Category Archives: Human Behavior

Drastic cuts to NIH budget could translate to less innovation and fewer patents, study argues – Los Angeles Times

From research on stem cells and DNA sequencing to experiments with fruit flies and surveys of human behavior, projects funded by the National Institutes of Health aim to make Americans healthier. A new analysis finds that NIH-funded research also fuels the kinds of innovations that drive the U.S. economy.

Between 1990 and 2012, close to 1 in 10 projects made possible by an NIH grant resulted in a patent, usually for a university or a hospital.

The indirect effects were far greater: Close to 1 in 3 NIH research grants generated work that was cited in applications for commercial patents.

Over roughly two decades, 81,462 patents filed by companies and individuals cited at least one NIH-sponsored research project in their applications. Some 1,351 of those patents were for drugs that would go on to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, undergirds a point repeated frequently since the Trump administration unveiled a budget plan that proposed cutting the NIH budget by 20% in 2018: that research funded by taxpayer dollars not only improves lives and forestalls death, it creates jobs which the president has long asserted is his highest priority.

It is an argument often made in support of such scientific undertakings as space exploration, and sometimes for defense spending. But when it comes to biomedical research, public spending is frequently dismissed as a way to sustain university professors or seek esoteric answers to the mysteries of life.

It shouldnt be, said Pierre Azoulay, a professor of technological innovation at MIT and coauthor of the new analysis.

NIH public funding expenditures have large effects on the patenting output of the private sector, Azoulay said. These results should give a lot of pause to those who think these cuts are going to have no effect.

Ashley J. Stevens, a biotechnology researcher who is president of Focus IP Group in Winchester, Mass., said the new study clearly ... supports the premise that increased investment in the NIH leads directly to improved public health.

It also makes President Trumps proposal to cut the NIH budget by $1.6 billion this year and $6 billion next year to fund a border wall and increased military spending incompatible with his America first objectives, added Stevens, who was not involved in the study.

More than 80% of the NIH budget is parceled out to researchers across the country and around the world. Each year, NIHs 21 institutes award close to 50,000 competitive grants to investigators at more than 2,500 universities, independent labs and private companies. The University of California, for instance, received nearly $1.9 billion in total NIH funding last year.

Led by Harvard Business School entrepreneurship professor Danielle Li, the new research scoured 1,310,700 patent applications submitted between 1980 and 2012 in the life sciences, a category that includes drugs, medical devices and related technologies. In the footnotes, citations and supporting data, the study authors looked for references to any of the 365,380 grants the NIH funded between 1980 and 2007, as well as to research articles generated by those grants.

To capture the unappreciated indirect spillovers of knowledge that result from NIH-funded work, the authors focused especially on 232,276 private-sector patents in the life sciences.

Li, Azoulay and Bhaven Sampat, a health policy professor at Columbia University, found 17,093 patents that were assigned to universities and public-sector institutions. These patents are certainly valuable they can spur further research, support professors and graduate students and boost endowments.

But private-sector patents may reverberate more widely through the economy, generating capital, manufacturing jobs and profits. And their intellectual debt to publicly funded research is rarely counted or acknowledged outside the fine print of these patent applications.

In all, 112,408 NIH-funded research grants 31% of the total disbursed between 1990 and 2007 produced research that was cited by 81,462 private-sector patents, the team found.

If you thought this was just ivory tower stuff that has no relevance, I think we contradict that, Azoulay said.

The findings demonstrate that the broad economic effects of NIH budget cuts would not necessarily be felt immediately, since it could take years for a research paper written by NIH-funded investigators to find its way into a patent application.

These effects are going to be delayed, Azoulay said. The slowdown resulting from a cut in the NIH budget now is for President Ivanka Trump or President Chelsea Clinton to worry about.

But the study also makes clear that publicly funded research lays the groundwork for important innovations and discoveries that companies and individuals seek to patent.

Biomedical research is perhaps the most complex type of research there is, Azoulay added: These are fundamentally harder problems. There are a lot of blind alleys, experimentation that leads to nothing.

Intriguingly, the new research found that there was little difference in the economic impact of grants for basic science and applied science. Both types of grants were equally likely to be cited in patent applications if they explored fundamental dynamics of biology (such as cellular processes) or if they studied specific disease states in humans.

That distinction is important, because researchers and scientific leaders have quarreled for years over how NIHs limited budgets should be apportioned.

Scientists who study very basic biological processes, or who work with simple organisms like yeast, earthworms or fruit flies, often argue that their contributions are most valuable because they shed light on how all life including human life works.

Scientists whose research is more applied, including clinical trials and epidemiological studies, believe their work contributes more directly to improving human health.

The new study suggests that both categories contribute to commercial innovation.

Stevens called this finding remarkable.

Azoulay acknowledged that neither the progress of life sciences research nor its contribution to the economy is neat or easy to quantify.

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Drastic cuts to NIH budget could translate to less innovation and fewer patents, study argues - Los Angeles Times

Proliferation of Common Mouse Linked to Human Settlement – New Historian

When humans began erecting permanent settlements around 15,000 years ago, the practice had an effect on local animal populations and new research says the common mouse was one of them.

Led by an international group of scientists, the recently published study looked into the link between how humans at the dawn of the agricultural age changed the ecological balance of the world around them. Even before the advent of agriculture, the Middle East became the site of many much more permanent homes, and researchers say these earliest permanent edifices led to the flourishing and proliferation of the common house mouse.

Washington University in St. Louis anthropology professor Fiona Marshall, a co-author on the study and an expert on animal domestication, says that the new research provides the first evidence that humans impacted local animal communities as early as 15,000 years ago. The direct result is the dominant presence of house mice she added, remarking that these settlements had major implications for human societies, animal domestication and local ecologies.

In a university press release, Professor Marshall characterized the new research as exciting because it showed how the environment was shaped not by farmers but even earlier by settled hunter-gatherers. House mice began to flourish thanks to these hunter-gatherers providing stable access to human shelter and food. The result, Prof. Marshall says, is commensalism an early form of domestication that teaches species the benefits of interacting with humans.

Broad implications are raised by these findings. The timeline for the roots of animal domestication could be pushed back thousands of years prior to the widely accepted dawn of agriculture that occurred between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago.

The study itself was undertaken to better understand what caused large differences in the ratio of house mice and wild mice discovered in archaeological digs at ancient hunter-gatherer sites in Israel. Researchers used differences in fossilized mouse teeth, some as ancient as 200,000 years old, to trace species-related variations over the millennia, resulting in the construction of a timeline of how different mice population numbers changed over the years the site was occupied by humans.

Human mobility changed the relationships between two specific mouse breeds the short-tailed field mouse and the house mouse. Both of these mice species are still alive today in and around Israels modern settlements.

The most telling evidence of how mice populations were influenced by human behavior is how they rose and fell in correlation with human populations. Local hunter-gatherers who stayed in the same location for extended periods of time created conditions that saw the house mouse population flourish; these populations would then diminish when the human periodically moved on.

In the absence of humans, the house mouse and the field mouse populations achieved equilibrium. When humans were present for long periods of time, the house mice were able to outcompete their evolutionary cousins, pushing the majority of them outside these settlements.

The new research study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, can be found here

Image courtesy of Lior Weissbrod

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Proliferation of Common Mouse Linked to Human Settlement - New Historian

Evidence Indicates That Universal Basic Income Improves Human Health – Futurism

In BriefThe immediate need for basic income in recognition of theeffects of chronic stress and the importance of improvingenvironments. Eliminating huge stressors like worrying about beingable to afford food and shelter can do wonders for the potential ofhumanity. Biological Case for UBI

At the end of 2015, after a year-long journey, I achieved the realization of an idea with the help of about 140 people that has already forever changed the way I look at the very foundations or lack thereof upon which all of society is based. I now firmly believe we have the potential through its universal adoption to systemically transform society for the better, even more so than many of those most familiar with the idea have long postulatedbecause, for me, the idea is no longer just an idea. Its not theory. It is part of my life. Its real. And the effects are undeniable for someone actually living with it.

The idea of which I speak goes by the name of basic income but is best understood not by name, but by function, and that function is simply to provide a monthly universal starting point located above the poverty line as a new secure foundation for existence. Its an irrevocable stipend for life. In the U.S. it would be something like $1,000 for every citizen every month. All other income would then be earned as additional income on top of it so that employment would always pay more than unemployment.

This may sound overly expensive, but it would save far more than it costs. It would also really only require an additional net transfer of around $900 billion, and thats without subtracting the existing welfare programs it could replace, and also without simplifying the tax code through the replacement of all the many credits, deductions, and subsidies it could also replace. Basically, were already handing out money to everyone, rich and poor alike, but in hundreds of different ways through thousands of government middlemen who only serve to disincentivize employment by removing government supports as a reward for working.

Odds are this idea is new to you, but its not a new idea. Its been considered for hundreds of years from as long ago in the U.S. by founding father Thomas Paine in the 18th century, to Richard Nixon, Martin Luther King, Jr., and free market-loving Milton Friedman in the 20th century, to a quickly growing list of new names here in the 21st century. Its advocates know no ideological lines. Supporters include Nobel prize-winning economists, libertarians, progressives, conservatives, climate change activists, tax reformers, feminists, anarchists, doctors, human rights defenders, racial justice leaders, and the list goes on.

For such an old idea thats been endorsed by so many for so long and yet has obviously never yet come to be, you may be thinking, Why now? The answer to such a question has economic reasoning rooted in the globalization of labor and the exponential advancement of technologies capable of entirely replacing labor, but as important as this particular discussion is to have, its centered more around the idea of a future problem and less a present one.

However, our problems are very much in the present and to see why, we need to go deeper, much deeper, beyond technology and economics, and into human biology itself. To do that, well first need to look at what we as humans have learned from some animals in the lab and in the wild, because I think doing so pulls back the curtain on our entire social system.

As is true with many scientific discoveries, they tend to be accidental, and the story of Martin Seligman and some dogs back in 1965 is no different. Seligman wanted to know if dogs could be classically conditioned to react to bells in the same way as if theyd just been shocked, so he put them in a crate with a floor that could be electrified, and shocked them each time he rang a bell. The dogs soon began to react to the bell as if theyd just been shocked. Next however, he put them in a special crate where they could leap to safety to avoid the shock, and this is where the surprise happened.

The dogs wouldnt leap to safety. It turns out theyd learned from the prior part of the experiment that it didnt matter what they did. The shock would come anyway. They had learned helplessness. Seligman then tried the experiment with dogs who had not been shocked and they leaped to safety just as expected. But the dogs who had learned helplessness, they just sadly laid down and whimpered.

Fast forward to 1971 where a scientist named Jay Weiss explored this further with rats in cages. He put three rats into three different cages with electrodes attached to their tails and a wheel for each to turn. One rat was the lucky rat. No shocks were involved. Another would get shocks that could be stopped by turning its wheel. The third was the unlucky one. It would get shocked at the same time as the second rat, but it could do nothing about it. The third rat would only stop getting shocked when the second rat turned its wheel. Can you guess what happened?

Even though the two rats that were shocked got shocked at the same time and for the same duration of time, their outcomes were very different. The rat who had the power to stop the pain was just a bit worse off than the rat who experienced no pain at all. However, the rat who had no control whatsoever, stuck with a lever that did nothing, became heavily ulcerated. Like the dog, it too had learned helplessness. The cost of this lesson was its health.

Of course, humans are not dogs or rats. Theres a bit more complexity when it comes to us and our physiological responses. For us, perception is a key factor. This is where something called attribution comes into play, of which there are three important kinds that lead to humans learning helplessness: internal, stable, and global.

Think back to when you first started school and try to remember your first math test. What if after taking that first test you did poorly on it, and instead of all the other possible reasons for why that could happen, you decided it was because you sucked at math? Thats an internal attribution. Now imagine you applied that attribution to all math tests. Thats a stable attribution. Its not a one-time thing. Now imagine you applied it beyond math to all classes. Thats a global attribution. Consider the results of such perceptions.

Maybe that first math test was simply too hard for everyone in the class. Maybe it wasnt just you. Maybe your poor grade was due to not studying hard enough, or because you were too hungry or too tired. But instead, because you decided it was your fault and it meant you were stupid, your entire life went down a different path. Even though at any point along the way, you could have escaped that path, just like Seligmans dogs could have escaped the shocks, what if you had learned helplessness from that first math test?

We can learn to be helpless in an environment that actually offers us control, and the feeling itself of control can be the difference between a life full of unending stress, and a relatively stress-free life.

Its even been shown that we only need to be told theres nothing we can do in order for us to feel theres no point in trying. Its like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Tell everyone theres no point in voting, and fewer people will vote.

What all of this shows is two-fold and extremely important to remember. We can learn to be helpless in an environment that actually offers us control, and the feeling itself of control can be the difference between a life full of unending stress, and a relatively stress-free life.

Stress is more than a feeling. Stress is a physiological response, and it has important evolutionary reasons for being. Back in the day, many thousands of years ago, our ancestors who could shift into a kind of emergency gear where long-term higher-order creative thinking shut down, and the body was enabled to think faster, react quicker, be stronger, move faster, run longer, and think only about survival those were the humans who survived.

We call this now the fight-or-flight response, and where this once incredibly important response was evolutionarily adaptive, it is now maladaptive. We dont live in that same world anymore where it made so much sense. We arent being chased down by lions or being eaten by wolves while sitting in front of our computers in our air-conditioned offices, and yet our fight-or-flight responses are still being activated. In fact, for far too many, daily existence is nothing but fight-or-flight. Long-term stress is a real problem, and I would argue, its not just a health problem. Its a problem for human civilization.

One of the most knowledgeable scientists in the world in this area is Robert Sapolsky, a pioneering neuroendocrinologist and professor at Stanford University who has spent more than thirty years studying the effects of stress on health, of which there are many. Over the years, Sapolsky has found that long-term stress increases ones risk of diabetes, cardiac problems, and gastrointestinal disorders. Stress suppresses the immune system. It causes reproductive dysfunction in men and women. It suppresses growth in kids. In affects developing fetuses. Newer evidence even shows it causes faster aging of DNA. But potentially worst of all is what it does to the human mind.

Prolonging fight-or-flight into a chronic condition means that neurons in the brain related to things like learning, memory, and judgment all suffer the consequences thanks to the wide-ranging effects of our double-edged sword stress hormones called glucocorticoids. Recent research has even shown this response made chronic is a self-perpetuating cycle. A constantly stressed out brain appears to lead to a kind of hardening of neural pathways. Essentially, feeling chronic stress makes it harder to not perceive stress, creating a vicious cycle of unending stress.

On top of this, and related back to Weisss rats and human attribution theory, is the coping responses of those who are stressed out. Think of the off-lever in the second rats cage. There are many such levers around us and although they can be effective in reducing our stress levels, many of them are arguably pretty bad off-switches. These responses include acting out against others, otherwise known as displacement aggression or bullying.

Yes, bullying is an effective coping mechanism. As the saying goes, shit rolls downhill, and theres actually a scientific reason for that other than gravity. In a hierarchy, it is healthier after a loss to start another fight with someone you can beat, than to mope about the loss. The former is the abdication of control, a form of learned helplessness, and the latter is the creation of control, a kind of learned aggressiveness.

A society full of unhealthy people getting sick more than they otherwise would be, saddled with difficulties learning and remembering, suffering from weakened judgment and short-term survival thinking, and violently turning on each other as a means of coping is not a recipe for success. Its a recipe for disaster.

Life in the 21st century is full of both. On the learned helplessness side, there have been an estimated 45,000 suicides per year since 2000, with a sharp rise since 2007, that can all be attributed to the stresses surrounding the economic insecurities of unemployment and underemployment. The U.S. is even confounding the world, with a mysterious and dramatic rise in mortality rates among middle-aged white men and women, who all appear to be drinking and overdosing themselves to death.

On the displacement aggression side, we see bullying of traditionally marginalized groups and a global and marked increase of anti-immigrant sentiment which has already led directly to the election of Donald Trump and as a result, cries for border walls and travel bans. We are seeing a rise in authoritarianism, which is fundamentally a cry for more control and predictability.

A society full of unhealthy people getting sick more than they otherwise would be, saddled with difficulties learning and remembering, suffering from weakened judgment and short-term survival thinking, and violently turning on each other as a means of coping is not a recipe for success. Its a recipe for disaster, especially faced with species-endangering challenges like climate change that demand long-term thinking. But there is hope, and that hope springs from the same well as our problems.

There is an animal out there, one of our cousins actually in the primate family, who lead somewhat similar lives to us. They are high enough in the food chain to generally not be bothered and smart enough to be the primary cause of each others problems. Or as Sapolsky has described it: Theyre just like us: Theyre not getting done in by predators and famines, theyre getting done in by each other. That animal is the baboon and its the animal Sapolsky has been studying for decades. In doing so, hes found three primary factors in predicting stress levels.

The first predictor is the social hierarchy itself. Those at the top tend to live the most stress-free lives thanks to having more control, and those at the bottom tend to live the most stressful lives, thanks to having less control. There is however an important caveat to this. The stability of the social hierarchy matters. If the top baboon faces what is effectively a baboon revolution, that can be pretty stressful. In other words, more unequal societies lead to more stress, for everyone.

The second primary factor is personality. Just as primates are smart enough to be stressed where other animals wouldnt, theyre also able to not be stressed where others would. A baboon who worries for his life every time another baboon walks by is going to be far more full of stress hormones than a laid-back baboon. Personality is therefore a factor that can override ones position in the hierarchy for better or worse. It can even strongly predict ones rank.

The third primary factor actually trumps all. It turns out that stress-related diseases are powerfully grounded in social connectedness. At the bottom of the social hierarchy and prone to stressing out based on your personality? That can still be okay for your health and well-being as long as you have strong social supports friends, family, and community to override it all. Sometimes all we really need is to know we are not alone.

This social trump card even helps explain the prevalence of religion in human societies. Its the creation of a perceived control lever that reduces stress across all factors including the all important social support factor. The result is that attending religious services regularly is actually surprisingly good for human health.

All of this goes a long way toward explaining a great deal of human behavior. The construction of a social hierarchy is a naturally emergent phenomenon of our biology. Being above someone else in rank offers a level of control and predictability. Our personalities help determine our ranks and also how we cope with a lack of control and predictability. Our social relationships help put our lives and the world around us into perspective. However, this is no meritocracy and much depends on the circumstances of birth.

Because our personalities are greatly determined by our environments, especially as kids, a positive feedback loop can emerge where those born and raised in high stress environments full of impoverishment and inequality are unable to escape those environments. This can then become self-perpetuating through each successive generation that follows. We see this happening right now. For all those born into the bottom fifth of American society, about half remain there as adults. The same is true for the top fifth. Meanwhile, the middle 60% are twice as mobile as either one. If we care about the American Dream, we should consider the implications.

Whats the result of such generational stratification of little social mobility? One need look no further than our coping mechanisms the levers of control we create to understand why so many things we dont want, emerge from highly unequal societies. Remember displacement aggression? A 1990 study of 50 countries concluded economic inequality is so significantly related to rates of homicide despite an extensive list of conceptually relevant controls, that a decrease in income inequality of 0.01 Gini (a measure of inequality) leads to 12.7 fewer homicides per 100,000 individuals. Simply put, and this is a robust finding, growing inequality leads to growing violence. A meta-analysis of 34 separate studies even found 97% of the correlations reported between social inequality and violent crime to be positive, meaning as one got bigger or smaller, the other got bigger or smaller.

Addictions are another result. Drug use is a lever of control that is also an escape. We may not be able to control anything around us, but we can control an entirely personal decision that is as simple as drinking that vodka or smoking that cigarette. It can function as the middle finger to everything and everyone around us as a way of saying, I may be stuck in this cage, but you cant stop me from using this to feel like Ive escaped, if only temporarily, and if even only an illusion. This is me controlling the one thing I can control myself. Consider again the mysteriously growing mortality rates of middle-aged white people due to overdoses and liver disease.

As economic inequality increases, other scientifically correlated effects include: reduced trust and civic engagement, eroded social cohesion, higher infant mortality rates, lower overall life expectancy, more mental illness, reduced educational outcomes, higher rates of imprisonment, increased teen pregnancy rates, greater rates of obesity, and the list continues to grow as inequality-related research grows.

Additionally, if you look closely at such a list of effects, it shows the erosion of social supports. If you are less likely to trust your neighbor, if you arent as involved in your community, if you or those you interact with are more aggressive, if you are depressed and just want to be alone, that means the all important trump card for handling stress social connectedness vanishes. This too is its own feedback loop. Less social connection means more stress which means less social connection. Its an unending cycle for human misery.

Its also exactly what weve been observing in the United States for decades. Robert Putnam wrote an entire book about it back in 2000 titled Bowling Alone. The title originated from the statistic that although more people are bowling, less people are doing it in leagues. As observed by Putnam:

Community and equality are mutually reinforcing Social capital and economic inequality moved in tandem through most of the twentieth century. In terms of the distribution of wealth and income, America in the 1950s and 1960s was more egalitarian than it had been in more than a century Those same decades were also the high point of social connectedness and civic engagement. Record highs in equality and social capital coincided. Conversely, the last third of the twentieth century was a time of growing inequality and eroding social capital The timing of the two trends is striking: somewhere around 196570 America reversed course and started becoming both less just economically and less well connected socially and politically.

Viewed through Sapolskys decades of scientific investigation into the physiology of stress, and backed by everything weve observed since theGreat Decoupling in 1973 where national productivity has continued to grow but wage growth has been non-existent, it becomes disappointingly clear that all of this is actually of our own making. Through the policy decisions weve made to increase inequality in the blind pursuit of unlimited growth through the cutting of taxes and subsidizing of multi-national corporate interests, and through the pursuit of globalization without regard for its effects on the middle classes of developed nations such that 70% of households in 25 advanced economies saw their earnings drop in the past decade, weve created a societal feedback loop for chronic stress. And were paying the price.

But it doesnt have to be this way. Just as we know more about why things are the way they are because of some rats in cages and some baboons in East Africa, those same animals point the way forward.

In what was a sad day for Sapolsky but a remarkable day for science, he discovered back in the mid-1980s that the very first baboon troop hed ever studied had experienced a die-off. Half of the troops males had died of tuberculosis from eating tainted garbage. Because those at the top did not allow weaker males and any of the females to eat their prize trash, all of them died. The result was a truly transformed society of baboons.

A greater sense of egalitarianism became the new rule of the jungle, so to speak. Bullying of females and lower males became a rarity, replaced with aggression limited to those of close social rank. Aggressive behaviors like biting were reduced while affectionate behaviors like mutual grooming were increased. The baboons got closer, literally. They sat closer to each other. Stress plummeted, even among those at the very bottom of the new hierarchy. Even more amazingly, this happier more peaceful society of baboons has lasted over the decades, despite members leaving and joining.

In what appears to be a transmission of societal values, new baboons are taught that in this particular society, bullying is not tolerated and tolerance is more the general rule, not the exception. Essentially, a new feedback loop was created, where the sudden reduction in inequality led to less stress and greater community, which led to a new normal of less stress and greater community. As Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal, the director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University put it in a 2004 interview with the New York Times about the baboon findings, The good news for humans is that it looks like peaceful conditions, once established, can be maintained.

As much as the story of these baboons have to reveal about the importance and the hope of a less stressed-out, more peaceful society, there is another animal story that in my opinion shows the most potential for mankind of all.

In what has become a very well-known and discussed kind of study, rats were put into cages and given the opportunity to press a lever to self-administer drugs like cocaine. They medicated themselves to death and thus went down in history as the kind of experiment to point to that reveals the helplessly addictive dangers of drugs and how we must be protected from their usage for our own good. This is the ammunition for the War on Drugs in a nutshell.

Meanwhile, in what has become a far too little known variation of this study, but I consider to be one of the most important ever devised, a new kind of experiment was run in an entirely different environment called Rat Park.

Hypothesizing that perhaps having nothing to do but just exist alone in a cage may have something to do with drug usage, a psychologist namedBruce Alexander decided to create a kind of rat heaven before offering rats drugs. Instead of a cage, rats were given a huge space to roam between tree-painted walls and a forest-like floor, full of toys and other rats to play and mate with, food to eat, obstacles to climb, tunnels to traverse, etc.

Within this paradise for rats, morphine-laced water was introduced. The rats could drink as much of it as they wanted. Incredibly, the rats didnt care for it, opting for plain water instead. The morphine-water was then made sweeter and sweeter until eventually the rats finally drank it, but only because it apparently tasted so good, not for the narcotic effects. This was even confirmed by adding a drug to the water, Naltrexone, that nullified the effects of the morphine, which resulted in the rats drinking more of the water. All of this was in strong contrast to solitary rats in cages given the same choices, who took to the morphine-water immediately and strongly.

In fact, its even been found that solitary existence within a cage actively prevents neurogenesis the growth of new neurons within the brain. It turns out neuroscientists for decades thought it impossible for adults to grow new neurons because they were studying solitary animals in cages the whole time. Its therefore only recently that weve learned that impoverished environments actively limit brain development.

Building a paradise for humans is up to us, where because everyone has enough, and inequality is low enough, we wont reach for those levers of control that end up being against our better interests.

What this all reveals is more than the great lie of the Drug War. It reveals the vast importance and great differences of living alone in a cage, and living in a world of abundance and social bonds. Viewed in the context of everything else discussed, it shows the importance of constructing an environment for the purpose of bringing out the best in us, instead of the worst in us. Building a paradise for humans is up to us, where because everyone has enough, and inequality is low enough, we wont reach for those levers of control that end up being against our better interests. So how do we build Human Park?

It is only in my studies of the idea of basic income that Ive seen glimpses into this idea of a Human Park. Like a bunch of puzzle pieces that can be collected to form into a picture, the evidence behind simply giving people money without strings forms a profound image of a better world that can exist right now, if we so choose. Remember the three primary factors that determine our levels of stress?

Creating a less unequal society is step one. There exists in the world today, and has since 1982, something as close to a fully universal basic income as anything yet devised. Its the annual Alaska dividend where thanks to every resident receiving a check for on average around $1,000 per year for nothing but residing in Alaska, inequality is consistently among the lowest of all states. Not only that, but we see what wed expect to see in lower stress populations, where Alaska is also consistently among the happiest states.

In Gallups 2015 ranking of states by well-being, Alaska was second only to Hawaii. This annual ranking is a combined measure of five separate rankings: purpose (liking what you do each day and being motivated to achieve your goals), social (having supportive relationships and love in your life), financial (managing your economic life to reduce stress and increase security), community (liking where you live, feeling safe and having pride in your community), and physical (having good health and enough energy to get things done daily). Alaska scored 5th, 5th, 1st, 7th, and 6th respectively in each of these measures.

In other words, in the only state in the U.S. to provide a minimum amount of income to all residents every year, such that no one ever need worry about having nothing, they feel the greatest amount of basic economic security and the least amount of stress than any other state. As a result theyre also among the most motivated, the healthiest, and have strong family, friend, and community social supports. Alaska is essentially a glimpse at Human Park, but only a glimpse because even the $2,100 they all received in 2015 is not enough to cover a years worth of basic human needs.

Some more of the best evidence we have in the world for what happens in the long-term when people are provided something that looks even more like a basic income than is found in Alaska, can again be found in the U.S., in North Carolina.

In 1992, the Great Smoky Mountains Study of Youth began with the goal of studying the youth in North Carolina to determine the possible risk factors of developing emotional and behavioral disorders. Because Native Americans tend to be underrepresented in mental health research, researchers made the point of including 349 child members of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation. About halfway into the ten-year study, something that is the dream of practically any researcher happened as a matter of pure serendipity. All tribal members began receiving a share of casino profits. By 2001 those dividends had grown to $6,000 per year. By 2006, they were $9,000 per year. The results were nothing short of incredible.

The number of Cherokee living in poverty declined by 50%. Behavioral problems declined by 40%. Crime rates decreased. High school graduation rates increased. Grades improved. Home environments were transformed. Drug and alcohol use declined. Additionally, the lower the age the children were freed of poverty, the greater the effects as they grew up, to the point the youngest ended up being a third less likely to develop substance abuse or psychiatric problems as teens.Randall Akee, an economist, later even calculated that the savings generated through all the societal improvements actually exceeded the amounts of the dividends themselves.

However, the most powerful finding of all was in personality effects. These changes were observed as a result of better home environments that involved less stress and better parental relationships. Incredibly, the children of families who began receiving what we can call something very close to a basic income, saw long-term enhancements in two key personality traits: conscientiousness and agreeableness. That is, they grew up to be more honest, more observant, more comfortable around other people, and more willing to work together with others. And because personalities tend to permanently set as adults, these are most likely lifelong changes.

If we remember how important personality is to the perception of stress and ones location within social hierarchies, these children will end up far better off, and as a result, their own children likely will as well. This is another glimpse into a basic income-enabled Human Park.

Although whats been happening for years in both Alaska and North Carolina are close to universal basic income in practice, they are not actually UBI. UBI requires regularly giving everyone in an entire community an amount of money sufficient to cover their basic needs. This has been done in three places so far: the city of Dauphin in Canada, the Otjivero-Omitara area of Namibia, and the Madhya Pradesh area of India.

Its in these areas that humanity has achieved whats closest to creating Human Parks. As a direct result of guaranteeing everyone a basic income in Dauphin, hospitalization rates decreased 8.5% and high school graduation rates surpassed 100% as dropouts actually returned to school to finish. In Namibia, overall crime rates were cut almost in half and self-employment rates tripled. In India, housing and nutrition improved, markets and businesses blossomed, and overall health and well-being reached new heights. But if its one thing I find most interesting across all experiments, its the improved social cohesion a proliferation of new and strengthened social supports.

In Namibia, a stronger community spirit developed. Apparently, the need to ask each other for money was a barrier to normal human interaction. Once basic income made it so that no one needed to beg anymore, everyone felt more able to make friendly visits to each other, and speak more freely without being seen as wanting something in return. In India, where castes can still create artificial social divisions, those in villages given basic income actually began to gather across caste lines for mutual decision-making. And in Canada, the basic income guarantee had a notable impact on caring, with parents choosing to spend more time with their kids, and kids spending more time with each other in schools instead of jobs.

Remember, social supports are the trump card of societies with less stress, and it appears that providing people with UBI strengthens existing social supports and creates new ones. Freed from a focus on mere survival, humans reach out to each other. This is also something that makes us different from every other animal on Earth our ability to reach each other in ways unimaginable even to ourselves until only recently. We as humans are entirely unique in our ability to belong to multiple hierarchies, and through the internet create connections across vast distances and even time itself through recorded knowledge.

Our place in a hierarchy matters, but we can decide which hierarchies matter more. Is it our position in the socioeconomic ladder? Is it our position in our place of employment? Or is it our position in our churches, our schools, our sports leagues, our online communities, or even our virtual communities within games like World of Warcraft and Second Life?

No other policy has the transformative potential of reducing anywhere near as much stress in society than the lifelong guaranteeing of basic economic security with a fully unconditional basicincome.

We as humans have incredible potential to create and form communities, and realize world-changing feats of imagination, and this mostly untapped potential mostly just requires less stress and more time. If all were doing is just trying to get by, and our lives are becoming increasingly stressful, it becomes increasingly difficult to think and to connect with each other. Its the taxation of the human mind and social bonds. Studies even show the burden of poverty on the mind depletes the amount of mental bandwidth available for everything else to the tune of about 14 IQ points, or the loss of an entire nights sleep. Basically, scarcity begets scarcity.

On the other hand, if we free ourselves to focus on everything else other than survival, if we remove the limitations of highly unequal and impoverished environments, then were increasingly able to connect with each other, and we minimize learned helplessness. As a result, our health improves. Crime is reduced. Self-motivation goes up. Teamwork overtakes dog-eat-dog, and long-term planning overtakes short-term thinking. Presumably, many an IQ jumps the equivalent of 14 points. A greater sense of security has even been shown to reduce bias against out groups, from immigrants to the obese. And if we take into account the importance of security in people deciding to invest their time and resources in bold new ventures, innovation also has the chance of skyrocketing in a society where everyone always has enough to feel comfortable in taking risks without fear of failure. Basically, abundance begets abundance.

If what we seek is a better environment for the thriving of humans a Human Park full of greater health and happiness then what we seek should be the implementation of basic income, in nation after nation, all over the world. There is no real feeling of control without the ability to say no. Because UBI is unconditional, it provides that lever to everyone for the first time in history. No other policy has the transformative potential of reducing anywhere near as much stress in society than the lifelong guaranteeing of basic economic security with a fully unconditional basic income. Plus, with that guarantee achieved, the fear of technological unemployment becomes the goal of technological unemployment. Why stress about automation, when we could embrace it?

No more fight-or-flight.

Its time for live long and prosper.

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Evidence Indicates That Universal Basic Income Improves Human Health - Futurism

People who think about this stuff don’t think bad online behavior will get better any time soon – Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard

The quality of public discourse online is not going to get better and may actually get worse over the next decade, according to a survey released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center that invited 8,000 technology experts, scholars, corporate practitioners and government leaders to respond.

Forty-two percent of the 1,537 participants said they anticipate no major change in levels of online trolling and other harmful behavior that is found online. Another 39 percent said the next decade will be more shaped by these types of online behaviors.

While respondents expressed a range of opinions from deep concern to disappointment to resignation to optimism, most agreed that people at their best and their worst are empowered by networked communication technologies, the studys authors wrote. Some said the flame wars and strategic manipulation of the zeitgeist might just be getting started if technological and human solutions are not put in place to bolster diverse civil discourse.

Pew and Elon Universitys Imagining the Internet Center conducted the survey between July 1 and August 12, 2016, before the height of the divisive U.S. election.

The report categorizes responses into four primary themes that outline what the future of online discourse might hold:

Many respondents think things will just get worse as humans continue to evolve to a relatively new medium.

I would very much love to believe that discourse will improve over the next decade, but I fear the forces making it worse havent played out at all yet, technology consultant Jerry Michalski said. After all, it took us almost 70 years to mandate seatbelts. And were not uniformly wise about how to conduct dependable online conversations, never mind debates on difficult subjects. In that long arc of history that bends toward justice, particularly given our accelerated times, I do think we figure this out. But not within the decade.

We see a dark current of people who equate free speech with the right to say anything, even hate speech, even speech that does not sync with respected research findings, an anonymous MIT professor said. They find in unmediated technology a place where their opinions can have a multiplier effect, where they become the elites.

The social media ecosystem is attention-driven; the platforms themselves make money from advertising and, as a result, want to continue to drive participation. And because the platforms are so crowded, its often the loudest voices that get the most attention, which carries over into our larger political debates.

Distrust and trolling is happening at the highest levels of political debate, and the lowest, said researcher Kate Crawford. The Overton Window has been widened considerably by the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, and not in a good way. We have heard presidential candidates speak of banning Muslims from entering the country, asking foreign powers to hack former White House officials, retweeting neo-Nazis. Trolling is a mainstream form of political discourse.

And as social medias influence has grown, traditional media outlets have seen their influence wane. Heres how Steven Waldman, the founder and CEO of LifePosts, explained it:

It certainly sounds noble to say the internet has democratized public opinion. But its now clear: It has given voice to those who had been voiceless because they were oppressed minorities and to those who were voiceless because they are crackpots. It may not necessarily be bad actors i.e., racists, misogynists, etc. who win the day, but I do fear it will be the more strident.

Some respondents were more optimistic that the levels of online discourse would improve over the next decade. Artificial intelligence and other technological improvements will help improve dialogue, some said.

I expect we will develop more social bots and algorithmic filters that would weed out the some of the trolls and hateful speech, Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future, said. I expect we will create bots that would promote beneficial connections and potentially insert context-specific data/facts/stories that would benefit more positive discourse. Of course, any filters and algorithms will create issues around what is being filtered out and what values are embedded in algorithms.

Additionally, as platforms become more influenced by algorithms, respondents expect to see continued fragmentation of the online ecosystem.

There will still be some places where you can find those with whom to argue, but they will be more concentrated into only a few locations than they are now, senior design researcher Lindsay Kenzig said.

Respondents also expressed concern that increased regulation of online spaces could result in surveillance and censorship. They also worried that people would begin to change their positive online behaviors as surveillance increase.

Rebecca MacKinnon, director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at the New America foundation, said shes worried about the state of free speech online:

The demands for governments and companies to censor and monitor internet users are coming from an increasingly diverse set of actors with very legitimate concerns about safety and security, as well as concerns about whether civil discourse is becoming so poisoned as to make rational governance based on actual facts impossible. Im increasingly inclined to think that the solutions, if they ever come about, will be human/social/political/cultural and not technical.

Queensland University of Technology professor Marcus Foth warned that the increased regulation of online speech could result in polarization and filter bubbles:

With less anonymity and less diversity, the two biggest problems of the Web 1.0 era have been solved from a commercial perspective: fewer trolls who can hide behind anonymity. Yet what are we losing in the process? Algorithmic culture creates filter bubbles, which risk an opinion polarization inside echo chambers.

The full report, in which you are certain to find at least one opinion you agree with, s available here.

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People who think about this stuff don't think bad online behavior will get better any time soon - Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard

Biology explains why men kill big game like Cecil the lion and how that behavior might be stopped – Los Angeles Times

Why do some humans engage in expensive ventures to hunt lions, elephants and other big-game species that often are endangered or otherwise threatened?

The cost, according to a trio of scientists, is exactly the point: These pricey big-game hunts are meant to show off mens high social status to competitors and potential mates.

The findings, published in Biology Letters, offer an evolutionary hypothesis for why humans kill animals they dont need for sustenance and hint at a possible tactic for discouraging that behavior.

The death in 2015 of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe by an American recreational hunter triggered waves of international outrage. Trophy hunting is not new; in fact, many countries have tried to tie it economically to their conservation efforts. But the rise of the Internet and social media where hunters often share photos of themselves smiling next to their kills has brought the practice to the forefront, particularly at a time when large predators are suffering precipitous population declines.

The killing of Cecil the lion (Panthera leo) ignited enduring and increasingly global discussion about trophy hunting, the study authors wrote. Yet, policy debate about its benefits and costs focuses only on the hunted species and biodiversity, not the unique behaviour of hunters.

And much of human hunting behavior is indeed unique. Lead author Chris Darimont, Hakai-Raincoast professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, and his colleagues have described humans as superpredators who dont follow the typical rules of other carnivores in the animal kingdom which can have devastating consequences for wildlife populations.

The average lion, hyena or wolf typically picks prey that are newly born (the juveniles) or nearly dead (the sick and weak animals, the substandard animals in populations) and they eat them, the conservation scientist said. And this really bizarre, unique predator, [the] human being, kind of does the opposite. We target the large; we target animals for characteristics that have nothing to do with their nutritional value; we target animals with big horns or antlers.

These also are more dangerous animals, which means a human hunter is raising his risk to life and limb. Attacking a large animal with big horns doesnt seem to make a lot of sense. But puzzling behaviors often have an evolutionary driver, so the scientists set out to see whether they could find a logical explanation for this human practice.

The researchers began by considering the subsistence hunting habits of traditional hunter-gatherers modern-day populations whose lifestyles more closely mirror those of ancient humans.

Darimont pointed to the indigenous Meriam population of Australia as an example. Men and women both hunt for green turtles but employ different methods. Women nab the turtles when they come ashore to lay eggs an efficient, low-cost way to get a meal. But men take boats to sea and dive into dangerous waters to pursue the same turtles. The hunt is both costlier and riskier than the ostensibly far more effective method used by the women. In addition, men who return home with a big animal end up having to share it with their community rather than feeding it only to their families.

And yet the men continue to hunt in that manner because there is another advantage: Hunting turtles at sea falls into what scientists call costly signaling behavior. Men show they have the resources to take on such a costly task and if they have the resources to do that, the thinking goes, then they must have plenty to devote to offspring, making them more attractive to potential mates. In fact, those male Meriam turtle hunters gain social status in their communities, get married earlier to higher quality mates and have more surviving children (which, in many ways, may be the ultimate measure of reproductive success).

For such behavior to be maintained, even the attempted hunt must signal that the hunter can sustain the handicap of high-cost, low-consumption activity, providing honest evidence of underlying phenotypic quality, the study authors wrote.

So these behaviors arent about bringing home the bacon. Theyre about bragging rights and the social stature that comes with them.

While this seems to be a particularly human trait, it may not be unique. Chimpanzees also spend more time and effort hunting without commensurate food consumption gains.

Similarly, some seabirds like the pigeon guillemot (Cepphus columba) show off display fish, sometimes for hours, the authors wrote. Often discarding them, the behaviour is likewise thought to be social, related to site-ownership display.

With big guns and professional guides often helping them find targets from a safe distance, big-game recreational hunters arent spending a lot of physical effort hunting their quarry, compared with our ancestors, and they arent risking life and limb in the same way either. But they are spending lots of money to kill these animals, theyre choosing species typically not eaten and they engage in display behavior having photos taken next to their fallen prey.

The overall effect emanates a costly signaling behavior: Look at me! I can spend this much on an expensive activity I dont really need to do to survive. I would make a good mate, ladies and you other males stay away from my turf, if you know whats good for you.

Social media has amplified these hunters ability to signal their perceived social status. Such networking also could explain why some women hunt big game, even though it isnt a traditional evolutionary driver for them.

We speculate that such behaviour, counter to expected gender norms (and their evolution), might allow for increased attention in an increasingly competitive social media and marketing world, the study authors wrote.

But social media is a double-edged sword. Just as it might fuel enthusiasm for big-game hunting, it also opens hunters up to shaming by critics (as Cecils hunter, Walter Palmer, discovered). Such public outcry, Darimont and his colleagues point out, may be a key tactic among those who want to reduce the killing of such targets.

If these hunters are hunting for status essentially, theres nothing like shame to erode status, Darimont said. So where the internet might fuel this kill-and-tell generation, it might also provide a vehicle for those opposed to trophy hunting to emerge with a powerful strategy.

amina.khan@latimes.com

Follow @aminawrite on Twitter for more science news and "like" Los Angeles Times Science & Health on Facebook.

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Biology explains why men kill big game like Cecil the lion and how that behavior might be stopped - Los Angeles Times

The new S-Town podcast, from the Serial team, is a real-life Southern gothic – Vox

You are now entering Shit Town.

Thats what the S in S-Town stands for, as we learn in the opening moments of one of the years eeriest new podcasts. The just-launched project is the highly anticipated follow-up to 2014s smash hit Serial, and all seven episodes are available to listen to now.

The details of S-Towns premise have been shrouded in mystery for months. The show was first announced in November, but apart from a few tantalizing hints about murders and treasure hunts, its story was kept largely under wraps.

So the podcasts opening revelation that the S-Town title is a smokescreen for a something much blunter is a perfect setup for the various bluffs, double bluffs, and unexpected U-turns to come. Hosted by This American Life producer Brian Reed, S-Town is about the real life of one man whose attempt to make a difference in his small Alabama community has sweeping, unexpectedly far-reaching repercussions.

Reed spent several years investigating the story, which began with an email from a This American Life fan and evolved into a mystery within a mystery. The story ultimately takes many unique turns that are best left unspoiled, but in the opening act, a man named John convinces Reed to travel to Alabama to help him investigate a murder. From there, Reed gets caught up in the somewhat baffling idiosyncrasies of Shit Town and its residents and above all, in the idiosyncrasies of John himself.

S-Town is the work of podcast royalty: The first podcast to launch under Serials spinoff production company Serial Productions, it is executive-produced by Serial co-creator Julie Snyder, and its editorial team includes longtime This American Life host Ira Glass, Serial host Sarah Koenig, and Starlee Kine, creator of the cult podcast hit Mystery Show.

However, despite its blatant positioning as the heir to the Serial throne, S-Town is not quite the true crime podcast you might be expecting. Instead, its an engrossing narrative about the complexities of human behavior. But there are definitely similarities to Serial and other podcasts that deal in real-life intrigue, like the recent controversial Missing Richard Simmons.

Perhaps inevitably, what seems to be a foray into one mystery abruptly veers into a much larger, more somber, and unexpected tale about how the personal is always political, and how change on an individual level can become change on a universal level.

But it really does include a treasure hunt.

S-Town is now streaming on iTunes, apps like Stitcher, and the S-Town website.

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The new S-Town podcast, from the Serial team, is a real-life Southern gothic - Vox

Can microbes make us better people? – Mother Nature Network (blog)

Why did human beings evolve to be nice to one another? From a scientific standpoint, it doesn't make much sense for us to go out of our way to help others, especially when we don't receive any direct benefit. But new research suggests there may be an evolutionary reason that kindness exists, and it may have more to do with microbes than genetics.

Most theories that attempt to explain the evolution of altruism focus on the individual; some people see the benefit of helping the community to help their own species. These theories assume that altruism is genetically encoded that some people just have bigger hearts than others, and that quality is determined by the genes passed down to them. But a new study has found that altruism may have less to do with the kindness in someone's heart and more to do with the number of microbes in their gut.

Researchers at Tel-Aviv University in Israel recently took a look at the role that microbes play in human behavior to determine the evolutionary benefit of altruistic behavior. We already know that viruses and bacteria can change a host's behavior. Rabies, for example, can make an individual more aggressive. There are certain parasites that can cause their insect hosts to commit suicide, and there are types of plasma that can manipulate their bacterial hosts into cooperating with one another.

The new study, which was published in a recent issue of Nature, proposed that microbes could make humans act altruistically, meaning it's microbes that explain and determine the evolution of human kindness.

Using a series of computer models, researchers tested a number of scenarios involving interactions between humans, some with altruism-inducing microbes and others without. They found that humans could not only be influenced by microbes to act altruistically, but that doing so would help promote the transfer of these microbes from one individual to another. In other words, microbes may make their human hosts act altruistically to give the microbe a better chance of spreading to the new host. That's evolution.

Researchers also compared the altruism-inducing microbe theory with the possibility that niceness is simply encoded in our genes. In these models, they found that genetically-encoded altruism would not evolve over time as it would with a microbial influence. They also noted that while genetic kindness could persist from generation to generation, microbe-induced niceness is much more likely to spread to the next generation.

"I believe the most important aspect of the work is that it changes the way we think about altruism from centering on the animals (or humans) performing the altruistic acts to their microbes," Dr. Lilach Hadany, a researcher of population genetics and evolution theory at Tel Aviv University and a lead researcher for the study, told Phys.org.

The microbial theory explains why altruism tends to "spread" within a community. One act of kindness often causes a snowballing of such acts within a population. That wouldn't be caused by genetics, but it does make sense when you consider the possibility that altruism is caused by microbes.

Can microbes make us better people? It's certainly possible. And if we have to "catch" something while interacting with another human being, wouldn't it be nice if that something was a dose of kindness?

Continued here:
Can microbes make us better people? - Mother Nature Network (blog)

Security awareness relies on balance of technical, human-behavior skill sets – ZDNet

Imagine a teeter totter (or seesaw, if you will). One one side, sits a technical security practitioner. On the other side, sits a person with advanced skills in changing behaviors and community engagement. In order for the teeter totter to stay level, each person needs to have equal experience, or one needs to move further to the center to achieve the desired equilibrium. If one level of experience too demonstrably outweighs the other, the right balance of talent won't be achieved.

Talent for what? The oft-misunderstood role of the security awareness professional.

Security awareness at its most basic level is the act of applying technical security knowledge to programs and activities that raise the awareness -- and diminish risky behaviors -- of employees within a given organization. This includes everything from phishing and password test programs, to community engagement with educated practitioners teaching less security savvy users how to change their behavior to better secure protect themselves or their companies.

It's long been stated that security is not convenient, and for many years cybersecurity teams were challenged with addressing the human element of security risk (patch your systems! change your passwords! no, that is not a real email from George Clooney!) while also trying to create a secure infrastructure that defends the organization from external attackers. While the challenge of insider threats is real and malicious employees do exist, there's an equal chance that human faux pas creates a significant risk -- whether it be someone losing a device, clicking on a malicious link, or emailing the wrong file to the wrong person.

Hence the importance of security awareness programs.

According to Masha Sedova, co-founder of Elevate Security, and former trust engagement leader at Salesforce, a good awareness program gets feedback from the rest of the security organization into what the top people-centric risks are for the company and, then creates an effective campaign to address those risks.

"Security awareness was initially started about 10 years ago with the advent of regulation and compliance requirements," Sedova said. "Unfortunately, they were designed with the wrong question in mind. They ask 'show me how many people have taken your training.' Instead they should have asked 'show me metrics that your program yields improvement in X behavior.' The companies leading the charge in the awareness space today are creating their programs around this question."

This leads back to the discussion around the right balance of talent for creating these programs. According to the SANS 2016 report on security awareness, more than 80 percent of security awareness personnel have a technical background, but also need soft skills such as communications, change management, learning theory, and behavior modeling, in order to be most effective.

The report calls out one option to address this gap: Adding a communications professional to the security awareness team. Although not wrong, this is a tricky one. While facets of marketing and communications expertise are helpful for many teams, as represented in the soft skills written above, the old adage applies: "you can't secure what you don't see." And if you don't have a firm understanding of security, and how risk can be created by humans and how such risk tracks back to security technology and implementation, marketing and communications skills alone cannot create the robustness required for a security awareness team.

In fact, too much of a focus on the communications elements of the security awareness role can somewhat water down its criticality. While communications programs, educational events, community dialogue and networking are important components, security awareness programs are not built on this kind of skill. These are just merely channels for influencing more people to understand their part in securing their organizations, or their communities at large.

"Most marketing people can't identify the underlying behaviors that need most focus, and unfortunately most technology-focused security people aren't great at that either," Sedova said. "Security folks will say 'employees need to be less dumb' which is hard to measure and drive a specific campaign for. And marketing people will say 'don't click on phishing links' but can't spend the time to explain why an employee should care about not clicking on phishing links and how it connects to a bigger picture. A good security awareness practitioner can bridge both skills sets."

The other component in achieving the proper torque in the seesaw, is ensuring there are resources available to fuel these security awareness programs. They are must-haves as much as basic security programs are themselves. According to the same SANS security awareness report, more than 50 percent of security awareness professionals survive on a budget of less than $5,000, or those professionals are not able to dedicate all of their time to awareness. The report also says that the amount of support is relative to the maturity of a security awareness program, so a focus on education, the human actor, and demonstrable metrics is crucial.

Corporate support, whether it be freeing up budget or resources, for security awareness programs and professionals is a must-have, as they need to scale as their organizations do.

"What needs to happen are programs that can create and educate local security champions throughout the organization," Sedova said. "This includes subjects such as secure coding, vulnerability identification and remediation, and threat sharing. These programs are great areas for security awareness practitioners to partner with security subject matter experts and create effective programs that scale. Overtime, I hope to see this happening more in this field."

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Security awareness relies on balance of technical, human-behavior skill sets - ZDNet

Contagious yawning, laughing and scratching gives clues to how the human brain works – KRCU

In 1962, a strange epidemic swept through several communities in Tanganyika, present-day Tanzania. It wasnt a virus, but laughter among teenage schoolgirls. The contagious laughter, which lasted for about two and a half years, afflicted about 1,000 people and forced at least 14 schools to temporarily shut down.

Experts later determined that the origin of the epidemic was psychological, perhaps related to stress caused by the presence of British colonialism. But such events have raised scientific questions about why humans cant control behaviors such as laughing, yawning, coughing and shivering and why they spread among groups of people.

We are a part of a human herd whose behavior is often the involuntary playing out of an ancient neurological script that is so familiar that it goes unnoticed, wrote neuroscientist Robert Provine in his book, "Curious Behavior."

Consider what is really happening when your body is hijacked by an observed yawn or you spontaneously join others in a communal chorus of ha-ha-ha," Provine wrote. "You dont decide to yawn or laugh contagiously. It just happens.

Provinediscovered that people are 30 times more likely to laugh around others than alone. To date, there has been much research thats observed socially contagious behaviors in humans and animals, but scientists are just starting to look into what makes them ripple through groups of people.

Empathy may not have much to do with it

Many studies have suggested that empathy could explain contagious yawning. A study published a year ago, for example, indicated that women are more susceptible to catch yawns than men. Researchers also noted that women score higher on empathy tests, and thought the two might be associated.

Another study published in 2008 found that dogs may yawn in response to their owners, but not to strangers or other dogs. Researchers wrote that because dogs are incredibly skilled at reading human cues and generally have unique social interactions with people, there is the potential that dogs may also have developed the capacity for empathy towards humans, and may catch human yawns.

Other studies, however, suggest that empathy is less significant in contagious behaviors than we might think. A paper in 2014 published by Duke University researchers, for example, analyzed various factors that influenced yawning among more than 300 human volunteers. Scientists considered a number of influencers such as empathy, energy levels and age. They saw that contagious yawning decreased among older people.

In our study, there was a connection between contagious yawning and empathy, but it was explained by a stronger connection between contagious yawning and age, said Elizabeth Cirulli, a geneticist at Duke University and an author of that paper.

Other research also showed that young children arent likely to catch yawns from other people, either.

Itch researchers at Washington University believe empathy has very little to do with such behaviors. This month, they published a study in the journal Science that showed that mice will scratch themselves in response to seeing videos of other mice that have chronic itch problems.

At the beginning, this [experiment] may sound like a crazy idea because, as you know, mice are nocturnal. They have very poor vision, said Zhou-Feng Chen, director for the schools Center for the Study of Itch.

Chen and his colleagues examined the brains of the non-itchy mice in the study and found that a specific

region, called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, released a chemical thats been known to signal when theres an itch that needs to be scratched.

Basically, our study shows those kinds of contagious behaviors are instinctive behaviors and are hardwired into our neurocircuitry, Chen said.

However, more research is needed to understand exactly how involved the brain is when we uncontrollably copy each others behaviors. As Cirulli noted, other factors need to be examined. Empathy, she said, shouldnt be ruled out, but is likely just as connected to such behaviors as height is to weight.

I dont think empathy is totally unrelated, Cirulli said. Its just that its absolutely not everything thats going on with contagious yawning. In some cases, its a proxy for something else.

We behave like the pack to survive

In the animal kingdom, one principle that prevails is strength in numbers. Snow geese, for example, will fly in groups as large as 5,000. A pack of zebras will whine loudly when they detect a predator nearby.

Some scientists believe that humans evolved to uncontrollably copy others behavior, as a means of communicating important information.

You can imagine millions of years ago when animals lived widely and maybe living in places where there are parasites," Chen said. "If all the animals begin to scratch, it could mean the area that theyre in may be dangerous.

He further speculated that as scratching became a regular way to alarm others that they needed to leave certain environments, its possible that the behavior became innate and written into our genetics over time.

From an evolutionary point of view, contagious behaviors actually help animals to better survive because you dont have to learn everything from scratch, Chen said.

How the brain works

While it might seem frivolous to study why we catch yawns and participate in other kinds of unconsciously provoked micmicry, the research could provide fundamental insight into how our brains work and develop. For instance, a 2009 study by University of Zurich researchers showed that contagious yawning and laughing happened much less frequently with people who have schizophrenia. Yawning also spread much less among people with autism.

Such findings still need further research to be understood. However, its promising that contagious scratching is observed among mice, for example, since theyre often used as experimental subjects to understand brain diseases.

Reflecting on her contagious yawning study, Cirulli mused that it would be interesting to study how genetics might influence a persons susceptibility to this behavior and how that might be connected to neurological conditions.

Because big genetic studies have been done on schizophrenia and autism and other diseases, you can calculate someones risks of developing those diseases from their genetic information and you can see if its associated with contagious yawning, she said.

Follow Eli Chen on Twitter:@StoriesByEli

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Contagious yawning, laughing and scratching gives clues to how the human brain works - KRCU

Nuke the Internet From Orbit? – Washington Free Beacon

A computer gamer in Osnabrueck, Germany. / Getty Images

BY: Jack Butler March 26, 2017 4:50 am

What if the Internet shut down?

The Internet is so enmeshed in modern life that such a question seems unthinkable, an apocalyptic disaster of the sort reserved for fiction, such as E.M. Forster's startlingly prescient 1909 short story"The Machine Stops." But at the end of February, huge swaths of the Internet went dark due to problems with Amazon's servers. (The cause was a typo.) A similar outage occurred last October. That time, though, it wasn't accidental. The culprit was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on key aspects of the Internet's infrastructure. The attackflooded vitalwebsites and services with requests, amplifying itself through loosely secured, Internet-connected devices. Such devices, includinghousehold fixtures like wireless printers and DVD players, are known collectively as the "Internet of things."

Mary Aiken's The Cyber Effect: A Pioneering Cyberpsychologist Explains How Human Behavior Changes Online deals only tangentially with such threats to the Internet. But, after reading it, one is tempted to hope that an attacksucceeds in bringing the whole thing down.

Aiken didn't set out to make the case for nuking the Internet from orbit. Her goal was rather to dissent from typical tech reporting, which breathlessly focuses on the relentless pace of change or submits paeans to Silicon Valley. Instead, she observes dispassionately how the Internet, smartphones, and related items affect us. As Aiken somewhat clumsily notes, "[w]e are living through a unique period of human history, an intense period of flux, change, and disruption that may never be repeated." At the same time, she submits another awkward, obvious, but important message: "What is new is not always goodand technology does not always mean progress."

Aiken struggles through parts of the book to convey her thesis. Virtually every page bears a trite phrase (beginning with the JFK-quoting epigraph "Children are the world's most valuable resource and its best hope for the future"), some meaningless filler (the first words of the book proper are "I am sitting on a cold, hard bench"), or a pointless rhetorical question (my favorite was "where am I going with this?"). Aiken could have used a better editor.

Moreover, the authorhas a curious habit of explaining or discovering the obvious. Is it really that surprising to learn that "people behave differently when they are interacting with technology than they do in the face-to-face real world"? Is anyone shocked to find that "the more you mention something, the more you normalize it"? Did she really need to define "content analysis" and "logic" for readers?

Yet the importance of Aiken's message inclines me to forgive these faults. The meat of the book isdata and anecdotes about technology's effects, and she is at her best simply conveying these. Aiken rightly notes that "[t]he impact of technology on human behavior begins at birth and ends at death," and providesplenty of striking examples to show how technology may be deforming human behavior.

There's what Aiken calls "online syndication," or the way the Internet has allowed all sorts of warped individuals to organize aroundtheir fetishes and festering ideas. There are the video game addicts who have literally played themselves to death, and the ever-growing cohort of mostly young males who may not be literally dying but who are increasingly checking out of the real world for the more reliable stimulants of video games and pornography. Aiken cites psychologist Philip Zimbardo's claim that the average boy watches 50 pornographic videos a week, and will have played ten thousand hours of video games by age 21.

And then there are today's infants and children, the first generation raised entirely in a digitally saturated world. As Aiken notes, we will not know how staring at screens for hours from birth will affect the neurological development of today's children,or how social media will affect the self-image of today's teenagers who have spent their entire lives cultivating themselves forit, until it's too late. Don't forget the children harassed in online game worlds or lured into prostitution; horror stories of this kindmay convince you of the need fora separate Internet just for kids, an idea Aiken endorses. These and countless other examples, drawn from headlines and psychological literature, enliven the book, and nearly suffice as expiation for other faults.

The Cyber Effect may not be the world's best-written book, but Aiken has performed an invaluable service by producing it. We desperately need pushback against the tech-addled mores of our time, which encroachon us seemingly from every direction, at every stage of our lives. The Internet has given us many great things, and it would probably be a bad thing on the whole if one of these cyber attacks does take it out. Nevertheless, we still must pay attention to the work of Aiken and others, consider the questions they raise, and try our best to resist the Internet.

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Nuke the Internet From Orbit? - Washington Free Beacon