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

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

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

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

June 20, 2017 Credit: CC0 Public Domain

The image of grazing cows in a field has long conjured up a romantic nostalgia about a relaxed pace of rural life. With closer inspection, however, researchers have recognized that what appears to be a randomly dispersed herd peacefully eating grass is in fact a complex system of individuals in a group facing differing tensions. A team of mathematicians and a biologist has now built a mathematical model that incorporates a cost function to behavior in such a herd to understand the dynamics of such systems.

Complex systems research looks at how systems display behaviors beyond those capable from individual components in isolation. This rapidly emerging field can be used to elucidate phenomena observed in many other disciplines including biology, medicine, engineering, physics and economics.

"Complex systems science seeks to understand not just the isolated components of a given system, but how the individual components interact to produce 'emergent' group behaviour," said Erik Bollt, director of the Clarkson Center for Complex Systems Science and a professor of mathematics and of electrical and computer engineering.

Bollt conducted the work with his team, lead-authored by post-doctoral fellow Kelum Gajamannage, which was reported this week in the journal Chaos.

"Cows grazing in a herd is an interesting example of a complex system," said Bollt. "An individual cow performs three major activities throughout an ordinary day. It eats, it stands while it carries out some digestive processes, and then it lies down to rest."

While this process seems simple enough, there is also a balancing of group dynamics at work.

"Cows move and eat in herds to protect themselves from predators," said Bollt. "But since they eat at varying speeds, the herd can move on before the slower cows have finished eating. This leaves these smaller cows facing a difficult choice: Continue eating in a smaller, less safe group, or move along hungry with the larger group. If the conflict between feeding and keeping up with a group becomes too large, it may be advantageous for some animals to split into subgroups with similar nutritional needs."

Bollt and his colleagues incorporate a cost function into their model to capture these tensions. This adds mathematical complexity to their work, but it became apparent that it was necessary after discussing cows' behavior with their co-author, Marian Dawkins, a biologist with experience researching cows.

"Some findings from the simulation were surprising," Bollt said. "One might have thought there would be two static groups of cowsthe fast eaters and the slow eatersand that the cows within each group carried out their activities in a synchronized fashion. Instead we found that there were also cows that moved back and forth between the two."

"The primary cause is that this complex system has two competing rhythms," Bollt also said. "The large-sized animal group had a faster rhythm and the small-sized animal group had a slower rhythm. To put it into context, a cow might find itself in one group, and after some time the group is too fast. Then it moves to the slower group, which is too slow, but while moving between the two groups, the cow exposes itself more to the danger of predators, causing a tension between the cow's need to eat and its need for safety."

The existing model and cost function could be used as a basis for studying other herding animals. In the future, there may even be scope to incorporate it into studies about human behavior in groups. "The cost function is a powerful tool to explore outcomes in situations where there are individual and group-level tensions at play," said Bollt.

Explore further: Horses masticate similarly to ruminants

More information: Kelum Gajamannage et al, Modeling the lowest-cost splitting of a herd of cows by optimizing a cost function, Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science (2017). DOI: 10.1063/1.4983671

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Cow herd behavior is fodder for complex systems analysis - Phys.Org

Its pretty much a given that teenagerseat junk food as oftenas they can. And, while junk binging isa normal habit for most teens, new research finds thatwhat kids eat can have a lasting impact on their brains well into adulthood.

For a study published in The Journal of Neuroscience, researchers raised mice on a balanced diet up until their teenage years, when some of the miceswitched to a diet that wasnt so balanced and some kept on with their perfectly balanced menu. Theteen mice who werefed a poorly rounded diet consumed food that lackedomega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids brain-boosting nutrients that are notproduced inthe human (or mouse) body butare easily found in fatty fish, walnuts, soybeans, and spinach.

The researchers found that the mice that ate baddiets as teenagers had lowered levels of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids in several parts of their brains as adults; including the medial prefrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens. The mice who had stayed on balanced diets, had none of these deficits. In addition, thebrains of the mice that had been fed a poor diet had difficulty fine-tuning connections between neurons in those regions of the brain; the mice who had remained on a healthy, balanced diet did not.

As a result, the mice on the bad diet had increased anxiety-like behavior as adults, and performed worse on memory tasks than their healthy-eating counterparts.

Of course, thisstudy was conducted on mice not humans and more research needs to be done before scientists can definitively say that eating a poor diet as a teenager makes you more likely to have problems with your behavior and memory down the road. But many studies of human behavior are originally tested on mice, so this might not be too far afield. Additionally, whether or not this study shows a direct corollary to human behavior there is no doubt that what you eat can have an impact on your brain. Doctor Santosh Kesari, MD, PhD, a neurologist and neuro-oncologist and Chair of the Department of Translational Neuro-Oncology and Neurotherapeutics at the John Wayne Cancer Institute at Providence Saint Johns Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif. who did not participate in the study, upheld this assertion telling Yahoo Beauty.

The brain is constantly developing and new connections are being made, he says. Whether youre young, old, or in adolescence, what you eat can have an impact on neurological issues such as anxiety.

The studys researchers didnt investigate whether a poor diet as a teenager has reversible effects on an adult brain, but Kesari suspects that making healthier dietary choices in adulthood could help. Poor diet can have a long-lasting effect if you dont fix the underlying issue of the diet, he says.

Thats why he recommends having omega-3 fatty acids at all stages of life, as well as eating a healthy, well-rounded diet that includes lipids (organic compounds found in olive oil, among other things) and carbohydrates.

The studys findings dont mean that everyone who ate a poor diet as a teenager is bound for issues with anxiety and memory it just may raise your risk. I suspect some people are more prone than others to developing these issues, Kesari says.

He stresses the importance of eating well for your brain and overall health: We dont pay much attention to diet and healthcare, but this highlights how diet can have significant effects on neurological health and prevent a lot of medical issues in the future.

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What You Ate as a Teenager Could Impact Your Brain Now - Yahoo Health

A slater-like crustacean that lives in the sand on Aucklands Piha beach has provided new evidence that animals have biological clocks influenced by the tide as well as the more familiar circadian clock that follows the day/night cycle and regulates human behavior.

While the molecular mechanism of the circadian clock in humans is well known, including its location in the human brain and the genes involved, the mechanisms of other biological clocks are not.

Many animals are known to have extra biological clocks that regulate feeding or reproduction according to the tide or lunar cycle, but scientists have been unsure of how they work, particularly over longer periods.

Senior lecturer James Cheeseman from the faculty of medical and health sciences, and Mike Walker from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland carried out a study of Scyphax ornatus, a nocturnal sand-burrowing isopod that feeds on the plant and animal detritus that is moved up the beach by the incoming tide.

Leaving their burrows only at night, the animals need to maximize the amount of time for feeding before the tide comes in. In the wild, they appear able to follow a semilunar or approximately fortnightly feeding cycle, meaning something other than the circadian clock must be regulating their behavior.

Taking the animals from Piha into the laboratory, the study used artificially manipulated light and tidal cycles to test several hypotheses for the mechanism of the semilunar clock that controls their behavior.

The study found the animals followed internal biological clocks even when deprived of external stimuli.

What we have found is that, in the laboratory, with light and tide cycles artificially manipulated, these animals follow the same rules of behavior as they would in the wild, says Cheeseman. So we can very accurately change the semilunar rhythm by changing the perceived length of the day and tidal cycles.

That tells us their semilunar or fortnightly behavior continues to be regulated by the interaction of circatidal and circadian clocks even where there is either no external stimuli or they are in an environment with artificial light cycles or tidal cycles.

Walker said circalunar and circatidal behavior in animals was well known by early Maori who followed a fishing and planting calendar over the circalunar cycle.

The study is published in Scientific Reports.

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Animal Behavior Regulated by Interaction of Tidal, Circadian Clocks - Laboratory Equipment

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Where: The Rosenthal Theater at Inner-City Arts, 720 Kohler St., downtown Los Angeles

Tickets: $25

Length: 60 minutes, no intermission

Suitability: Mature teens and adults

Information: 323-893-3605, contactherotheatre@gmail.com, herotheatre.org.

In days gone by, people made names for themselves by doing something useful for society. Mara Irene Forns wrote plays that broke old rules, broke barriers and taught something, whether to other playwrights or to audiences.

Though she was a leader of the off-off-Broadway movement in the 1960s, the Southland knows her better from her establishing role in the also legendary Padua Hills Playwrights group and festival.

Now, her 1985 play, The Conduct of Life, is getting an airing at Inner-City Arts in downtown Los Angeles. In part because of her importance to theater but also for what the play still says about humanity, this highly stylized, challenging, disturbing work is well worth viewing.

It consists of a plotless series of scenes, many of them soliloquies or duologues, telling and not showing. It pulls from mismatched theatrical styles, the most easily recognizable of which is absurdism. It has no protagonist, no ones journey we wish to join in on. It ends in gunfire.

And yet, as a whole, it effectively and efficiently makes its points in a mere 60-minute running time, with a theatrical depth and richness not always achieved by plays with plots and standard exposition.

In what can be gleaned of story, we learn that military officer Orlando (Nick Caballero) interrogates and tortures captives in an unnamed, presumably Latin American, nation. His goal is maximum power.

He seeks that, too, in his relationships at home. His wife, Leticia (Adriana Sevahn Nichols), knows shes in a loveless marriage. But uneducated, though bright and articulate, she needs marriage to survive.

In a presumably secret room in Leticia and Orlandos home, he repeatedly rapes a child, formerly homeless and orphaned, now imprisoned there, though the play keeps us guessing, until the end, whether this is real or his fantasy.

Visiting the home, Alejo (Jonathan Medina), symbolizing passivity, cant stop himself from admiring Orlando. The sometimes-stuttering maid Olimpia (Elisa Bocanegra) disdains her employers. But she, too, cant walk away from her job (the time frame of this work seems ambiguous, though the dial telephone gives us an approximate era).

The child, Nena (Antonia Cruz-Kent), is last to speak, revealing her horrific childhood and her coping mechanisms. Likewise, the visual focus ultimately turns to Nena. Its director Jos Luis Valenzuelas statement that our actions leave the next generation to cope with the results.

Forns themes are status, gender, class, education and, in particular, how we blame others for what ails us and how our deepest misery shows up as violence, which becomes contagious.

Valenzuela makes visual and even more visceral the potent script. His actors, even working in various styles throughout the play, make their every moment believable, a pure reflection of human behavior.

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Symbolically, Franois-Pierre Coutures pristine all-white set design belies the messiness of the characters lives. It also serves as a canvas for Johnny Garofalos highly saturated lighting design that changes with the intensity of the scene.

John Zalewskis superb sound design underscores the scripts brutality, notably in the sounds almost cruel intrusions on our hearing and heartbeats, but also in the juxtaposition of classical music to the inhumaneness of words and actions here.

Dany Margolies is a Los Angeles-based writer.

Rating: 4 stars

When: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday, through June 25

Where: The Rosenthal Theater at Inner-City Arts, 720 Kohler St., downtown Los Angeles

Tickets: $25

Length: 60 minutes, no intermission

Suitability: Mature teens and adults

Information: 323-893-3605, contactherotheatre@gmail.com, herotheatre.org.

Continued here:
'Conduct of Life,' at LA's Rosenthal Theater, shrewdly examines human cruelty - San Bernardino County Sun

Theres a world of intriguing ideas in these new nonfiction books from five Bay Area authors. From Robert M. Sapolskys deep study of human behavior, to Steve Casners users guide to preventing injury and in between, Mugambi Jouets study of American exceptionalism, Adam Lashinskys look at the inner workings of Uber, and Jo Piazzas worldwide survey of women in their first year of marriage readers will find much to consider and perhaps put into practice in their daily lives.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky (Penguin, $35, 800 pages)

It cant be easy to define and describe the scope of human behavior, but MacArthur Fellow Robert Sapolsky, a San Francisco resident and a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, explores the subject with passion, insight and wide-ranging vision. In 17 chapters, he examines the connection between emotion, aggression and empathy, considers the power of symbols and explains what childhood adversity does to our DNA, why nature and nurture are inseparable and how our brains divide the world into Us and Them. Its a big, sprawling mess of a subject, he admits, but Sapolsky makes the discussion fascinating and often very funny. Behave is brilliant and unusual a big book about science that offers hope for human nature.

Exceptional America: What Divides Americans from the World and from Each Other by Mugambi Jouet (University of California Press, $29.95, 368 pages) Mugambi Jouet, who teaches at Stanford Law School, takes a long look at the notion of American exceptionalism in this thought-provoking new book. Jouet was raised in Paris by a French mother and a Kenyan father, and he tackles his subject with a multicultural point of view, considering anti-intellectualism, fundamentalism, sex and gender roles and the politics of mass incarceration. The book takes the reader right up to the present; Jouet finished writing it just after the 2016 presidential election.

Wild Ride: Inside Ubers Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky (Portfolio/Penguin, $28, 228 pages) Recent news that Uber, facing claims of harassment, discrimination and inappropriate behavior, had fired 20 of its employees probably didnt surprise author Adam Lashinsky. An assistant managing editor at Fortune, Lashinskys been looking at the embattled $70 billion ride-sharing company for several years. In this revealing new book, he traces many of Ubers problems to its controversial CEO, Travis Kalanick, whom the author calls insensitive to customer concerns and indifferent to the plight of Uber drivers. Lashinsky briefly worked as a driver for the company getting the job required no test, no interview, no nothing, he writes and he sums up the experience in a few words: The pay stinks, and the work is difficult.

How to Be Married: What I Learned from Real Women on Five Continents about Surviving My First (Really Hard) Year of Marriage by Jo Piazza (Harmony, $26, 304 pages) San Francisco travel editor Jo Piazza admits that life after marriage wasnt easy for her. As a single woman, shed been well-adjusted, with great friends and work she loved. Once she tied the knot, though, she just wasnt sure how well it was working. She began to feel a strange melancholy and wondered if other recently married women felt the same way. So for the next year, she asked them; along with her husband, Nick, she traveled to 20 countries on five continents and talked to women about their marriages. What she learned makes How to Be Married a practical and surprisingly helpful how-to.

Careful: A Users Guide to Our Injury-Prone Minds by Steve Casner (Riverhead, $26, 336 pages) How careful are you? According to Steve Casner, a research psychologist who studies the accident-prone mind, modern life is driving the rate of injuries and fatalities sky-high. The San Francisco-based author lays out the science of safety, and offers practical techniques for thinking ahead, staying focused, and preventing accidents at home, at work, and on the road.

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Books by the Bay: Robert Sapolsky's 'Behave' offers hope for human nature - The Mercury News

June 16, 2017 11:30 PM

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) Weve all seen reports about protests that spin dangerously out of control, it could happen anywhere.

Would you know what to do if you were caught in the middle? CBS2s Jessica Moore has some information that could save your life in the impulse reaction.

The protesters surged forward, the police pushed back, I got hit by a baton, CBS2s Dick Brennan recalled.

Brennan was reporting from the center of Occupy Wall Street protests that turned violent.

I remember having my hands over my head, someone stepping on me and thinking this is a really bad situation, he said.

What if you could predict how someone might react in a volatile situation, or even teach them how to stay safe?

Thats the concept behind Riot, a one of a kind interactive film.

It was created and designed by Karen Palmer. She said she was inspired by the events in Ferguson.

I wanted to create an experience that will show somebody how they would actually really respond in a conflict situation. I started thinking thats AI, thats facial recognition, she said.

While watching, a webcam tracks expressions using a complex series of algorithms. It can register calm, anger, or fear.

I was distracted by the person right in front of me, and that could have led to my demise, Moore said.

The viewers reactions determine the outcome.

It responds in real time to emotions, so the narrative will change depending on your emotional reaction, Palmer explained.

Hawk Newsome, founder of the New York chapter of Black Lives Matter, said hes seen situations change in a flash.

People see video on the news, but they dont experience. This is the closest that anyone can come to being on the front line, he said, You can feel it, something is going to happen.

He agrees a calm response can be most effective.

There may be pushing, there may be shoving, but stand your ground, be calm, and well get through this, he said.

Retired NYPD detective Joe Giacalone said having an understanding of how participants might react can also affect police response.

They can have it stream live into a temporary headquarters vehicle near the scene, and then be able to dictate what personnel needs to move at what location, he said.

Palmer said shes heard from some police departments and organized protest groups about her film and the findings to see how it might be helpful to both of these organizations in the future.

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'Riot' The Film Seeks To Predict Human Behavior In Volatile Situations - CBS New York