Human Behavior – Page 10

facebook, Human Behavior, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News, Social Media

Influencers are flocking to a surprising new kind of social media

April 14, 2019

Influencers are flocking to a surprising new kind of social media

350+ influencers with a collective audience of 3.5 billion people are flocking to a platform called Escapex, which gives them their own apps. It’s part of the next wave of social media focused on smaller, more private groups.

Last week, actor Jeremy Renner posted a time-lapse video of himself trying on different outfits in front of the mirror. “Suiting up for the Avengers press tour,” he wrote. “What are you wearing?” More than 2,000 people commented on the post (some offered outfit tips, but many agreed he looked better without a shirt). Others said good luck, or jovially wished everyone a happy Friday.

None of this was happening on Instagram, but on Renner’s own app, where his most die-hard fans gather to gush about their favorite actor. They do more than just comment on Renner’s photos, videos, and give-away contests. They also post their own images in a “fan feed”–a quick scroll reveals a woman’s before-and-after haircut, a call for recommendations for a trip to L.A., and a shot of tomato soup and parmesan-crusted chicken with bacon, which a fan had made from another fan’s cookbook.

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Analysis, Big Problems, Crime, Human Behavior, Science & Technology News

Around the world, more say immigrants are a strength than a burden

April 1, 2019

Immigrants take the Canadian oath of citizenship during a ceremony in Toronto.

Publics divided on immigrants’ willingness to adopt host country’s customs.

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Automobiles, Human Behavior, People Making a Difference, Science & Technology News

Volvo’s next step in car safety: Intervening in dangerous driving

March 29, 2019

Volvo hopes to tackle speeding, distraction and intoxication with tech. Jake Holmes mugshot BY JAKE HOLMES MARCH 20, 2019 5:20 PM PDT 0 Twelve years ago, Volvo senior technical advisor for safety Jan Ivarsson announced Vision 2020. The bold plan dreamed of a world where, by 2020, nobody would be killed or seriously hurt in a new Volvo. Where do things stand today, with 2020 less than 12 months away? At a presentation in Gothenberg, Sweden, on Wednesday, Volvo Cars CEO Håkan Samuelsson said the limiting factor in any car maker reaching that ambitious dream is bad human behavior.

“We have done a lot with technical means, passive and active [safety] features in the car,” he said. “But really to come down to zero [deaths] you have to tackle some issues that are much more human-related.”

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Big Problems, government, Human Behavior, Science & Technology News

Switzerland has a stunningly high rate of gun ownership — here’s why it doesn’t have mass shootings

March 28, 2019

Switzerland Swiss army honor guard soldiers troops military

Switzerland hasn’t had a mass shooting since 2001, when a man stormed the local parliament in Zug, killing 14 people and then himself.

The country has about 2 million privately owned guns in a nation of 8.3 million people. In 2016, the country had 47 attempted homicides with firearms. The country’s overall murder rate is near zero.

The National Rifle Association often points to Switzerland to argue that more rules on gun ownership aren’t necessary. In 2016, the NRA said on its blog that the European country had one of the lowest murder rates in the world while still having millions of privately owned guns and a few hunting weapons that don’t even require a permit.

But the Swiss have some specific rules and regulations for gun use.

Business Insider took a look at the country’s past with guns to see why it has lower rates of gun violence than the US, where gun death rates are now at their highest in more than 20 years.

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Crazy Stuff, Human Behavior, Humor, Science & Technology News

Flat Earthers now plan to “shut this debate down” by getting to the “outer edges of Earth

March 30, 2019

Mm-kay

After their last experiment went pear-shaped, Flat Earth supporters have announced an expedition to the “outer edges of flat earth” in order to “shut this debate down” once and for all.

An extremely in-depth report in Forbes saw journalist Jim Dobson speak to “dozens” of believers, one of whom – Jay Decasby – is in talks to develop his own reality TV series about his theory.

Decasby is also throwing his weight behind plan to sail to Antarctica to prove flat earth.

“All we have to do is shut this debate down once and for all is to get the distance of the coast of Antarctica,” he told Forbes.

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Analysis, Human Behavior, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Defining generations: Where Millennials end and Generation Z begins

March 27, 2019

Michael Dimock, president of Pew Research Center

For decades, Pew Research Center has been committed to measuring public attitudes on key issues and documenting differences in those attitudes across demographic groups. One lens often employed by researchers at the Center to understand these differences is that of generation.

Generations provide the opportunity to look at Americans both by their place in the life cycle – whether a young adult, a middle-aged parent or a retiree – and by their membership in a cohort of individuals who were born at a similar time.

As we’ve examined in past work, generational cohorts give researchers a tool to analyze changes in views over time. They can provide a way to understand how different formative experiences (such as world events and technological, economic and social shifts) interact with the life-cycle and aging process to shape people’s views of the world. While younger and older adults may differ in their views at a given moment, generational cohorts allow researchers to examine how today’s older adults felt about a given issue when they themselves were young, as well as to describe how the trajectory of views might differ across generations.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Breakthrough Thinking, Futurist, Human Behavior, Science & Technology News

Artificial Intelligence and the future of humans

March 25, 2019

A vehicle and person recognition system for use by law enforcement is demonstrated at last year’s GPU Technology Conference in Washington, D.C., which highlights new uses for artificial intelligence and deep learning.

Experts say the rise of artificial intelligence will make most people better off over the next decade, but many have concerns about how advances in AI will affect what it means to be human, to be productive and to exercise free will.

Digital life is augmenting human capacities and disrupting eons-old human activities. Code-driven systems have spread to more than half of the world’s inhabitants in ambient information and connectivity, offering previously unimagined opportunities and unprecedented threats. As emerging algorithm-driven artificial intelligence (AI) continues to spread, will people be better off than they are today?

Some 979 technology pioneers, innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists answered this question in a canvassing of experts conducted in the summer of 2018.

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Analysis, Historical Perspectives, Human Behavior, Science & Technology News

Millennial life: How young adulthood today compares with prior generations

March 25, 2019

Over the past 50 years – from the Silent Generation’s young adulthood to that of Millennials today – the United States has undergone large cultural and societal shifts. Now that the youngest Millennials are adults, how do they compare with those who were their age in the generations that came before them?

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government, Human Behavior, Internet

Putin wants his own internet

March 13, 2019

A new law would create a single command post from which authorities can manage—and halt—information flows across Russian cyberspace.

When anti-government protests erupted on Russia’s side of the Caucasus Mountains in October, authorities did something they’d never done before: cut mobile internet service to an entire geographical area.

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Analysis, Children, Healthcare, Human Behavior, Science & Technology News

Study of 657,461 children finds no link between vaccines and autism

March 12, 2019

Danish researchers followed children born over a 10-year period and found no connection between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.

It only hurts for a second.

The vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella doesn’t cause autism, according to a massive, new study.

It’s yet another study that unravels any tie between vaccines and the developmental disability. A link between autism and the MMR vaccine has long been erroneously suggested, due to a controversial paper published in prestigious journal The Lancet over 20 years ago.

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Analysis, Futurist, Human Behavior, Science & Technology News

Why Futurism has a cultural blind spot

March 8, 2019

We predicted cell phones, but not women in the workplace

In early 1999, during the halftime of a University of Washington basketball game, a time capsule from 1927 was opened. Among the contents of this portal to the past were some yellowing newspapers, a Mercury dime, a student handbook, and a building permit. The crowd promptly erupted into boos. One student declared the items “dumb.”

Such disappointment in time capsules seems to run endemic, suggests William E. Jarvis in his book Time Capsules: A Cultural History. A headline from The Onion, he notes, sums it up: “Newly unearthed time capsule just full of useless old crap.” Time capsules, after all, exude a kind of pathos: They show us that the future was not quite as advanced as we thought it would be, nor did it come as quickly. The past, meanwhile, turns out to not be as radically distinct as we thought.

In his book Predicting the Future, Nicholas Rescher writes that “we incline to view the future through a telescope, as it were, thereby magnifying and bringing nearer what we can manage to see.” So too do we view the past through the other end of the telescope, making things look farther away than they actually were, or losing sight of some things altogether.

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Advertising, Human Behavior, Science & Technology News, Shopping, Social Media

Today’s influencer economy can be explained by a 19th century economic theory

March 7, 2019

At the end of the 19th century, American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen said that people take their cues about what to consume from the social class immediately above their own. They want things just beyond their reach.

A new paper in the journal Communication, Culture and Critique shows how this theory explains some dynamics of the influencer economy and the rules that govern Instagram. In it, researchers Emily Hund and Lee McGuigan at the University of Pennsylvania investigate the mechanics of “a shoppable life.” The term describes the contemporary phenomenon of influencers marketing their lifestyles, then selling aspects of it, like the beauty products they use or elements of their home’s decor, through nearly seamless technological infrastructure, and the finding that more and more commercial opportunities rise with the way people present themselves and interact with each other.

One influencer told the researchers that a favorite part of her job is getting freebies, like a new set of furniture, from brands that want to be promoted in her channels. “They’re things that I love and never could have afforded on my own, and it’s going to bring a lot of value to the blog, so I’m excited about those just for that reason.”

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