era of fake news, facts can shape our opinions - Grist

Recently, much hay has been made about a Guest Opinion that claimed people who display a Hate has no home here sign are hypocrites in that such signs are code for I hate Trump.

Although it is usually impossible to judge the intentions of actions, the display of such signs logically demands that the owners claim they hate no one, that they are sending a message to some who, in their opinion, do hate others, and that they are morally superior to such haters.

The problem is that the sentiment Hate has no home here can only be justified religiously under the rubric that humans are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. Secularism has as its basis that religious beliefs are merely personal, biased world views. Even if God does exist, he, or at least his revelations to humanity, are irrelevant to the public square.

Secularism appears to be stuck in the Enlightenment, which claimed that morals could be justified by pure, detached reason, as if that overall project has not been discredited by academics for over 100 years.

So, without a religious basis, morality becomes a mere shouting match over who can scream the loudest or act the most indignant. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote all animals ... strive instinctively for an optimum combination of favourable (sic) conditions which allow them to expend all their energy and achieve their maximum feeling of power. Thus, if person A thinks it is to his or her advantage to discriminate against person B, who are you to judge? One could even argue this is perfectly Darwinian. Ironically, the quote comes from Nietzsches book, Beyond Good and Evil.

We have here a clear example of how the pen is mightier than the sword. The ideas that permeate a culture are far more dangerous than even going to war. Barack Obamas dissemination of his functional atheism (as he was labeled by famous atheist Richard Dawkins) has had a far more pernicious effect on our culture than Donald Trumps personal puerile and bellicose behavior ever could. For example, the Family Research Council (admittedly a Christian organization) claims in its report Hostility to Religion: The Growing Threat to Religious Liberty in America, that there has been a 76 percent increase in violations (might we say hate toward?) of legitimate religious freedoms that can be tied directly to Obama administration policies.

Additionally, the hatred of the political left toward the political right is on display daily. The lack of condemnation over Kathy Griffins bloodied Trump head has been deafening. The shutdown at universities of speakers not following politically correct orthodoxy only makes our divisions worse. (So much for diversity and dialogue.)

Furthermore, what greater hate can there be toward a fellow human being than to support his or her execution before he or she is even born?

And, of course, people who have honest doubts about climate change are not met with logical counterargument but simply insulted. Take Trumps pullout from the Paris agreement. As columnist Charles Krauthammer pointed out, the agreement was completely non-binding, non-enforceable and allowed China and India to continue to put our planet in jeopardy for another 13 years. Predictably, there was a cacophony of catcalls skewering Trump for his alleged scientific naivet.

However, science does not work as straightforwardly as we are taught in school. Consider Thomas S. Kuhns 1962 book, The Structures of Scientific Revolutions. Parade magazines capsule review calls it a book of science as explained by a physicist and philosopher who suggested that understanding is not merely a matter of gathering the facts. The book demonstrates how scientific advancements actually happen and undercuts the justification for any arrogance on the part of those who respond with mere disdain to those, for example, who may have their doubts about climate change or its causes.

Recently, this paper editorialized and lamented that the courtroom appears to be the last bastion of decorum in a society where most people seem to think the rules apply to everybody but them. But given that progressives have spent the last 50 years undermining traditional sexual mores while naively thinking their rejection of some moral standards would not spread like a cancer to the remainder of human behavior, how could we not but have arrived at this point?

As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

Charles D. Dern, Ph.D., Plumstead, is an adjunct teacher of philosophy and theology.

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As ye sow, so shall ye reap - The Intelligencer

Muslim groups in Malaysia and Indonesia are calling for a Starbucks boycott due to the company's support of LGBT issues.

The Muslim Malaysian group Perkasa called on its members to boycott Starbucks coffee shops this week, the Associated Press reported.

"Our objection is because they are promoting something that is against human instinct, against human behavior and against religion," Amini Amir Abdullah, Perkasa's Islamic affairs bureau chief, told Reuters. "That's why we are against it."

Perkasa called on the Malaysian government to revoke trading licenses for Starbucks, as well as other companies like Microsoft and Apple.

The call came days after an Indonesian Islamic group, Muhammadiyah, also denounced the coffee chain in the nation with the world's largest Muslim population.

According to the Associated Press, shares in the company that operates Starbucks in Indonesia fell and a boycott Starbucks hashtag was popular for a short time.

Amini said the call for boycott stemmed from a report that Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz supports gay marriage. In 2013 Schultz, who was Starbucks CEO at the time, responded to a question from a shareholder who suggested that Starbucks had lost customers due to its support of LGBT rights by saying, "Not every decision is an economic decision. The lens in which we are making that decision is through the lens of our people."

"Though we are founded in the United States, we are a global company with over 300,000 partners and 26,000 stores in 75 markets around the world," a Starbucks spokesperson told the Washington Examiner. "In all countries where we do business, we are proud to be a part of the fabric of the local community, and we strive to be respectful of local customs and traditions while staying true to Starbucks long-standing values and purpose."

Sodomy is illegal and punishable by up to 20 years in prison in Malaysia and, while homosexuality is not illegal in Indonesia, Indonesia's Constitutional Court is looking to make homosexual sex and sex out of wedlock a criminal activity, the Associated Press reported.

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Malaysia, Indonesia Muslim groups call for Starbucks boycott over LGBT stance - Washington Examiner

In his book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin proudly argued that our sense of morality was a uniquely human trait. Even though that claim has been disputed in recent years, its fair to say humans still top the charts when it comes to moral senses.

But it looks like we might soon have some competition, namely in the form of driverless cars.

A new study in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience has looked at human behavior and moral assessments to see how they could be applied to computers.

Just like a human in a car, a driverless car could be faced with split-second moral decisions. Picture this: A child runs into the road. The car has to work out whether it hits them, veers off to hit a wall and potentially kill other passersby, or hit the wall and potentially kill the driver.

It was previously assumed that this kind of human morality could never be described in the language of a computer as it was context dependent.

But we found quite the opposite, Leon Stfeld, first author of the study, said in a statement.

Human behavior in dilemma situations can be modeled by a rather simple value-of-life-based model that is attributed by the participant to every human, animal, or inanimate object."

They worked this out by asking participants to drive a car in a typical suburban neighborhood on a foggy day in an immersive virtual-reality simulation. During the simulation, they were faced with unavoidable crashes with inanimate objects, animals, people, etc. Their task was to decide what object the car crashes into.

The results were then plugged into statistical models leading to rules to work out how and why a human reached a moral decision. Remarkably, patterns emerged.

Now we have worked out the laws and mechanics in the way a computer would understand, it means we could now simply teach machines to share our morality. This will have some huge implications in regards to self-driving cars.

We need to ask whether autonomous systems should adopt moral judgments, if yes, should they imitate moral behavior by imitating human decisions, should they behave along ethical theories and if so, which ones, and critically, if things go wrong who or what is at fault? senior author Professor Gordon Pipa said.

"Now that we know how to implement human ethical decisions into machines we, as a society, are still left with a double dilemma," Professor Peter Knig, another senior author, added. "Firstly, we have to decide whether moral values should be included in guidelines for machine behavior and secondly, if they are, should machines act just like humans."

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Self-Driving Cars Will Soon Make Moral Decisions As Well As Humans - IFLScience

Customers sit outside of a Starbucks cafe in Jakarta, Indonesia July 1, 2017.. (photo credit:REUTERS)

KUALA LUMPUR - A prominent Muslim group in Malaysia has joined calls by Islamic conservatives in Indonesia for a boycott of Starbucks to protest against the international coffee chain's support of gay rights.

Activists say intolerance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people has spiked in recent years in Indonesia and Malaysia, both majority Muslim, multi-ethnic Southeast Asian countries.

Perkasa, a group with about 700,000 members that campaigns for the rights of ethnic Malay Muslims, said it agreed with calls this week by Muhammadiyah, Indonesia's second-largest Muslim group, for a boycott of Starbucks over its pro-LGBT stand.

Perkasa also agreed with the Indonesian group's call for Starbucks' operating license to be revoked, it said.

Amini Amir Abdullah, who heads Perkasa's Islamic affairs bureau, said Starbucks' position challenged Malaysia's constitution, which recognized Islam as the country's official religion.

"Our objection is because they are promoting something that is against the human instinct, against human behavior and against religion. That's why we are against it," Amini told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.

Muhammadiyah's call for a boycott has gained support from the Indonesian Ulema Council, its top clerical body.

The religious groups' opposition to Starbucks came after a video from 2013 circulated online of pro-LGBT comments made by the company's chairman and former chief executive, Howard Schultz.

In the video, Schultz said Starbucks embraced diversity and "not every decision is an economic decision," in response to a shareholder who complained that the company had lost customers because of its support for gay marriage.

Starbucks Malaysia could not be reached for comment.

PT Sari Coffee Indonesia, which holds the license to run the Starbucks chain in Indonesia, said in a statement it was not affiliated with any political or ideological groups.

"We are grateful and proud to have been a part of local communities in Indonesia for 15 years, always maintaining the deepest respect for, and adherence to, Indonesia's local laws, culture and beliefs," said Fetty Kwartati, a director at PT MAP Boga Adiperkasa, the parent company of PT Sari Coffee Indonesia.

Some Muslims in Indonesia, however, said the boycott call would not stop them from buying Starbucks coffee.

"I love their products, not their CEO," said Jakarta resident Kornelius Kamajaya.

The boycott call got a similar response from some in Malaysia.

"Don't make it such an issue that we have to boycott a company because of one small statement," said Muhammad Azril Maridzuan, an assistant bank manager in Kuala Lumpur.

Muslim groups should not "be so extremist" even though gay rights was against their religious beliefs, he said.

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Muslim group calls for Starbucks boycott over LGBT stand - The Jerusalem Post

A year after then-chief information officer Terry Halvorsen first publicly floated the idea of killingDoDs Common Access Card in favor of a collection of more flexible authentication technologies, the Pentagon is beginning to test drive at least one of the potential replacements for the CAC.

Last week, the Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental reached an agreement with Plurilock Technologies, a Victoria, British Columbia-based firm that holds several patents on behavior-based authentication (or, behaviour-based, to our friends to the north).

The company claims that after spending about 20 minutes monitoring and analyzing the specific patterns people engage in when using their computers particularly their habits when pressing keys on their keyboards and their mouse movement techniques its software can build a reliabledigital fingerprint for any user that can be used later on to sound an alarm when an impostor is logged onto a system using someone elses credentials.

Human behavior has a degree of variability its organic, Plurilocks CEO, Ian Paterson said in an interview. A person may have had coffee in the morning, they may be tired at the end of the day, but they still retain unique characteristics, and thats what we track.

Sponsored Content: Register for our free webinar to learn how DHS, Department of Transportation, FirstNet and FEMA are implementing their emergency communications strategies.

The aforementioned CIO, Terry Halvorsen, said last June that DoD would eliminate the CAC within two years. The replacement, he continued to emphasize in subsequent public statements, would not be a single technology, but a collection of 10 or more different authentication factors that give the department a higher degree of identity assurance than it currently haswithout tying users to a single piece of plastic with an embedded microchip.

The evaluation thats now underway with Plurilocks system appears to be consistent with that game plan. Paterson said the test deployment thats now beginninginside one of DoDs combat support agencies (the company declined to say which one) will monitor users behavior only after theyve logged into a computer by some other means.

If the system detects something unusual, it can be configured to do a number of things, from delivering immediate alerts to security administrators, to locking the users terminal, to simply asking a user to authenticate themselves again. And depending on how they re-authenticate, it can take a series of steps that rely on other factors to provide higher degrees of identity assurance.

Paterson argued that sort of continuous monitoring of users behavior is the only realway to know whether the person sitting behind a computer screen is truly who they claim to be.

For some of our large clients in the financial sector, theyve told us it only takes one oops for someone to walk away and leave their terminal unlocked, he said. It doesnt take much imagination to think that if somebodys going through a divorce, if theres been money changing hands, it becomes a liability for that business. Because were sitting in the background continuously, the second an intruder would sit down and start trying to interact with that desktop, we would be able to stop them in real time.

Worried about the Trump administration's proposed cuts to federal retirement? Find out what these 100 members of Congress have to say about it.

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In quest to replace Common Access Card, DoD starts testing behavior-based authentication - FederalNewsRadio.com

T T heir relationship began innocently enough. He started to pay extra attention to her, and her attraction to him grew over time. One day, however, the dynamic changed. While she was peacefully sitting having a meal, he attacked her without warning. The unprovoked abuse continued, yet she stayed with him, still feeling the attraction and too afraid to go anywhere else. Later, his presence benefitted their youngsters.

Such is a typical story of a wild, female chacma baboon, which in many ways is a tale that mirrors those of certain chimpanzees and human domestic abuse survivors the world over, a new study published in the journal Current Biology indicates. Males of all three species may use long-term sexual intimidation to control their mates, suggesting that this mating strategy has a long history in primates, including humans.

The behavior has often been reported in our species, and has been documented in male chimps over the past decade. The new study focuses on chacma baboons, which are among the largest of all monkeys.

What is interesting is that the forms of sexual violence reported in chacma baboons may resemble some common patterns of sexual intimidation in humans, namely domestic violence, in the sense that they are similarly expressed in the context of long-term relationships between one male and one female, which are otherwise characterized by close spatial proximity and sometimes high levels of affiliation, said senior author Elise Huchard of the University of Montpelliers Institute of Evolutionary Sciences.

There is nothing paradoxical in forming a strong bond with someone, and displaying aggression in the context of such relationship, added Huchard. Conflict is an integral part of social life in every species including humans, and it's often with those people that you often see that you may have a conflict.

Huchard, lead author Alice Baniel, and co-author Guy Cowlishaw studied wild chacma baboons at Tsaobis Nature Park, a semi-arid environment in Namibia. The study occurred over four different periods from 20052014, during which time the researchers documented 222 chases or attacks led by males.

The researchers observed that males often formed social bonds with particular fertile females, which they then attacked and chased repeatedly usually without provocation in the weeks preceding her ovulation and prior to their mating.

It can also be that there is an event triggering the attack, such as a rival approaching or vocalizing, or the proximity of another baboon group, Huchard said. The latter case is typical: males often chase and attack some females of their own group when meeting another group, and they generally target sexually receptive females in such occasions.

RELATED: Human Hands More Primitive Than Chimp Hands

Some of the females were badly injured in the attacks, with certain individuals suffering premature deaths after repeated bouts of injuries.

The prior studies on sexual intimidation in chimps found that fertile females have higher levels of cortisol, a hormone indicative of stress. Increased stress can alter immune response. It can also disrupt reproduction and growth.

If a female baboon does give birth to offspring sired by the male, his behavior somewhat changes.

Several studies (on baboons) have shown that its often the male who has been monopolizing a female during her conceptive estrus who becomes her friend when she gives birth, Huchard explained. The female follows the male everywhere with her newborn, and the male essentially tolerates her presence; however, studies have shown that males defend their female friend's offspring against predators or infanticidal attacks, which are not uncommon in baboons.

She continued, Male-female bonds progressively dissolve as infants grow towards independency, and are often finished when a female becomes fertile again, when her juvenile is fully weaned.

A common factor among primates that practice long-term sexual intimidation is that the species tend to have males that are larger than the females. Such size differences, in turn, appear to be driven by patterns of male-to-male competition. This can happen when there are several adult males for each sexually receptive female within a population.

Since sexual coercion can stunt a victims growth, it might even further drive sexual size dimorphism, helping to keep the vicious cycle going.

Not all primate species have males that engage in long-term sexual intimidation, though. In lemurs, for example, it is common that females are larger than males. Even among baboons, chimps, and certainly humans, not all males practice sexual coercion.

There is increasing research to show that animals are capable of innovations, rational decisions, self-control, empathy, strategic behavior, etc., Huchard said. So, it's possible that male baboons are just driven by their sexual hormones, but it's also very possible that their actions are strategic and adjusted to the social context.

In humans, the intensity and frequency of long-term sexual intimidation by males vary widely across cultures. This points to a strong cultural component affecting the behavior.

Its even possible that there is a cultural basis for baboon sexual intimidation, as for human sexual intimidation, Huchard said. Thats a question for future research, but it wont be an easy one to answer.

Original post:
Sexual Violence Among Baboons Shows Links to Human Behavior ... - Seeker