#behavior

The unseen driver behind the migrant caravan: climate change
Photo: Honduran migrants heading to the US, Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty Images

While violence and poverty have been cited as the reasons for the exodus, experts say the big picture is that changing climate is forcing farmers off their land – and it’s likely to get worse

Thousands of Central American migrants trudging through Mexico towards the US have regularly been described as either fleeing gang violence or extreme poverty.

But another crucial driving factor behind the migrant caravan has been harder to grasp: climate change.

Most members of the migrant caravans come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – three countries devastated by violence, organised crime and systemic corruption, the roots of which can be traced back to the region’s cold war conflicts.

Experts say that alongside those factors, climate change in the region is exacerbating – and sometimes causing – a miasma of other problems including crop failures and poverty.

And they warn that in the coming decades, it is likely to push millions more people north towards the US.

“The focus on violence is eclipsing the big picture – which is that people are saying they are moving because of some version of food insecurity,” said Robert Albro, a researcher at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University.

“The main reason people are moving is because they don’t have anything to eat. This has a strong link to climate change – we are seeing tremendous climate instability that is radically changing food security in the region.”

Migrants don’t often specifically mention “climate change” as a motivating factor for leaving because the concept is so abstract and long-term, Albro said. But people in the region who depend on small farms are painfully aware of changes to weather patterns that can ruin crops and decimate incomes. [Full article]

Source:The Guardian

First Evidence That Social Bots Play a Major Role in Spreading Fake News
by Emerging Technology from the arXiv August, 2017

Automated accounts are being programmed to spread fake news, according to the first systematic study of the way online misinformation spreads

Fake news and the way it spreads on social media is emerging as one of the great threats to modern society. In recent times, fake news has been used to manipulate stock markets, make people choose dangerous health-care options, and manipulate elections, including last year’s presidential election in the U.S.

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Clearly, there is an urgent need for a way to limit the diffusion of fake news. And that raises an important question: how does fake news spread in the first place?

Today we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Chengcheng Shao and pals at Indiana University in Bloomington. For the first time, these guys have systematically studied how fake news spreads on Twitter and provide a unique window into this murky world. Their work suggests clear strategies for controlling this epidemic.

At issue is the publication of news that is false or misleading. So widespread has this become that a number of independent fact-checking organizations have emerged to establish the veracity of online information. These include snopes.com, politifact.com, and factcheck.org.

These sites list 122 websites that routinely publish fake news. These fake news sites include infowars.com, breitbart.com, politicususa.com, and theonion.com. “We did not exclude satire because many fake-news sources label their content as satirical, making the distinction problematic,” say Shao and co. […]

Shad and co say bots play a particularly significant role in the spread of fake news soon after it is published. What’s more, these bots are programmed to direct their tweets at influential users. “Automated accounts are particularly active in the early spreading phases of viral claims, and tend to target influential users,” say Shao and co.

That’s a clever strategy. Information is much more likely to become viral when it passes through highly connected nodes on a social network. So targeting these influential users is key. Humans can easily be fooled by automated accounts and can unwittingly seed the spread of fake news (some humans do this wittingly, of course).

“These results suggest that curbing social bots may be an effective strategy for mitigating the spread of online misinformation,” say Shao and co.

That’s an interesting conclusion, but just how it can be done isn’t clear.

[Full article]

Source:MIT Technology Review

Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret

The millions of dots on the map trace highways, side streets and bike trails — each one following the path of an anonymous cellphone user.

One path tracks someone from a home outside Newark to a nearby Planned Parenthood, remaining there for more than an hour. Another represents a person who travels with the mayor of New York during the day and returns to Long Island at night.

Yet another leaves a house in upstate New York at 7 a.m. and travels to a middle school 14 miles away, staying until late afternoon each school day. Only one person makes that trip: Lisa Magrin, a 46-year-old math teacher. Her smartphone goes with her.

An app on the device gathered her location information, which was then sold without her knowledge. It recorded her whereabouts as often as every two seconds, according to a database of more than a million phones in the New York area that was reviewed by The New York Times. While Ms. Magrin’s identity was not disclosed in those records, The Times was able to easily connect her to that dot.

The app tracked her as she went to a Weight Watchers meeting and to her dermatologist’s office for a minor procedure. It followed her hiking with her dog and staying at her ex-boyfriend’s home, information she found disturbing. […]

At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information, The Times found. Several of those businesses claim to track up to 200 million mobile devices in the United States — about half those in use last year. The database reviewed by The Times — a sample of information gathered in 2017 and held by one company — reveals people’s travels in startling detail, accurate to within a few yards and in some cases updated more than 14,000 times a day.

These companies sell, use or analyze the data to cater to advertisers, retail outlets and even hedge funds seeking insights into consumer behavior. It’s a hot market, with sales of location-targeted advertising reaching an estimated $21 billion this year. IBM has gotten into the industry, with its purchase of the Weather Channel’s apps. The social network Foursquare remade itself as a location marketing company. Prominent investors in location start-ups include Goldman SachsandPeter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder. [Full article]

Source:The New York Times

When People Are as Predictable as Water
Image: Start of the 2016 Bank of America Chicago Marathon. Left panel: images after correction from perspective distortion effects. Right panel: Walking speed of the crowd, measured from a PIV analysis. Credit: Nicolas Bain and Denis Bartolo

Can we apply a physics-like reductionism to people? That’s a question we asked Simon DeDeo, a professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, who also heads the Laboratory for Social Minds at the Santa Fe Institute. DeDeo was well suited to the question. With a background in astrophysics, studying galaxy formation, he’s applied a similar, mathematical approach to both contemporary and historical social phenomena (see his Nautilus feature on shifting attitudes toward violent crime, “When Theft Was Worse Than Murder”).“

One of the bugbears of the social sciences—and the study of groups and the origins and development of civilization—is this notion of human nature,” DeDeo told Nautilus editor in chief Michael Segal. “Since the very beginning of what you might call a ‘science of society,’ people have always gone back to this idea that there are some invariants of human society.” These boil down to a list of biological constants that are able to generate a diversity in human societies that somewhat mirrors galactic variety. “If you’re a physicist, you’re really proud of how little you need to assume to get where you’re going—and I think in the modern era now, in the study of society, of human behavior, we’re beginning to develop a taste for those kinds of explanations that get further with less,” DeDeo said.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, to hear that people, moving as a crowd, shift and jostle in ways that render them as predictable as water spilling down a channel. In a paper published in Science this month, two French scientists, Nicolas Bain and Denis Bartolo, modeled marathon runners as they walked up to the starting line of the Chicago Marathon. However, they modeled the runners not as individuals, but as part of a continuous flowing material. “Guided by the spectral properties of velocity waves, we build on conservation laws and symmetry principles to construct a predictive theory of pedestrian flows without resorting to any behavioral assumption,” the authors wrote.

As if taking a cue from DeDeo—getting further with less—Bain and Bartolo eliminated any trace of human characteristics in their model and explained human behavior with a physicist’s precision. From a practical perspective, they concluded, understanding the behavior of crowds in terms of hydrodynamics could help civic planners design more efficient and safe crowd controls.

Source:Nautilus,phys.org

machetelanding:

Times Square, New Year’s Eve 1937

The complete history behind the famous Times Square Drop Ball

calumet412:

Summer in the City

1) Oak Street Beach, 1930

2) VJ Day, State Street, August 14, 1945

3) Summer Concert at the Band Shell, Grant Park, 1943

visualizingmath:

The Ulam Spiral

The prime spiral, also known as Ulam’s spiral, is a plot in which the positive integers are arranged in a spiral with primes indicated in some way along the spiral. Unexpected patterns of diagonal lines are apparent in such a plot. This construction was first made by Polish-American mathematician Stanislaw Ulam (1909-1986) in 1963 while doodling during a boring talk at a scientific meeting. While drawing a grid of lines, he decided to number the intersections according to a spiral pattern, and then began circling the numbers in the spiral that were primes. Surprisingly, the circled primes appeared to fall along a number of diagonal straight lines or, in Ulam’s slightly more formal prose, it “appears to exhibit a strongly nonrandomappearance”

In the above variation of the Ulam spiral, red squares represent prime numbers and white squares represent non-primes. Image source.

writingbox:

Violent behaviour reference sheet

EDIT: A lot of people have reshared this from various blogs and added some interesting comments (they’re worth a read).

Many people feel that these behavioural characteristics are more like characteristics of someone who is feeling intimidated. Of course, people who feel intimidated may well attack, but they may equally retreat. There are also several comments pointing out that many of these characteristics are seen in people with autism and social anxiety (I hope it goes without saying that these are not inherently violent people).

For writers, it’s still a useful reference for body language, although its application in this infographic may be a little rudimentary.

It’s always useful to remember, as a writer, that there are a million different reasons someone may display any kind of body language. Everyone acts and reacts to situations differently and reads the behaviour of others in different ways.

So your application of body language to any of your characters depends on their particular viewpoint, personality, and history. Of course, as writers, you should be applying this understanding to everything you write about them.