Selin Balci uses fungi as a medium tocreate living maps that explore the complexity of microscopic life and its similarity with human behavior.

SelinBalci got a degree in microbiology from Istanbul Universityand worked in researchfor 5 years before turning to art. Her work combines her experience culturing fungi and moldwith creative experimentation to obtain colorful pieces that reflect the complex behavior of these microorganisms. The micro-world, largely hidden from sight, is alluring, frightening and beautiful, she writes.

Balci creates her living paintings by seeding colorful microorganismson agar coating on top of the canvas. This method lets her control the overall shape, but the final colors and sizes of each colony depend on the interactions among the different species as they grow. After observing the complex patterns they follow for years, she argues that their behavior is not much unlike our own.

Simple living organisms demonstrate all of the hallmarks of a complex and coordinated social life, Balci says. The diminutive life forms harmonize to create a colorful array of actions, counter-actions and conflicts where they mimic the human conditions of social, political, economic, and environmental concerns that have an effect on us.

With every piece, she experiments with the fungis behavior.I create competition for resources, territorial wars, and struggle for power and control among living organisms in an artificially created environment where all vital resources are restricted, she writeson herwebsite.Sometimes they eat each other; they grow on top of each other. They get angry. Other times, they keep to themselves, delineating a strict border between colonies. I find their behavior very similar to us, to humans.

All images via Selin Balci

Original post:
This Turkish Bioartist Creates Beautiful Maps out of Fungi - Labiotech.eu (blog)

Whats the right way to respond if your boss makes an inappropriateor even unethicalrequest? Former FBI director James Comey says he found himself facing just such a dilemma in February, when US president Donald Trump reportedly asked him to drop a federal investigation into the recently-fired national security adviser Michael Flynn.

[Flynn] is a good guy. I hope you can let this go, Trump said, according to a memo written by Comey shortly after the meeting. I agree he is a good guy, Comey said, opting not to address the implied request.

Some US senators seem to think Comeys response was pretty weak. Youre big. Youre strong. I know the Oval Office, and I know what happens to people when they walk in. There is a certain amount of intimidation. But why didnt you stop and say, Mr. President, this is wrong. I cannot discuss this with you.' Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked during Comeys June 8 testimony.

But management experts say its no surprise that Comey floundered in the moment. When bad bosses take us by surprise, few people respond in the way they might hope.

Its incredibly normal for people not to respond perfectly in the moment when theyre confronted with shocking behavior.Its incredibly normal for people not to respond perfectly in the moment when theyre confronted with shocking behavior, Alison Green, a management consultant and author of New York magazines popular column Ask a Manager, writes in an email. Very few of us have a perfectly polished response on the spot when we first encounter something inappropriate or unethical. And one of the most common reactions is to say something to try to normalize the situationand that is especially true when there are sticky power dynamics, as there are in this case. (As an example of this, look to all the women who deal with creeps at work by just trying to smooth over an inappropriate interactionand later realize, whoa, that was clear-cut sexual harassment.)

Indeed, Comey was clearly navigating uncharted territory. By his own admission, hed never dealt with a president like Trump before. During his testimony, he noted that he felt compelled to take notes on their one-on-one meetings, a step hed never taken with former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our meeting, and so I thought it really important to document, he said. Theres also reason to think Trump was trying to make Comey fear for his job security. Before firing Comey, Trump reportedly assured him that lots of people wanted the job. Comey saw this as an attempt to create a patronage relationshipComey could stay on as FBI director if he was loyal to Trump.

Such behavior will sound familiar to anyone whos had a boss that perpetuates a culture of fear, according to Stefanie Johnson, an assistant professor of management at the University of Colorado, Boulders Leeds School of Business. And when people face harassment or intimidation at work, they dont think as clearly.

Daniel Kahnemans book Thinking Fast and Slow (and many other theories) point to the fact that our brains have two mechanismsa logical side that requires slow conscious, data-driven thought and an emotional one that results in fast, not always logical, responses, Johnson writes in an email. If someone is afraid of their leader (their leader might fire them, for example) then theyre likely to engage in this emotional response.

Basically, when we feel threatened, the logical parts of our brain shut down, according to Johnson. The part of your brain in which you weigh the costs and benefits of making a decision (like standing up for what you think is right) is dismantled. Instead, you engage in fight-or-flight. Giving an answer like Hes a good guy seems to be a flight responsehe does not want to fight with Trump.

Comey himself expressed regret about his initial response to Trump. I was so stunned by the conversation that I just took it in, he told Sen. Feinstein. I remember saying, I agree he is a good guy, as a way of saying, Im not agreeing with what you asked me to do. Again, maybe other people would be stronger in that circumstanceI hope Ill never have another opportunity. Maybe if I did it again, Id do it better.

Chances are Comey will do better if he encounters a similar scenariosimply because hes now had practice dealing with a shocking request, and has devoted thought to what a suitable response might look like. But the truth is that its hard to prepare for unexpectedly alarming behavior at work. And so Johnson suggests that if you find yourself in a similarly sensitive moment, you ask for a moment to think.

You need to remove yourself from the situation, collect yourself, maybe go out on the balcony and think about what you need to do, she says. So just say, I really cant respond to that right now, I need to put some thought into that,' and leave the room.

Another option is to signal to your boss that you wont keep the request a secret. Say, Ah, I think we should probably loop some other people in on this and see what they think, Johnson suggests. If your boss is really making an inappropriate demand, this may help defuse the situation.

And if you dont heroically shut down your boss or another overstepping coworker, theres no reason to beat yourself up. Comey did exactly what anyone should do upon coming out of a shocking encounter like thathe documented it and he reported it, says Green. But youd have to be pretty oblivious to human behavior to criticize him for not taking the president to task in the shock of the moment.

Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

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James Comey proves it's basically impossible to give a perfect response to a bad boss - Quartz

The MIT AgeLabwill build and analyze new deep-learning-based perception and motion planning technologies for automated vehicles in partnership with the Toyota Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC). The newresearch initiative, called CSRC Next, is part ofa five-year-old ongoing relationship with Toyota.

The first phase of projects with Toyota CSRC has beenled by Bryan Reimer, a research scientist at MIT AgeLab, which is part of theMIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. Reimermanages a multidisciplinary team of researchers, and students focused on understanding how drivers respond to the increasing complexity of the modern operating environment. He and his team studied the demands of modern in-vehicle voice interfaces and found that they draw drivers eyes away from the road to a greater degree than expected, and that the demands of these interfaces need to be considered in the time course optimization of systems. Reimers study eventually contributed to the redesign of the instrumentation of the current Toyota Corolla and the forthcoming2018 Toyota Camry.(Read more in the 2017 Toyota CSRC report.)

Reimer and his team are also building and developing prototypes of hardware and software systems that can be integrated into cars in order to detect everything about the state of the driver and the external environment. Theseprototypes are designed to work both with cars with minimal levels of autonomy and with cars that are fully autonomous.

Computer scientist and team memberLex Fridmanis leadinga group of seven computer engineers who are working on computer vision, deep learning, and planning algorithms for semi-autonomous vehicles. The application of deep learning is being used for understanding both the world around the car and human behavior inside it.

The vehicle must first gain awareness of all entities in the driving scene, including pedestrians, cyclists, cars, traffic signals, and road markings,Fridman says. We use a learning-based approach for this perception task and also for the subsequent task of planning a safe trajectory around those entities.

Fridman and his team, now firmly entrenched in the next phase of the project with Toyota CRSC, set up a stationary camera at a busy intersection on the MIT campus to automatically detect the micro-movements of pedestrians as they make decisions about crossing the street. Using deep learning and computer vision methods, the system automatically converts the raw video footage into millisecond-level estimations of each pedestrians body position.The program has analyzedthe head, arm, feet and full-body movement of more than100,000 pedestrians.

Fridmans research also focuses on the world inside the car.

Just as interesting and complex is the integration of data inside the car to improve our understanding of automated systems and enhance their capability to support the driver,he says.This includes everything about the drivers face, head position, emotion, drowsiness, attentiveness, and body language.

With Toyota and other partners, the team is exploringthe use of cameras positioned to monitorthe driver, as well as methods toextract all those driver state factors from the raw video and turnthem into useable data which can to support future automotive industry needs.

Whats innovative about Lexs work is that it uses state-of-the-art methods in computer science and artificial intelligence to study the complexities of human intent grounded in large-scale real-world data, Reimer says.

Toyota CSRC DirectorChuck Gulash the researchleverages the AgeLabs expertise in computer vision, state detection, naturalistic data collection and deep learning to focus on the challenges and opportunities of autonomous vehicle technologies.

When asked how the research collaboration would affect the future of automotive technology, Gulash says it willcontribute to better computer-based perception of a vehicles environment as well as social interactions with other road users.

What is unique about the AgeLabs work is that it brings together advanced computer science with a human centered perspective on driver behavior,he says. As with all CSRC projects, output from the AgeLabs effort will be openly shared with industry, academia and government to contribute to future safe mobility.

MIT AgeLab DirectorJoe Coughlinsays theAgeLab is using all of these technologies to do two things: understand human behavior in the driving context, and to design future systems that result in greater safety and expansion of mobility options for all ages.

Read more:
AgeLab researching autonomous vehicle systems in ongoing collaboration with Toyota - MIT News

Cant Take The Hunt Out of the User

While technology continues to advance, the core nature of human behavior remains the same. Yes, weve evolved; however the fact that we now use a microwave instead of starting a fire with sticks and rocks does not change the fact that we still need to eat!

All kitchen tools aside; the core nature of human behavior plays a crucial role in several aspects of the Enterprise world. Take a SharePoint or Office365 intranet portal as an example; when evaluating your employees user experience, the focus is on how comfortable the portal suits an employees needs. Having an intranet portal is meant to make employees work-life easy, organized and efficient. However, when human nature is disregarded during the creation or alteration process of a portal, the attempt to optimize employee work-life backfires as frustration leads to lack of motivation, and overall productivity- not to mention a decrease in ROI.

Recent statistics implicate just how impacting user experience is at work; 52% of people claimed that negative user experiences made them less likely to engage with a company. In addition, studies are predicting that user experience will take over price and product as the key differentiation by 2020.

The Hunters Choice

In the times where hunting and gathering were crucial practices for survival, one would choose to engage with the tool he or she deemed useful to fulfill his or her needs. In modern days, where work replaces hunting, getting an employee to engage with your intranet tool boils down to this ancient decision regarding the usefulness of a tool. The very basics of human behavior shows that three hemispheres of the brain come into play when coming to such a decision. Firstly, the reptilian brain which deals with human needs. Users have a mission, and they want to know that their portal is giving them what they need in order to complete it. Next, the emotion center of the brain, or the limbic system. In order to prevent frustration and anger from affecting work ethic, a users emotions must move in a positive direction when executing tasks. Lastly, the executive and logical branch of our brain: the neo-cortex. A user must logically conclude that their portal ranks highly in its level of usefulness.

Webcast, June 21st: 5 Keys to Operational Excellence

Hitting the Trifecta

Tapping into human nature and hitting the trifecta where all three hemispheres are satisfied becomes achievable with advanced analytics. Rather than making decisions about your portal based off of a hunch, data that provide insight on precisely where changes need to be made in order to fit the needs of users can be collected prior to making alterations. For example: advanced analytics can identify content-crammed pages that take too long to load, irrelevant content, failed searches, specific departments and users lacking engagement, exit pages, and more areas in need of improvement. These metrics highlight where needs are not being met, and where user frustration stems from. Neglect to these areas heavily influence an employees decision to further engage in the portal as it does not serve useful and efficient.

Sharp Checkup

Reaching a portals prime positive experience requires trial and error. After changes are made, advanced analytics can offer metrics that suggest the success rate of the changes, such as a spike in the average number and length of page visits. To secure that changes to the portal were successful in a manner that is more personalized to the individual user, campaigns can be implemented in the form of email, text, time-sensitive pop-up questions, and context-based pop up questions, which allow the user to add in their own insights about what is helpful or frustrating to them. The personalized campaigns strengthen an employees decision to engage with the portal as it is calming and logical to continue with a tool that is actively molding to user needs.

People may not be searching for sharper hunting tools to capture dinner, however they are still looking for the sharpest tools in technology to help them achieve success. Advanced analytics actively works with portals, improving them by analyzing user behavior and checking that needs are being met in order to provide a prime user experience.

Marketing Specialist at Intlock/ Cardiolog Analytics. Major in Psychology and a Minor in Business. The mix of my interests, business and psychology, allow me to have a great appreciation for analytic tools that look to improve the quality of "work-life" while simultaneously guiding a business to reach its maximum potential. Viewfullprofile

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The Search for the Sharpest Tool in the Shed: Advanced Analytics & User Experience - Business 2 Community

Harvard University says it has canceled offers to admit at least 10 students after it found they exchanged offensive memes on social media.

The universitys student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, reported the move on Monday.

The Crimson reported that the individuals connected through the Harvard College Class of 2021 Facebook group. It said they traded memes and messages with a private Facebook group, which was set up last December.

Those memes included images making fun of sexual abuse, racial minorities and the deaths of children.

For example, one student in the private group called the imagined hanging of a Mexican child piata time, The Crimson noted. Others made jokes about the Holocaust, Germanys systematic killing of Jews and others during World War II.

A Harvard spokeswoman did not comment, saying the university does not discuss the admission of individual students. The university tells accepted students that an offer of admission can be canceled for a number of reasons. They include behavior that brings into question (student) honesty, maturity or moral character."

What happened?

The Harvard Class of 2021 Facebook group had about 100 members. Later, some of them then created the smaller, private Facebook group. They shared the offensive images and messages in this group.

In April, Harvard officials sent letters to some of the members, asking them to explain their offensive posts. The students were told the school was reconsidering its offer of admission. The admissions office also said the students should not attend Harvards freshmen visiting event in April, the Crimson reported.

About a week later, at least 10 were told their offers were canceled, the newspaper said.

Jessica Zhang was a member of the larger Facebook group, Class of 2021.

A lot of students were excited about forming group chats with people who shared similar interests," she told The Crimson in an email.

She said the group began because someone posted about starting a chat for people who liked memes.

Zhang told The Crimson she did not post in the smaller group.

Cassandra Luca told the student newspaper that some members of the Class of 2021 group had suggested a group that posts more "R-rated" memes. Luca will also start taking classes at Harvard later this year.

Luca said the founders of the smaller group required students to first post shocking memes to the main group if they wanted to join the smaller group.

They were like, Oh, you have to send a meme to the original group to prove that you could get into the new one, Luca said.

Neither Zhang's nor Luca's offers of admission were canceled.

A student whose admission was canceled said the office asked the students to share with them all of the memes they sent to their private group.

This student spoke under the agreement that reporters would not use their name.

Right or wrong?

Some students, such as Luca, were unsure how they felt about the university's decision, she told The Crimson.

She said that if the students had threatened someone with harm, it would be a reason to cancel their admission offer.

But Zhang agrees with the school's decision. She told The Crimson that she respects the school's decision because "those actions really spoke about the students' true characters."

This is the second year that Harvard officials have dealt with students sharing offensive messages on the Internet. Last year, students from the Class of 2020 shared racist and sexist jokes in an unofficial Group Me chat. School officials released a statement saying the messages were unacceptable.

Harvard is one of the nation's top universities. It accepted only 5.2 percent of the nearly 40,000 students who applied for the Class of 2021.

I'm Jill Robbins.

And I'm Alice Bryant.

Alice Bryant reported on this story for VOA Learning English. Her report was based on information from the Associated Press, The Harvard Crimson newspaper and VOAs Student Union. Kelly Jean Kelly was the editor.

________________________________________________________________

meme - n. an amusing or interesting picture or video that is spread widely through the Internet

chat / chat group - n. a group of people who communicate regularly via the Internet, usually in real time but also by email.

piata - n. a decorated container filled with candies, fruits and gifts that is hung up at parties or celebrations and hit with a stick by children until it is broken and the things inside it fall out

The Holocaust - n. the killing of millions of Jews and other people by the Nazis during World War II

moral - adj. concerning or relating to what is right and wrong in human behavior

R-rated - adj. (informal use) not meant to be seen by children under the age of 17

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Harvard Cancels Admissions Offers Over Social Media Behavior - Voice of America

This week, two of Donald Trumps top advisers, H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, wrote the following passage in The Wall Street Journal: The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a cleareyed outlook that the world is not a global community but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.

That sentence is the epitome of the Trump project. It asserts that selfishness is the sole driver of human affairs. It grows out of a worldview that life is a competitive struggle for gain. It implies that cooperative communities are hypocritical covers for the selfish jockeying underneath.

The essay explains why the Trump people are suspicious of any cooperative global arrangement, like NATO and the various trade agreements. It helps explain why Trump pulled out of the Paris global-warming accord. This essay explains why Trump gravitates toward leaders like Vladimir Putin, the Saudi princes and various global strongmen: They share his core worldview that life is nakedly a selfish struggle for money and dominance.

It explains why people in the Trump White House are so savage to one another. Far from being a band of brothers, their world is a vicious arena where staffers compete for advantage.

In the essay, McMaster and Cohn make explicit the great act of moral decoupling woven through this presidency. In this worldview, morality has nothing to do with anything. Altruism, trust, cooperation and virtue are unaffordable luxuries in the struggle of all against all. Everything is about self-interest.

Weve seen this philosophy before, of course. Powerful, selfish people have always adopted this dirty-minded realism to justify their own selfishness. The problem is that this philosophy is based on an error about human beings and it leads to self-destructive behavior in all cases.

The error is that it misunderstands what drives human action. Of course people are driven by selfish motivations for individual status, wealth and power.

But they are also motivated by another set of drives for solidarity, love and moral fulfillment that are equally and sometimes more powerful.

People are wired to cooperate. Far from being a flimsy thing, the desire for cooperation is the primary human evolutionary advantage we have over the other animals.

People have a moral sense. They have a set of universal intuitions that help establish harmony between peoples. From their first moments, children are wired to feel each others pain. You dont have to teach a child about what fairness is; they already know.

People have moral emotions. They feel rage at injustice, disgust toward greed, reverence for excellence, awe before the sacred and elevation in the face of goodness.

People are attracted by goodness and repelled by selfishness. Good leaders like Lincoln, Churchill, Roosevelt and Reagan understand the selfish elements that drive human behavior, but they have another foot in the realm of the moral motivations. They seek to inspire faithfulness by showing good character. They try to motivate action by pointing toward great ideals.

Realist leaders like Trump, McMaster and Cohn seek to dismiss this whole moral realm. By behaving with naked selfishness toward others, they poison the common realm and they force others to behave with naked selfishness toward them.

By treating the world simply as an arena for competitive advantage, Trump, McMaster and Cohn sever relationships, destroy reciprocity, erode trust and eviscerate the sense of sympathy, friendship and loyalty that all nations need when times get tough.

By looking at nothing but immediate material interest, Trump, McMaster and Cohn turn America into a nation that affronts everybody elses moral emotions. They make our country seem disgusting in the eyes of the world.

George Marshall was no idealistic patsy. He understood that America extends its power when it offers a cooperative hand and volunteers for common service toward a great ideal. Realists reverse that formula. They assume strife and so arouse a volley of strife against themselves.

I wish H.R. McMaster was a better student of Thucydides. Hed know that the Athenians adopted the same amoral tone he embraces: The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

The Athenians ended up making endless enemies and destroying their own empire.

David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times. Reach him c/o The New York Times, Editorial Department, 620 8th Ave., New York, NY 10018. 2017 New York Times News Service

Read more from the original source:
Brooks: Selfishness makes enemies and destroys empires - The Durango Herald

June 7, 2017

The mouse lemurthe world's smallest primatehas the potential to transform the field of genetics and serve as an ideal model for a wide range of primate biology, behavior and medicine, including cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer's disease, Stanford University School of Medicine researchers say.

For decades, scientists have relied on mice, fruit flies and worms as genetic models, but despite all their success, these organisms routinely fail to mimic many aspects of primate biology, including many human diseases, said Mark Krasnow, MD, PhD, professor of biochemistry.

Frustrated by the lack of a good study model, Krasnow and his colleagues turned to the mouse lemur and began conducting detailed physiologic and genetic studies on hundreds of these petite, docile creatures in the rainforests of Madagascar.

Working in a Stanford-funded lab on the island country, the scientists report that they already have identified more than 20 individual lemurs with unique genetic traits, including obesity, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, cardiac arrhythmias, progressive eye disease and motor and personality disorders. Their hope is that continued study of these abundant primates could lead to a better understanding, and possibly better treatments, of these and other conditions in lemurs and humans.

'Huge potential'

"I think mouse lemurs have great potential for our understanding of primate biology, behavior and conservation, in the same way that fruit flies and mice over the last 30 or 40 years have transformed our understanding of developmental biology and many other areas of biology and medicine," Krasnow said. "Some of the most fascinating and important questions that need to be answered are primate-specific. For those, we really need something besides humans to complement the work that has been done in fruit flies and mice."

A paper describing the researchers' findings will be published online June 9 in Genetics. Krasnow is the senior author. Lead authorship is shared by graduate student Camille Ezran and postdoctoral scholar Caitlin Karanewsky.

The project began in 2009 when Krasnow, frustrated by the lack of a good animal model for lung diseasehis area of expertisecommissioned three high school interns to search the animal world for something better. By the end of the summer, the interns had come up with the mouse lemur, which fits all the necessary criteria: Like mice, these animals are small (about twice the size of a mouse), develop quickly, reproduce rapidly, produce many offspring, and are inexpensive and easy to maintain and manage. In genetic terms, the mouse lemur is about midway between humans and mice, Krasnow said.

"When I talk to scientists, their faces light up when I tell them about mouse lemurs because they are about the size of a mouse but they are primates, so that makes a huge difference," said Ezran, who was one of the high school interns. "I think they really do present such great potential for biological, behavioral and medical research in general."

Early on in the project, Krasnow sought out the perspective of Stanford veterinarians, ultimately recruiting Megan Albertelli, DVM, PhD, assistant professor of comparative medicine. A geneticist and primate specialist, Albertelli said she was initially skeptical of the idea of lemurs as animal models, but soon became enthusiastic after realizing their enormous potential for contributions in understanding neurologic problems, eye disease and other conditions where mouse models have fallen short.

Trip to France

She accompanied the group on a trip to France to visit with scientists who had been studying lemurs in the laboratory for years. A French team had found that some aging lemurs develop a form of dementia and accumulate plaques in the brain that resemble those of Alzheimer's patients.

"I saw that they were promising models for Alzheimer's disease," Albertelli said. "Alzheimer's is a condition that is hard to model in other animal species, so that was very exciting."

Mouse lemurs live exclusively on Madagascar, where they are found in great abundance. Tens of millions of them populate the island. While lemurs generally are endangered due to habitat destruction, mouse lemurs are not under threat and freely roam the island, said Ezran, who calls them the "rodents of Madagascar."

The Stanford researchers began to develop collaborations with other scientists studying lemurs, including those at the Centre ValBio near the Ranomafana National Park in Madagascar, who have been examining lemur ecology, family structure and behavior for decades.

During periodic visits to the island, Krasnow and his colleagues learned how to catch brown mouse lemurs in the rainforest just outside the research station, using a tiny banana slice inside a trap as a lure. The scientists then tagged and photographed each animal, gave them a thorough physical examination, analyzed them for behavioral issues and abnormalities and removed a drop of blood for detailed genetic and serum studies. The animals then were released back into the wild so the researchers could follow them over time to see how their environments may influence their progress and health. In 2013, Stanford built a sophisticated molecular biology and genetics lab within the ValBio complex, where these studies could be carried out.

'Distinctive personalities'

Lemurs have distinctive personalities, Krasnow said, and the researchers gave each one a name, based on his or her looks or behavior. For instance, one was named Feisty for his unusually aggressive nature; most lemurs are docile.

The work has led to a whole new way of doing genetic studies, said Krasnow, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Instead of using the traditional method of introducing genetic mutations into mice to create "knockout" miceor animals with customized genesthey found they were able to find naturally occurring variants among animals in the wild. Moreover, in working with lemurs in their native habitats, the researchers could better understand how the animals interact with their surroundings and the relationship between genes and the environment.

"Instead of introducing mutations in mice or fruit flies, we are doing something much more similar to what is done in humans," he said. "We are looking at all the wonderful genetic variation already existing in nature, since there are so many millions of mouse lemurs out there. We calculate that most 'knockout' mutations are already present in nature, and all we have to do is find them. And because the cost of sequencing a genome is rapidly dropping, it's now possible to sequence the genomes of thousands of mouse lemurs to see what mutations they are carrying."

In doing so, the researchers could accomplish in a few years for a tiny fraction of the cost what the International Knockout Mouse Consortium will accomplish in 10 years, at a cost of nearly $1 billion, he said.

But the project could use some additional staff, as the process of capturing the animals and screening them in the laboratory is labor-intensive, he said. He and his colleagues have come up with a multipurpose solution that will contribute to the local educational system while helping preserve the lemur populations in Madagascar, whose habitats are threatened by farming, mining and logging interests, he said.

Help from students

The group is developing a science curriculum for use in Malagasy high schools in which students learn about biology by exploring the rich environment right outside their school houses. Among the instructors is Manu Prakash, PhD, assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford and a pioneer in the field of "frugal science," who has brought his powerful $1 paper microscopes to Madagascar and taught students how to explore the microscopic world in which they live, including the lice in their hair, the pathogens in their water and the disease-causing parasites in their environment. The curriculum was first introduced among university students, some of whom now are screening lemurs at the Stanford lab in Madagascar.

"We saw this as an opportunity because we are going over there to study the unique animals and biology and ecology of Madagascar, which is unsurpassed in the world," Krasnow said. "It is the No. 1 hotspot for biodiversity, but most of the students don't realize what they have in their backyards because they are being taught from textbooks and from teachers who have learned from Europeans."

He said the researchers hope to expand scientific curricula at all levels of education, helping train the Malagasy scientists of the future and build scientific capacity in the country, all the while creating an appreciation among the local population of the need to understand and preserve lemurs and other species for the future.

"We are trying to do this in a way that is respectful and will help the lemurs and the people of Madagascar, while enlightening many aspects of primate biology and human disease," he said.

The researchers plan to make the genetic sequencing and phenotyping information they obtain from the lemurs publicly available so that researchers around the world can take advantage of this trove of knowledge, Albertelli said.

Explore further: Three new primate species discovered in Madagascar

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Mouse lemur could serve as ideal model for primate biology and human disease - Phys.Org

This is part two of a five-part series. Read the first part here.

Gary Haugen of International Justice Mission (IJM) cites 45 million slaves worldwide; President Trump cites 27 million slaves; Ivanka cites 20 million slave. They are all in the same room and yet, these are their discrepancies.

Kevin Bales concocted the 27 million number years ago. By 2012, International Labor Organization (ILO) claimed 20.9 million. That number never took into consideration the internet that was reported and exposed as the elephant in the trafficking arena by Homayra Sellier in 1999, and by this journalist in 2000. The 45 million is a number used by an Australia NGO to which Bales has consulted.

Poverty, hunger, mass migrations, war zones,terrorists groups, corrupt states, lack of education and other factors, including earthquakes and tsunamis are fertile grounds for human trafficking. If you analyze how many live on $2 a day, that is almost half the planet.

UNICEF claims 10 million child prostitutes worldwide. UN claims approximately 120 million street children globally; 10 million orphans in Africa due to AIDS, 250 million Dalits in India alone, and somehow the so-called human trafficking experts claim anywhere from 20 45 million slaves. Hardly plausible.

Years ago, David Batstone of Not for Sale, when challenged why he then posted 27 million on his website, apologetically stated that he could not get a seat at the table unless he went along with the US anti-trafficking cabals narrative. That alone makes this coercive data. That is why ethics is needed in this arena.

Innocents at Risk claims, In Washington DC, trafficking innocent children is a $100 million industry. U.S. local NGOs claim their cities are the hubs. Yet, Gary Haugen now claims that human trafficking really flourishes in 12 primary countries. How does that compute if poverty is a factor and 2 billion live on $2 a day, according to Haugen in his TED talk?

In 2014, Jean Baderschneider, another Global Fund architect, gave a speech to the ILO, citing their own outdated numbers.

While none of them seem to agree on the landscape, they do agree that a $1.5 billion fund is needed for data they contradict! US congressional teams say that they too believe that these large U.S. NGOs are only interested in money. It only seems logicalto ask Who has the gall to ask for $1.5 billion when they contradict each other, but who would possibly think this was a sane idea to award $1.5 billion to anyone whose data is wrong?

Or, are there other reasons behind their motives? Are these large US NGOs tired of raising monies, and now, they want a hedge fund like monopoly for their financial sustainability to hijack human trafficking for political agendas? Is not that the very globalization issue that candidate Trump campaigned against? With no blame to the Trumps here at all, these large US NGOs are tenacious and clever as they have built their cottage industry cabal for the last 17 years, but they have proven their model of self-sustainability financially is not doing the job. Bigger is not better with this particular social issue. If anything, it should be run like a business fighting a business of crime.

The 2012 ILO numbers do not incorporate the massive upside down world we live in which contributes to the increase in human trafficking the implosive effect by the internet, Arab Rising ramifications, increase in mass migrations unknown since World War II from West Africa across Northern Africa and the Middle East, from the Arabian Peninsula into Central Asia, onto Europe and even landing in the Australian-paid detention centers in Nauru and Papa New Guinea. ILO does not take into consideration the parades of unaccompanied children headed north from Guatemala into Mexico and transported and trafficked along the way on the beast trains to the U.S. southern border. ILO does not count ISIS and the blood, organ, sex, and labor spikes even in Libya, or the Yemen torture chambers, the tens of thousands of children gone missing in Europe, the Boko Haram girls, and the spike in public auctions.

The data today does not take into consideration the massive underbelly of transnational and trans-criminal human trafficking enterprises that engulf terrorism on a scale not witnessed in human history, while transported over the internet by images, and buried in the Dark Net internet recesses of Tor and Bitcoin. The data does not take into consideration the opiate issue in the US and Australia where homeless children engage in survival-sex to get their next fix. Recently, in Maryland, a 15 year old girl, hooked on heroin, was sold by her own mother in state and across state lines.

None of these figures fully grasps the nearly 2 million homeless children in America where homeless shelters for youth close at 5 or 6pm and they have no place to go unless they negotiate a trick for a bed, nor those 65 million migrants worldwide. Nor does it address children at risk who are institutionalized, disabled, in foster care, or recycled through jails, who were repeatedly raped starting at four or five years of age when the suffering began that Philadelphia psychiatrist, Dr. Jean Langberg, calls compounded trauma that spirals their lives out of control.

This U.S. NGO cabal leading this Global Slush Fund has no shame because they know their narratives and facts are inconclusive. We needbrazen ethics, critical thinking and analysis to grasp the breath and width of this global phenomenon, not promises of funds. No one is addressing the child rape that leads to livesspentin spiritual, physical, and emotional in pain, mental illness, broken relationships, and cycles of humantrafficking, except the older survivors whose lives have been impacted for years. In the background, is the ever present Internet thatnormalizes what in decades past was not accepted normal human behavior, yet the hypocrisy is played out with these large U.S. NGOs because they fall short of fully demanding a zero tolerance of Silicon Valley because they accept their donations.

ILO numbers should be questioned fully. The ILO is a UN agency. The UN still does not fully address their own human trafficking issues. They still have employees and contractors engaged in food for sex trafficking models. While the UN Global Impact wants corporations to take the deep dive on their internal supply chains, the United Nations to date has never cleaned up their own internal contribution to human trafficking. Nor, have these NGOs ever cleaned up their contribution to this disinformation campaign. Instead, they lead with what sells. Instead of reality.

Homayra Sellier, Founder and CEO of Innocence in Danger in Europe challenges the hypocrisy of these US NGOs,

The UN must go beyond their declarations of child protection claiming they stand for fighting all forms of abuse and trafficking. It is a fact that UN soldiers abuse children in countries and war zones where they are commissioned to protect marginalized communities. If the UN ceases to stand up for the very values it was created for, then the UNs utility is in question. All member states should stop financing an organization whose priorities are no longer to keep populations safe. The UN must be held accountable for fueling the very child abuse that they publicly denounce. Institutionally, they are no different than any other institution. We are not what we say. We are what we do!

Rivers Teske, Founder and CEO of Hidden Choices of Westport, Connecticut also challenges them, It is time to acknowledge that big is not better, that small NGOs on the ground do the work, and that these larger U.S. NGOs want to take credit for their work. We need results. We need ethics front and center. Too many children and families are being profoundly harmed. The internet must be challenged for the sake of humanity.

Christine Dolan is an investigative journalist, and the former CNN Political Director. She is an authority on human trafficking globally having covered it for over 17 years. She is the author of Shattered Innocence The Millennium Holocaust, and In the Name of God, two authoritative investigations on the global phenomenon of human trafficking.

Originally posted here:
A Global Fund To Fight Human Trafficking's Data - The Daily Caller

This story originally appeared in GARAGE Magazine No. 11. GARAGE's life-changing, mind-altering launch is coming soon. Until then, we're publishing some of our old favorites, plus a few original stories, essays, videos, and more to give you a taste of what's to come.

Ian Cheng was born in 1984 in Los Angeles. Now based in New York City, he creates virtual ecosystems he calls "simulations." The simulations are unscripted: they function like video games that play themselves, and Cheng doesn't know exactly how they will turn out. Each is an examination of the dynamics of human behavior, an interrogation of narrative, and an exploration of rationality and motive.

After shows at the Migros Museum in Zrich, the Smithsonian's Hirschhorn in Washington, D.C., Pilar Corrias in London, and an installation in the Whitney Museum's recent exhibition Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016, Cheng currently has on view his first U.S. museum solo presentation at MoMA PS1, entitled Emissaries, through September 25.

Exclusively for GARAGE, Cheng and Haley Mellin discuss the connection between mind and body, the effects of software on culture, and the tension between deterministic narrative and abysmal base reality.

(This introduction was revised to update the artist's exhibition history.)

Haley Mellin: I just played the digital commission you did for the Serpentine and loved it. What brought you to cognitive science? Ian Cheng: It was a gut feeling. I've always been interested in how human behavior is shaped. What is Mom thinking? What is Dad thinking? What is the cat thinking? What is their misunderstanding? What is my role between them? Things an only child thinks about. Cognitive science seemed to offer a tool set. At the time, at UC Berkeley, that was a combination of neuroscience, linguistics, computer science, and psychology, with an aim of developing a general understanding of cognition that could inform approaches to artificial intelligence.

HM: What was happening with artificial intelligence in the mid-2000s? IC: At the time, artificial intelligence was in the dark ages. Most research was based on a kind of objectivity fallacythe perspective that to make a computer intelligent you had to feed it a million factslike creating a Jeopardy champion. You soon realize that a computer with a million facts quickly exhausts itself. You ask it a question like, "What do you see?" It has no idea. The current paradigm of artificial intelligence is closer to nature. It begins from a position of subjective stupidityyou endow a computer with the ability to sense and develop patterns from its senses. Humans act as its trainer. Like the way a small child or dog learns. Once an AI can learn, regardless of what it learns, it can develop a subjective understanding of the world from the bottom up, rather than from the top down. It can have agency.

HM: What was it that brought you into working with moving digital images? IC: After Berkeley, I worked at Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas's postproduction visual-effects studio. It was exciting, though, over time, I started to feel like one cog in a very, very big machine. There were hundreds of artisans and technicians working on Optimus Prime punching a skyscraper.

HM: The visual effects in those films are a fascinating force of collaboration. What happened after? IC: I then went to grad school at Columbia's MFA program. My peers were very talented and prolific. But I felt lost. I couldn't bring myself to do anything. I felt art isn't worth doing unless I can find some kind of leverage, some technology that could render the familiar into something alien. When you use a technology that has not been over-exhausted by other people, you have a stake in defining the language, the compositional principles, and a perspective toward that technology. I felt that I needed to do that, in order to feel like I wasn't just polishing territory that many other artists have explored already. I have a constant curiosity for technologies in the loosest sense, whether an actual tool or a soft thing, like a perspective. This leveraging has been an operating principle I have had as an artist since the beginning.

HM: I saw your work first in 2012, at West Street, the apartment gallery that Alex Gartenfeld and Matt Moravec created in New York. The piece was an animation on an iPhone, which I think was placed near a window, with the Hudson River beyond it. The figure in the video was stripped of detailjust essentialswhich came across to me as both primitive and advanced. IC: The video you're talking about is called This Papaya Tastes Perfect. It looks like an animation and it is animated, in fact, but it was done using motion capturea process in which you place markers on a real performer's body, so their movements can be translated onto a digital avatar. Three-dimensional animation has a reputation for being smooth, frictionless, plastic. But I wanted to see if something as artificial as 3D animation could capture human behavior that had the friction, or visceralness, that we find in life itself. This desire to get closer to nature and aliveness led to making what I call "simulations"I think of them as video games that play themselves. They are open-ended software systems that simulate an ecology. It's a form that can contain an ever-evolving relationship between agents and environment.

HM: Your earlier simulations were like chaotic systems. But the recent ones have an element of narrative in them. IC: I found myself thinking about how you and I are creatures of narrative. We eat and breathe narrative. I wanted to use narrativewhich I see as a deterministic, scripted forceto counterbalance the entropy and chaos in the simulations. I begin with open-ended ecosystems, which contain various agents with A.I.s that are very reactive to the environment. Then I introduce one agent who has a very different intelligence a set of narrative goals that it doggedly tries to achieve. It's like giving an actor a script and telling her she has to get through her lines no matter what obstacles get in her way. It's like Shakespeare in the Park, but it's a really disturbing, chaotic park, where everything's going wrong, but the agent still tries.

HM: I like that your content is unpretentious and direct. You're working with sculpting the soft material of human behavior. IC: I feel that having a narrative script, or having a life script, is an incredibly useful tool for orienting oneself, especially in times of uncertainty. It allows you at least to give yourself a direction, and a sense of place within the timeline of the imagined script. It is a self-made fiction, but it gives you courage. In two recent simulations, Emissary in the Squat of Gods and Emissary Forks at Perfection, I've started to program a character that has an orienting script in spite of all the chaos around him or her. What you see as a viewer is a battle between an open-ended ecological system that is amoralthere is no good or bad, things just happen as they do in natureand a highly scripted character who is trying to negotiate this world with a sense of purpose, with a sense of morality. The two forces sculpt each other.

HM: Are the digital materials you're using refined enough to communicate what you're intending, or is there work you want to make that you cannot? IC: I never fully arrive. I keep moving the goalposts. At the moment, I'm trying to figure out a model of intelligence that is located in the relationship between thingsthe idea of intelligence not located entirely in an organism's head, but instead distributed between the organism and the other objects in its environment. Like how the intelligence required to ride a bike is cued by the presence of the bike, but fades away when there is no bike available.

HM: To me, you are a documentarian of what is ahead. Your artwork gives me a feeling of being in a new body. IC: I've realized, in making these simulations, that having a body really matters. More and more, I can't imagine artificial intelligence without some kind of prosthetic body to ground itself in. The A.I. of a self-driving car needs the Umwelt of a car. I've had to find a level of representation that not only we as viewers can relate to, but that the simulated creatures need to achieve agency. That is something I am working on nowhow does the body morphology of a virtual creature influence the intelligence of the creature?

HM: It would be something if you could collaborate with an artificial-intelligence machine and have the artificial intelligence make the body of your character. It would be inventing something that it doesn't know, but inherently must be wired into. IC: I want to make art for children. I want to make work that is engaging to a five-year-old, and to do that, the work has to be alive. Children are the toughest critics.

HM: I played video games, such as Pong, Super Mario Bros., and World of Warcraft as a kid. Did you? IC: Yes. But now I play games to learn from them. In some ways I still feel like a child. Being an artist is like being the most adult-adult and being the most child-child. The reason we're talking now, at 11am, is because I need 7am to 10:59am to be a child. That's when my child brain is on and ideas flow like a tap. It's the opposite of that adult voice of doubt"This is an awful idea. You should be more worried. You haven't answered your email in 10 days." For me, that authority voice is completely absent in the morning, and I can dwell in a childlike state. I talk to myself without embarrassment. By noon, the other side of being an artist kicks in. I have to be more adult than someone with steady employment, because there's no boss. There's no scaffolding, no safety net. Nobody else has the burden of decision-making. It's a total head-trip, because no one tells you in art school that you have to become schizophrenic.

HM: I agree. We've talked about that before. I get emails from you at certain times of the day, not at all hours. I became patient for them. IC: I often want to give the authority to someone else, so they can make the decisions for me in moments of stress. Directors have producers. Start-ups have cofounders. But for artists and writers, no one cares about your work as much as you do. I work with a producer now, which has been a game changer for me.

HM: Sometimes I step back, time goes by, and it allows me to connect in a new way. Hesitation can be a tool. This brings me to think of the team working on the Microsoft HoloLens. It has taken them a long time to develop the technology, they have worked slowly, one foot in front of the other. It will combine digital holograms and reality into a new landscape. It will be like a more advanced state of what we play with Pokmon Go. IC: The best story I heard so far was that this fabulous pink Pokmon was sited inside the Westboro Baptist Church headquarters, and all these kids were rushing in, totally agnostic to the meaning of that place. Just eagerly trying to find the Pokmon inside. It's beautiful. It's a mainstream breakthrough of the idea that the social realities you live in are not strictly rooted in the physical world. A physical place is simply an address to hold multiple social realities, which are often mutually exclusive. It's a refactoring of the familiar by software. Pokmon Go is effectively a work of software in the same way that Uber is a work of software. It fundamentally re-factors the way in which material things are organized, their meaning, status, and value.

HM: Software has changed many of our basic actions. Look at Uber. IC: You couldn't trust getting in a stranger's car five years ago.

HM: Uber shows how an app can reprogram our motion. IC: I don't think a child would go into the Westboro Baptist Church if not for the overriding motivation of getting that amazing Pokmon. It transforms what's meaningful and what's meaningless. We get a clear feeling of the relativity of meaning through this compression of what's valuable and what's sacred versus what's vulgar and what's profane. We see now that software has this collapsing effect.

HM: So what if the battery on your phone dies and there's no amazing Pokmon? IC: You crash like Neo. Or like an Amish person visiting Times Square. You crash back into the shitty base reality that preceded your worldview.

HM: It makes me think of the Philip K. Dick quote you mentioned last year, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." I love that. It makes things clear and simple. If I stop believing in something, but it remains, then maybe it is real. Is the Pokmon digital character actually there? IC: It's there as much as, if you're a Christian, God is there. It's there in the sense that it organizes your life and is operative in how you act within the world. Whether it's physically real or not is irrelevant. Most of us, except for perhaps enlightened Buddhas, cannot withstand living in direct relationship to raw reality. Raw reality is meaningless and disorienting and almost impossible for any human to accept on a full-time basis. We need games to overlay onto raw reality to orient our lives, whether it's the game of Pokmon or the game of being a Christian or the game of college. Those games crash all the time, creating moments of social unrest and existential angst.

HM: Those are healthy moments, too, and we evolve into yet another game. IC: I've been reading a lot about Buddhism and Hinduism recently. Achieving enlightenment is actually very difficult, because when you're enlightened you're not in a more comfortable place. It's not like you get enlightened and then you're at peace because everything makes sense. Apparently, when you're enlightenedif you can ever be thatyou're actually in a much more abysmal, uncertain, and ambiguous place, but you're simply okay with that. You accept that abyss. This is radical. I think most humans can't withstand this. We're evolved to see faces in clouds. Find meaning. Make up a busy thing to do. There's a reason why monks and enlightened people are secluded in difficult-to-reach low-sensory places, high in the mountains, without too much complex human or ecological drama. It's a zone of minimum viable abyss.

HM: When the underlying structure of how you live and why and what you do breaks apart, finding a new orchestration can be slow, since you are building from the ground up. IC: It's often seen in our culture as a shameful process, like you fell off the wagon.

HM: Or a mental breakdown. IC: When someone falls off the script, there's a lot of shame attached to it, because everyone else in one's local ecology likes to feel secure in the script that's working for them. You can psychologically die in those momentsthat's when you become really depressedbut that's also where there's the most potential for clarity about where you are, and the most potential for reinvention.

HM: Oftentimes, things have to end for a new structure to begin, to start living from a new philosophy. When the system fails you, you create your own system. Often you've invested a lot of energy in a direction that you've taken seriously, and you can see how quickly the structures you relied on unravel. I learned recently how breaking things up is a kind of restructuring. IC: Yes. It forces a restructuring.

HM: There's a difference between what we conserve and what we change. I spend half my time working to preserve wilderness. IC: What parts of the world?

HM: Currently I'm working on an animal-migration corridor joining two national parks in Namibia. I have a different mind space when I'm in stretches of wildernessit's an area that has never had any sort of static structure or use imposed upon it. The body feels that it's not a national park, with all sorts of rules and boundaries. Animals are both very primitive and very advanced. They don't need all the objects and tools we use to live. IC: Yes.

HM: It's healthy for anyone who works in a creative capacity to spend time outside. My brain takes on an ease and rapidity of thought, because there is a lack of social structure. Things become black and whiteanything I am on the fence about becomes clear. IC: We've spoken about transforming things, and I think the things that need to be transformed are modelsculture, ingrained habits, our stories. On the flip side, the things that need to be preserved are the things that have no culture in them. Stretches of wilderness, where nature has built up so much embedded complexity and intelligence, even if it's inherently meaningless to us now. Later, we'll have all that richness and biologic history to learn from.

HM: I want to preserve a space without culture. Those spaces help us to understand what culture is. IC: It's an exercise in being in base reality.

HM: Now we're going in a different direction. IC: That's a good way to end, actually.

See the original post:
'Shakespeare in the Really Disturbing, Chaotic Park' - VICE

In previous articles, I've mentioned that we can say nothing about what an animal's behavior means unless we know the context in which is occurs. In the case of companion animals, a key contextual element is the owners' and others' emotional perception of those animals.

However, when it comes to behaviors displayed by companion animals, it's not uncommon for human perceptions of the context to vary even within the same household. The same display from the family dog that one person considers loving, her partner may perceive as obnoxious, while their kids think it's funny. Meanwhile, their visiting relatives hate the dog because "she looks weird."

Those different human responses, in turn, may affect the animal's subsequent behavior in general or only with those specific individuals. Although multiple factors contribute to this mixed perceptual bag within the companion animal household, this month I'd like to consider one factor that practitioners also may experience directly or indirectly.

In a research paper entitled "Tail Docking and Ear Cropping Dogs: Public Awareness and Perception" published in PLOS ONE, Katelyn E. Mills, Jesse Robbins and Marina von Keyserlingk wanted to fill a gap in the literature regarding how surgical alteration of canine body parts affected human perception. Although previous studies explored the perceptions of veterinarians and breeders relative to these surgeries when performed for strictly cosmetic reasons, no one had addressed those of the public.

To provide insight into this segment of the population, the researchers conducted three experiments using American residents as subjects. Data for each experiment included the number of participants, mean age and range, sex and percentage of the total who functioned as the primary canine caregiver in the household.

In the first experiment, researchers showed each participant one professional photo of a dog belonging to one of four breeds in which tail docking and ear cropping commonly occurs: Doberman pinscher, miniature schnauzer, boxer or Brussels griffon. Participants then rated the dog using a list of 10 traits they considered of genetic or environmental origin using seven-point scale.

During the second part of this experiment, the participants received two photographs of the same breed of dog, one with surgically modified ears and tail and one without. The history accompanying these photos stated that the dogs were purebred siblings. Participants then had to choose one of three options to describe what the dogs' different appearances meant:

Although this may come as a surprise to some veterinarians, 42 percent of the 810 participants believed that the short ears and tail were of genetic origin in these breeds.

In the second experiment, the researchers explored if and how the appearance of natural and modified dogs influenced people's perception of the dog's temperament. To determine this, they had a professional artist restore the ears and tails on the photographs of the surgically modified dogs.

When completed, the researchers had two photos of each of the original four dogs: the original photo of the dog with cropped ears and docked tail, and one of the same dog with his or her natural ears and tail restored by the artist. They then asked participants to rate a collection of either all surgically modified or all (artificially restored) natural dog pictures using a canine personality questionnaire.

In general, participants perceived the modified dogs as more human- and canine-aggressive as well as "dominant." Those who received the natural dog photos perceived those animals as more playful and attractive.

Keep in mind that the experiment wasn't designed to determine whether any of these dogs truly possessed those qualities. It was designed to determine if and how cropped ears and docked tails could influence people's perception of dogs so modified.

The third experiment examined how others' perception of the people with these dogs changed depending on the absence of presence of canine ears or tails. In this case, identical full-body pictures of the same man or woman were paired with images of the surgically modified or natural Doberman.

Each participant received images of one man and a modified or natural dog and a second set of a woman paired with either a modified or natural dog. Subjects then had to answer questions regarding their perceptions of the supposed owner as well as the dog.

Given the differences in participants' perception of the modified and natural dogs, again it probably comes as little surprise that the participants' perceptions of the dogs' respective owners also differed. Traits assigned to the presumed owners of modified dogs included more aggressive, more narcissistic, less playful, less talkative and warm than the owners of natural dogs.

Additionally, participants perceived the female owner the of modified dog as more dominant, aggressive and competent than the female owner of the natural dog. Interestingly, the participants perceived the male owner of the modified dog as more narcissistic, less warm and less competent than that same man when paired with the natural version of the same dog.

But if these results will surprise few clinicians, why bother writing about them at all? Like all studies, this one has its flaws.

However, it does further support the notion that some people will make snap judgments of a dog's temperament and the person with the dog based solely on the dog's looks. And because dogs and their people routinely may congregate in veterinary practice waiting rooms, this may directly or indirectly affect how other clients interact with those animals and their people. And that, in turn, may affect the dog's behavior in the examination room as well as the waiting room.

Hopefully and regardless of their personal views, practitioners and their staff members know that cringing in response to every cropped-eared, docked-tailed dog that enters the veterinary clinic won't enhance the dog's behavior. And although it superficially might appear that more positive responses to naturally eared and tailed canines and their owners would be a win-win for everyone, that approach also can backfire.

Just as modified dogs and their owners may dwell anywhere on the spectrum of temperaments and personalities, so may natural dog-owner pairs. And some of these may be nicer and better behaved than others.

Original post:
Ethology and veterinary practice: Animal behavior and human perception - MultiBriefs Exclusive (blog)