#behavior

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 An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have  Deborah M Gordon is a professor

An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have 

Deborah M Gordon is a professor of biology at Stanford University in California. She has written about her research for publications such as Scientific American and Wired. Her latest book is Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior(2010).

Like a brain, an ant colony operates without central control. Each is a set of interacting individuals, either neurons or ants, using simple chemical interactions that in the aggregate generate their behaviour. People use their brains to remember. Can ant colonies do that? This questionleads to another question: what is memory? For people, memory is the capacity to recall something that happened in the past. We also ask computers to reproduce past actions – the blending of the idea of the computer as brain and brain as computer has led us to take ‘memory’ to mean something like the information stored on a hard drive. We know that our memory relies on changes in how much a set of linked neurons stimulate each other; that it is reinforced somehow during sleep; and that recent and long-term memory involve different circuits of connected neurons. But there is much we still don’t know about how those neural events come together, whether there are stored representations that we use to talk about something that happened in the past, or how we can keep performing a previously learned task such as reading or riding a bicycle. […]

Changes in colony behaviour due to past events are not the simple sum of ant memories, just as changes in what we remember, and what we say or do, are not a simple set of transformations, neuron by neuron. Instead, your memories are like an ant colony’s: no particular neuron remembers anything although your brain does. [Full article]

Source:Aeon


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datarep:A better way to visualize US Election Resultsby u/NeuralV

datarep:

A better way to visualize US Election Results

byu/NeuralV


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Simulating Many Scenarios of an EpidemicBack when the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to be taken se

Simulating Many Scenarios of an Epidemic

Back when the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to be taken seriously by the American public, 3blue1brown’s Grant Sanderson released a video about epidemics and exponential growth. (It’s excellent — I recommend watching it if you’re still a little unclear on how things are got so out of hand so quickly in Italy and, very soon, in NYC.) In his latest video, Sanderson digs a bit deeper into simulating epidemics using a variety of scenarios.

Like, if people stay away from each other I get how that will slow the spread, but what if despite mostly staying away from each other people still occasionally go to a central location like a grocery store or a school?

Also, what if you are able to identify and isolate the cases? And if you can, what if a few slip through, say because they show no symptoms and aren’t tested?

How does travel between separate communities affect things? And what if people avoid contact with others for a while, but then they kind of get tired of it and stop?

These simulations are fascinating to watch. Many of the takeaways boil down to: early & aggressive actions have a huge effect in the number of people infected, how long an epidemic lasts, and (in the case of a disease like COVID-19 that causes fatalities) the number of deaths. This is what all the epidemiologists have been telling us — because the math, while complex when you’re dealing with many factors (as in a real-world scenario), is actually pretty straightforward and unambiguous.

The biggest takeaway? That the effective identification and isolation of cases has the largest effect on cutting down the infection rate. Testing and isolation, done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

See also these other epidemic simulations: Washington PostandKevin Simler.

Note: Please keep in mind that these are simulations to help us better understand how epidemics work in general — it’s not about how the COVID-19 pandemic is proceeding or will proceed in the future.

Source:Kottke


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Cellphone Data Shows How Quickly Partying Spring Breakers Spread Across the CountryPeople on Spring

Cellphone Data Shows How Quickly Partying Spring Breakers Spread Across the Country

People on Spring Break in Florida for the past couple of weeks were famously unconcerned with social distancing measures implementing in other areas of the country to help stem the tide of COVID-19 infections and save lives. Using cellphone location data from just the phones of the people gathered on a single beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, this video shows just how far those people spread across the country when they went home, possibly taking SARS-CoV-2 with them. They go everywhere.

Show of hands: who feels uncomfortable being reminded of the extent to which 3rd party companies know the location of our cellphones? With tools like the one demonstrated in the video & other easily available info, it has to be trivial to identify individuals by name using even “randomized” data and so-called metadata. (via @stewartbrand)

Source:Kottke


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citymaus: paseo de la castellana in madrid, spain. photo: carlos álvarezvia guardian, 16.05.2020. 

citymaus:

paseo de la castellana in madrid, spain.

photo: carlos álvarez
viaguardian,16.05.2020


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 Domino Park Introduces Social Distancing Circles to Adapt to the COVID-19 Crisis  While all public

Domino Park Introduces Social Distancing Circles to Adapt to the COVID-19 Crisis 

While all public spaces around the world are trying to innovate and implement safety measures to open during the coronavirus pandemic, Domino Park has introduced a series of painted social distancing circles. This strategical urban design intervention ensures that people are “following proper social distancing procedures recommended by the CDC and government”.

Designed by landscape architecture firm James Corner Field Operations and privately-funded by Brooklyn-based developer Two Trees Management, Domino Park has been accessible to the public ever since the summer of 2018. In order to encourage safe park visitation practices, during this pandemic, the park has recently implemented social circles in its open public space.

Elaborated by Domino Park’s staff members, the project generates a series of chalk painted circles on the astroturf Flex Field. Introduced on May 15th, the intervention puts in place 30 circles: each circle is 8 feet in diameter and set 6 feet apart. Immediately famous with the visitors, the social distancing rings “took a few $.99 cans of white chalk paint from the local paint store, 2 people, and 4 hours”.

Along with this strategic tactical urbanism, Domino Park has continued to display various types of signage about social distancing and wearing masks. Moreover, the quarter-mile waterfront park highlights safety rules constantly on his social media pages. During times of peak visitation, Domino Park has even closed River Street.

Source:Archdaily


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Plaza Life Revisited This research project reconsiders writer William H. Whyte’s Street Life Project

Plaza Life Revisited

This research project reconsiders writer William H. Whyte’s Street Life Project and seminal study The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980). It sought to understand how the types of new public spaces have changed some 40 years after he published his book and companion film, what has changed in how people use public realm spaces, and what makes well used spaces.

The project first looked at 10 plazas in Manhattan by 10 different designers, constructed or renovated in the last 15 years. The sites range from the type of bonus plazas Whyte was observing, to infrastructural leftovers, alleys, transit plazas, private campus spaces, and tactical urbanist interventions. The team used new analytical tools such as a machine learning algorithm on video footage to develop heat maps describing dwell time, frequent and infrequent usage, and preliminary pedestrian counts. 

The team also used some of the same techniques Whyte did—behavioral observations, site measurements, and hand tabulation.  The goal was to identify common behavior patterns, collective activity, programming, physical elements, and understand context across the sites in order to inform future public realm design.  Findings and methods were published in a booklet called Field Guide to Life in Urban Plazas. Currently, researchers are experimenting with an extension of the New York study on other international sites using infrared data that allows evening site usage to be captured, as well as a higher level of anonymization.


RESEARCH TEAM
Emily Schlickman and Anya Domlesky, XL research and innovation Lab at SWA, Tom Balsley, Chella Strong, Jen Saura, and Hallie Morrison, SWA/Balsley, Anonymous, Data Scientist

Source:SWA Group,Landscape Architecture Magazine

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 The Pandemic Shows What Cars Have Done to CitiesTom Vanderbilt, April 24, 2020 (Photo: Ernst Haas/G

The Pandemic Shows What Cars Have Done to Cities
Tom Vanderbilt, April 24, 2020 (Photo: Ernst Haas/Getty)

Along streets suddenly devoid of traffic, pedestrians get a fresh look at all the space that motor vehicles have commandeered.

The New York City streetscape has become a strange, inverted mirror image of the normal world. Suddenly, if you have a car, and actually have someplace to go, driving seems weirdly pleasant, almost rational: Congestion is rare, gas is even cheaper than usual, and parking is abundant. This is the Hollywood version of getting around Brooklyn: No matter your destination, you can find a spot right out front. During the coronavirus-induced lockdown, not many people are driving to work, shuttling kids on the school run, or sharing Ubers home from a Lower East Side bar. Vehicle traffic moves smoothly, now that it largely seems to consist of what traffic on urban streets arguably should consist of: the movement of goods to people, the movement of public transit, the movement of emergency responders and other essential services.

For people on the sidewalks, the situation is much different. Those islands of street-side serendipity where friends once spotted one another and stopped to chat—clusters that, as the urbanist William H. Whyte observed, so often happened at corners—suddenly seem like miasmatic hot zones.

Things that might have only slightly rankled before—the couple insisting on running side by side down a narrow sidewalk, the dog walker thoughtlessly unspooling a long leash, the large family strolling four abreast—are now sources of real anxiety. The usual strategies by which one pedestrian might avoid walking into another, such as ducking into the small patches of sidewalk space nestled between street trees and trash cans, are no longer sufficient. Also disconcerting is the sight of people walking in the street, or in bike lanes. At my local Trader Joe’s, a portion of the block-and-a-half-long line of would-be shoppers (stretched as it was by the six-foot intervals between them) extended into the street, close to traffic, presumably to keep the sidewalk free for walkers.

Moments of crisis, which disrupt habit and invite reflection, can provide heightened insight into the problems of everyday life precrisis. Whichever underlying conditions the pandemic has exposed in our health-care or political system, the lockdown has shown us just how much room American cities devote to cars. When relatively few drivers ply an enormous street network, while pedestrians nervously avoid one another on the sidewalks, they are showing in vivid relief the spatial mismatch that exists in urban centers from coast to coast—but especially in New York. […]

The status quo became untenable when a pandemic required six feet of social distancing between people—a distance wider than many cities’ sidewalks. In Canada recently, two performance artists with a group called the Toronto Public Space Committee drew attention to this problem by building what they called the “social-distancing machine.” It was a brilliant provocation. They used a large circle of plastic—like a hula hoop with a two-meter radius—to create a skeletaloutline of government-mandated air rights around the person wearing it. One of the artists suspended it from straps on his shoulders and then tried to walk through the city, keeping everything and everyone else at a safe distance. In a video released by the group, the hoop-wearer is barely able to navigate Toronto’s obstacle-laden sidewalks, much less share those sidewalks with others.

The social-distancing machine was actually inspired by an earlier device, the so-called Gehzeug, or “walkmobile,” created by Hermann Knoflacher, an Austrian civil engineer, in the 1970s. Knoflacher’s idea was to construct a wood-frame outline of a car that a pedestrian could wear to show how much extra space someone driving alone would consume. A cheeky, visually effective cri de coeur on behalf of cyclists and pedestrians, the Gehzeug was created at a time when even cities such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen—now renowned for their bicycle traffic—were turning their streetscapes over to the car. [Full article]

Source:The Atlantic


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Why Bees Could Be the Secret to Superhuman IntelligenceLouis Rosenberg thinks he has found a way to

Why Bees Could Be the Secret to Superhuman Intelligence

Louis Rosenberg thinks he has found a way to make us all a lot smarter. The secret to this superhuman intelligence? Bees.

Rosenberg runs a Silicon Valley startup called Unanimous AI, which has built a tool to support human decision-making by crowdsourcing opinions online. It lets hundreds of participants respond to a question all at once, pooling their collective insight, biases and varying expertise into a single answer.

Since launching in June, Unanimous AI has registered around 50,000 users and answered 230,000 questions. Rosenberg thinks this hybrid human-computer decision-making machine – once dubbed an ‘artificial’ artificial intelligence – could help us tackle some of the world’s toughest questions. What’s more, with advances in AI coming thick and fast, he sees it as a way to put humans back into the loop. [Full article]

Source:BBC


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 The Essential Tool for Hong Kong Protesters? An UmbrellaPhoto: Demonstrators hold umbrellas at Vict

The Essential Tool for Hong Kong Protesters? An Umbrella
Photo: Demonstrators hold umbrellas at Victoria Park, Aug. 18. Photographer: Kyle Lam/Bloomberg

In Hong Kong, umbrellas are more than just protection from rain or glaring sunshine. They have become tools for expression, privacy and self-defense—and that’s made them a staple of the anti-government demonstrations that have rocked the city over the past three months.

The humble brolly has been a symbol of resistance in Hong Kong since 2014, when the city’s pro-democracy protests became known as the Umbrella Movement. Now, Hong Kong’s police force has labeled umbrellas as weapons, and Chinese e-commerce sites like Taobao and AliExpress no longer sell them to customers in Hong Kong.

“I tried to purchase umbrellas and I just can’t” on those platforms, said Kelvin Yeung, a 22-year-old university student who has participated in about half of the marches this summer. “I cannot put it into my basket if the destination is Hong Kong.”

Over the past 100-plus days, protesters have demonstrated dozens of ways to use umbrellas that have nothing to do with rain. Here are just a handful of examples, as well as what some protesters have to say about them. Many declined to give their full name for fear of punishment, and none are pictured.

Source:Bloomberg


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Data Visualization at UBERBy Nicolas Garcia BelmonteMap-based information is one of our biggest and Data Visualization at UBERBy Nicolas Garcia BelmonteMap-based information is one of our biggest and

Data Visualization at UBER
By Nicolas Garcia Belmonte

Map-based information is one of our biggest and richest assets at Uber. The billions of GPS points handled by our platform every day in real-time pose atypical challenges for real-time mapping visualizations and in-browser, data-dense visualizations. […]

Our tech stack for these applications consists on a few libraries that we developed and open sourced.react-map-gl provides a React-friendly layer on top of MapboxGL, a library from Mapbox that we use extensively at Uber. deck.gl provides an interface for creating WebGL-powered layers that can be put on top of a map or used standalone for creating abstract data visualizations. […]

We recently created a data visualization that explores how uberPOOL can have an impact in making cities’ transportation much more efficient. Behind Travis Kalanick in his TED Talk, you’ll see the data visualization we crafted to show traffic per street segment with and without uberPOOL, demonstrating POOL’s ability to make cities smarter by reducing traffic.

Source:UBER Engineering


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undr:Topical Press Agency ⁄ Getty Images. Hyde Park, London. 1914

undr:

Topical Press Agency ⁄ Getty Images. Hyde Park, London. 1914


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From lizarding to lingering: how we really behave in public space The researchers behind The Field G

From lizarding to lingering: how we really behave in public space

The researchers behind The Field Guide to Urban Plazas (published by SWA Group) decided to study the public behaviour of human beings in New York City, an update on William H Whyte’s pioneering work from 1980, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. From ‘roosting’ to ‘schooling’, here are the patterns they found.

Source:The Guardian


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 A Bird’s-Eye View of How Protesters Have Flooded Hong Kong StreetsHundreds of thousands of people p

A Bird’s-Eye View of How Protesters Have Flooded Hong Kong Streets

Hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets of Hong Kong on Sunday, June 16, and marched almost two miles (three kilometers), protesting a proposed extradition bill and calling for the city’s leader to step down.

It was the largest of three major protests against the bill that were held over eight days. More demonstrations are scheduled for Wednesday, ahead of the Group of 20 summit meeting in Osaka, Japan. The composite images below help show the enormous scale of the June 16 demonstrations.

Source:The New York Times


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The Motorbikes of TaiwanFrom Hiroshi Kondo, a mesmerizing short film called Multiverse of the motorb

The Motorbikes of Taiwan

From Hiroshi Kondo, a mesmerizing short film called Multiverse of the motorbike-jammed streets of Taiwan. Right around the 50 second mark, Kondo starts to use a clever time lapse technique to highlight individuality within the bustling mass of traffic. It’s a really cool effect and reminded me of this clip art animation by Oliver Laric. (via colossal)

Source:Kottke


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A Series of Maps Reveals the Difference in How Cities are Perceived by Tourists and LocalsWhile visi

A Series of Maps Reveals the Difference in How Cities are Perceived by Tourists and Locals

While visiting a city one has never been to before, it is common to go to touristic places, the ‘must-see’ spots advertised in the media. On the other hand, when establishing residency in a place, it is likely that one will start to attend some less popular locations, and will often spend a long time without passing by the city’s most famous touristic sights. Artist Eric Fischer has developed a project that explores precisely the difference in perceiving - and photographing - a city from the point of view of tourists and locals. The work, which is entitled Locals and Tourists, gathers the maps of 136 of the largest - and most visited - cities in the world.

Fischer used data from MapBox and Twitter to create the maps. The red dots indicate photographs taken by tourists, while the blue dots show images taken by local residents. The data were compiled between 2010 and 2013 and may be somewhat outdated, however, the main tourist attractions in large cities change very little from year to year, so it can be said that the maps reflect fairly accurately the activities of locals and tourists.

For this research, people who have been tweeting from the same city continuously within one month were considered locals. Meanwhile, tourists meant those who were considered locals in a city and tweeted from another location. Check out some of the maps produced by Fischer below and access the full gallery here.

Source:Archdaily


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How crows connectThe New Caledonian crow is well-known for its ability to make and use tools to pokeHow crows connectThe New Caledonian crow is well-known for its ability to make and use tools to pokeHow crows connectThe New Caledonian crow is well-known for its ability to make and use tools to poke

How crows connect

The New Caledonian crow is well-known for its ability to make and use tools to poke nutritious insects out of their hiding places.

An international team led by the University of St Andrews has studied the social networks of crows to understand how tool-use might spread between birds and across communities. 

The team looked at the social interactions of wild New Caledonian crows in their tropical habitat. Each crow was fitted with a high-tech, miniature spy tag which provided a record of which crows met at any given time.

They found that providing the crows with food had a similar effect to putting out a plate of freshly baked cookies – individual crows hang around the supply which can accelerate the spread of interesting information.

Scientists still don’t know how much of their tool-use behaviour New Caledonian crows learn from each other, but the study shows that opportunities for information exchange are plenty, especially when important resources encourage birds to forage in the same place. 

Read more

Images: James St Clair, James St Clair, Jolyon Troscianko


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(HYPER-)INVISIBILITY : The Asian Non-Model for Affection

I’m always confused when I watch Asian music videos - by which I mean K-pop and J-pop, primarily… and the degree to which the videos feel so sexualized. As someone who grew up watching old Asian (Chinese) dramas like 還珠格格 (which recently had its remake), it’s strange to know that some of the new Korean dramas are… well, R-rated. While I think most of us (though that’s probably not as true as I believe) struggle or feel loathe to envision others in the throes of passion, the depiction is fairly common in America cinema, something that has made me uncomfortable because it is so absent in Chinese cinema. For example, in 上错花轿嫁对郎*, a show that came out in 2001 and is focused around the idea of marriage, I don’t remember any scenes that show kissing, period. There are probably a few, but not many in a 20 1-hour episode show. Rather, intimacy and affection is shown in long embraces. “Intimate” scenes feature the couple lying down on a bed together, fully clothed.

What’s more remarkable is that this is a step forward even for the culture. Of my parents’ generation, nobody holds hands in public. No one leans into each other or sits touching each other. Even of the couples I know in America, there is a distinct lack of public affection between Asian couples and American couples. Of my peers, if they display a lot of physical intimacy, often it is coupled with an open embrace of another culture - in short, it is not classically considered a part of the culture we “grew up in” which is usually our parents’ culture. Parents who are more traditional, especially the Chinese parents I know, don’t have a sex talk, generally don’t approve of dating in high school, but might be confused why you’re not in a committed relationship by the time you enter grad school.

Contemporary culture of Korean and Japanese dramas are dramatically different. And I’m not quite sure why. It is possible that the government is trying to control the population of China by not encouraging more romantic media to be created. The general disparity between the classes may also because of the distinction between Asian cultures and their portrayal of love and romance on the big screen (particularly given the middle-class nature of such entertainment). But even so relative to American movies, the classic tropes are very different. American women are often either bold/brash and then “subdued” or humanized by love (see “The Proposal”, “Groundhog Day”, “Juno”, etc.) or sensitive/caring ones who win over the “playboy”/“bad boy" (see "A Walk to Remember”, “Beastly”/“Beauty & the Beast”). In Chinese drama, which, of the ones I’ve watched, are often historical, there is the “cultured, demure, perfect girl” who earns love through her faithfulness, and the “uncultured, ‘masculine’, poor girl” who is softened by love. The class element is often a part of the character trope and also often plays a part in the male characterization as well.

All this to say, the normalized presentation of love is pretty… chaste? Traditional? At least by American standards. But it goes beyond couples. Growing up, families didn’t hug (unless it was after crying) or kiss or even say “I love you.” Parents don’t ask about your day, they ask about your homework, about your success. But that is “love” is caring about how successful you are, which I thought was the strangest thing, and didn’t really consider love at all. There was a shift when I finally told my parents “I love you” - and I often still do it in English because it feels weird to do it in Chinese. It just feels… awkward and embarrassing. My younger sister and I are super affectionate, but we do it in English as well. It’s just really weird, because it seems illogical.

I’m also listening to “I Knew I Loved You (Before I Met You)” right now and I would say that I don’t think the disparity exists as much in terms of love songs… but I’m not sure if that’s just because I haven’t listened to as many Chinese love songs, or if it’s because it’s not as prevalent in the media.

*for those of you who are curious what a more “traditional” Chinese drama looks like, you can actual watch some English subtitled videos like the ones above. (it starts with episode 6, unfortunately, but it gives you a sense of what a lot of the ones I’ve watched are like)

#culture    #asian american    #chinese    #chinese drama    #affection    #standards    #behavior    #sociology    #socy 62    #dartmouth    #class blog    #college    #dartmouth college    
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