Behold The Hidden Hand

This was the basis for Spike Lee's 1989 Do the Right Thing by the way:

AI-based research reveals that extreme temperatures fuel online hate speech

Sep 2022, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09-ai-based-reveals-extreme-temperatures-fuel.html

Temperatures above or below a feel-good window of 12–21 degrees Celsius (54–70 °F) are linked to a marked rise in aggressive online behavior across the U.S.

Detecting hate tweets in more than four billion tweets from U.S. users with our AI-algorithm and combining them with weather data.

via Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research: Temperature impacts on hate speech online: evidence from 4 billion geolocated tweets from the USA, The Lancet Planetary Health (2022). DOI: 10.1016/S2542-5196(22)00173-5

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(22)00173-5

Also: A Stechemesser et al, Strong increase of racist tweets outside of climate comfort zone in Europe, Environmental Research Letters (2021). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ac28b3 , dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac28b3

http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac28b3

Image credit: AI Art Hybrid Prabhu B 15 - 2022

Urban elites seize most of the benefits of big cities, finds study

Jan 2023, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2023-01-urban-elites-seize-benefits-big.html

Ouch. This is pretty messed up.

Back up to 2010: A unified theory of urban living (Bettencourt and West) -- the legends of sociothermodynamics -- decide to measure cities like living things and find a universal scaling law similar to metabolic rates and body size. Basically everything you want to know about a city you can tell just by its size. Gas stations, patents, hospitals, suicides, cars, even average pedestrian walking speed. Everything. But wait, there's efficiency built into this scaling law -- for every doubling of a city's population, the number of new gas stations required is only 85%, not 100%, and the number of patents goes up 115%, not 100%. And that goes for everything, better medical care for less money, better garbage pick up, better job opportunities, better car dealerships, all for less money because the more people there are, the cheaper everything gets. 

Cities are a stellar reactor of wealth, creativity and even social services. The more people there are, the bigger and better everything gets, and for less time and less money. This has been measured by scientists only in the past decade.

But now, when we look a bit more carefully at the data, we find that averages aren't always a good indicator of the average person's experience. Instead, the rich get all the good stuff, and the poor get even less than they would if they lived in the soul-less suburbs. 

The study draws attention to the partial exclusion of most city dwellers from the socioeconomic benefits of growing cities. Their lifestyle, different than among the urban elite, benefits less from geographical location. When accounting for the cost of living in larger cities, many big-city dwellers will in fact be worse off as compared to similar people living in smaller places.

In other words, when it comes to cities, or anything for that matter, the rich get richer (insert astronaut meme).

via Linköping University: Martin Arvidsson, Urban scaling laws arise from within-city inequalities, Nature Human Behaviour (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01509-1

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01509-1

Post Script:

Active matter theory explains fire-ant group behavior

Jan 2023, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2023-01-theory-fire-ant-group-behavior.html

Ants are considered active particles that use chemical energy to move. They can be easily concentrated to create a dense collective that we can use to address active matter questions.

Active matter is based on particles that can self-propel and move due to local consumption of energy, unlike atomic or colloidal systems, whose constituents move as a result of temperature.

There are two large behaviors that emerge in active matter: the first is the transition into a state in which the set of particles moves in the same direction (collective mode), a behavior usually related to bird flocks and fish schools. The other is when the motility of the particles decreases with their pair-separation distance, which can lead to the formation of aggregates, and in some cases, to the separation of a phase formed by stationary ants and a phase formed by moving ants.

They can tell us about material properties: mechanical properties changed drastically depending on the state of the ant collective. In attraction-dominated phases, the behavior was similar to that of an elastic solid. In contrast, in active phases, the community reorganizes itself at the particle level to somewhat flow as a liquid

via University of Barcelona and Georgia Institute of Technology: Caleb Anderson et al, Ant waves—Spontaneous activity waves in fire-ant columns, Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.add0635

https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.add0635

Also: Caleb Anderson et al, Social interactions lead to motility-induced phase separation in fire ants, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-34181-0

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-34181-0

Foraging for Behavior Patterns and Other Levy Things

Read a disappointing book recently called The Drunkard's Walk -- only disappointed because I thought it would be about the drunkard's walk but it was just about randomness in statistics and probability. Thought it would be about Levy flights, foraging behavior, random walks, saccades, etc. Something very fractal about the nature of these phenomena.

Explore or exploit: How our brains make choices

Apr 2022, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-04-explore-exploit-brains-choices.html

Basically, newer areas of the brain (evolutionarily speaking) such as the lateral prefrontal cortex, activated more when an unfamiliar choice was made while older brain systems including the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex showed increased activation while weighing the value of explorations vs. exploitation. This suggests that both the newer and older circuits in the brain worked together during the decision-making process rather than against each other as was previously thought.

via University of New Mexico: Jeremy Hogeveen et al, The neurocomputational bases of explore-exploit decision-making, Neuron (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2022.03.014

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2022.03.014

Typical movement behavior at large events increases risk of spreading infectious diseases

Sep 2022, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09-typical-movement-behavior-large-events.html

Burstiness (another word for foraging pattern behavior)

An earlier paper on this topic compared the movements of individuals in the crowd to the typical foraging patterns that were also present in our human hunter-gatherer ancestors.

The first author of the study, Ph.D. candidate Philip Rutten, says, "This [new study] shows that, if the infection probability is time-dependent, an intermittently moving but freely mixing crowd may present the highest level of transmission risk." 

Because infection is a probability game.

via University of Amsterdam: Philip Rutten et al, Modelling the dynamic relationship between spread of infection and observed crowd movement patterns at large scale events, Scientific Reports (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-19081-z

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-19081-z

Not-so private eyes: Eye movements hold clues to how we make decisions

Dec 2022, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-12-not-so-private-eyes-eye-movements.html

"Unlike your arms or legs, the speed of eye movements is almost totally involuntary. It's a much more direct measurement of these unconscious processes happening in your brain."

In the study, the team asked 22 human subjects to walk on a treadmill then choose between different settings displayed on a computer screen: a brief walk up a steep grade or a longer walk on flat ground.

Researchers discovered that the subjects' eyes gave them away: Even before they made their choices, the treadmill users tended to move their eyes faster when they looked toward the options they ended up choosing. The more vigorously their eyes moved, the more they seemed to prefer their choice.

"Initially, the saccades to either option were similarly vigorous," Ahmed said. "Then, as time passed, that vigor increased and it increased even faster for the option they eventually chose."

via University of Colorado at Boulder: Colin C. Korbisch et al, Saccade vigor reflects the rise of decision variables during deliberation, Current Biology (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.10.053

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.10.053

Image credit: A laser beam (orange) creates excitons (purple) that are trapped inside the semicondcutor material by electric fields. Credit: Puneet Murthy / ETH Zurich

https://phys.org/news/2022-05-tunable-quantum-excitons.html

Primatologists Are Primates Too

AKA Anthorpomorphomania

AKA Cultural Panthropology

I heard about this book in an interview with Hamilton Morris, who you might remember from Hamilton's Pharmacopeia on Vice. He was talking about his other book, Neuropsychedelia, but I was hooked when I heard Hamilton utter "meta-primatology" in a moment of confusion as he tried to describe what the hell this book was. He's studying people who study primates. I think I'm more interested in his wordporn than anything else. Goldmine. 

Also, if you think that's a picture of just any gorilla, you're wrong, because it's Harambe.

Chimpanzee Culture Wars: Rethinking Human Nature alongside Japanese, European, and American Cultural Primatologists

Nicolas Langlitz, Princeton University Press, 2020

• To my familoid
• Multiculturalism to include apes
• Field vs lab, Euro-American vs Japan
• "Apes have culture but do not know that they do" -Thibaud Gruber, Klaus Zuberbuhler, Fabrice Clement, Carel van Schaik, Comparative Psychology 6:91, 2015
• Primatologists are primates too (p19)
• Non-genetic transmission of behavior in the wild -- Imanishi's Koshima, one ape learns to wash sweet potatoes in the stream, and others naturally pick up the behavior, because one of the humans decided to offer gritty, sandy sweet potatoes to the moneys to get them familiar with humans... . It was usually very young animals who first invented or adopted [the new food habits] and then passed them to their mothers. Some older individuals, especially the males, would never take them on.(p34)
• Anthorpomorphomania (p54)
• Cultural panthropology (p94)
• Living conditions and natural selection: Under the heading "Culture and cognition in chimpanzees," Boesch compared the histories and living conditions of three captive groups at the University of New Iberia, Ohio State University Chimpanzee Center, and Liepzig Zoo to explain behavioral differences these communities had shown in experimental tests.
• On the origin of Random Controlled Trials: via R. Mundry, Ronald Fisher proposes, "Randomisation relieves the experimenter from the anxiety of considering and estimating the magnitude of the innumerable causes by which his data may be disturbed."  (p188-189) -Ronald Fisher, Statistical Methods for Research Workers (1925) and The Design of Experiments (1935)
• On Salvage Primatology, Salvage Anthropology - via Darwin's emphasis on the importance of ethnographic research in the face of rapidly disappearing races, Levi-Strauss called the study of this disintegration not anthropology but entropology. -Levis Strauss, Tristes tropiques (1955) 1974
• "Anthropocene Blues" (p313)

Fauxbots

Robots are already taking over.

Human computer programmers are influencing memetic propagation algorithms which are influencing human social media users. Another way of articulating this is to say that we are outfitting ourselves with a cybernetic limbic system. I'm channeling both Elon Musk's far-out interview about artificial emotional intelligence ecologies and Jaron Lanier's recent behavior modification talks (with a bit of Robert Sapolsky's Human Behavior lectures).

As if it wasn't a surprise, news has it that a script designed to spread information is better than us at doing just that. Coupled with the fact that misinformation spreads faster than factual information, we can easily see what a bad idea it was to offload water-cooler-style information-spreading to an algorithm optimized to sell consumer goods and services to a hypertargeted audience.

This is not to talk trash about technology, or social media, or even human nature; there's plenty of good things to come of all this. I mean, ALS, right?

It is an alert, however, that the things that we fear from far away (robot overlords etc), they tend to look a lot different by the time they get right under our nose. And this is a great example. Note that researcher Tim Hwang was doing work with SocialBots back in 2012, when he ran a competition to see who could influence the most people on Twitter with an automated fauxbot. By the end of the competition we learned two things - 1.It's not hard at all to make people think you're a person when you're not, and 2.It's very very ethically questionable to do these kinds of experiments.

Not that it matters much. Using a social media platform waives your right to be free from experimentation.

In what I guess I will call traditional research, if your experiment involves people, you have to take some ethics classes, and your plan has to pass a group of people who's job it is to make sure you're not doing anything ethically dubious to your subjects. In very simple terms, you're not supposed to do harm to your subjects (only people though, sorry animals).

But when you participate in social media, you're willfully participating in the experiment that is the platform's digital ecosystem (and because the programs aren't programming themselves, not yet, the platform's corporate culture has influence here as well). The whole thing is an experiment from the moment you log in.

So what happens when you are that poor schmuck who fell in love with Tim Hwang's socialbot and then got his heart broken when the competition ended? Tough shit?

Or when you realize the "woman" you've been chatting up for the past two days is really a feature designed by the dating app itself to keep you engaged at the most opportune moments; what is a melted snowflake to do? Who to sue?

Listening to the news last night, two people are talking about results from a recent Facebook experiment that showed we can make people act nicer to each other through pretty simple and very subtle programming changes. Or make people happier by showing them happier news in their feed. (It's called a feed for f's sake.)

Is a social media platform responsible for the death of a teen who may have been only a few happy newsclips away from making that final decision?

Nope. Not right now at least. Not until we face the hard facts about how powerful it is to effect mass population manipulation with only minor changes in program code.


Post Script:
The chances you've been involved in one of these experiments already? 100%

"Low-credibility content" is the new fake news, and "auto amplification" is the act of spreading it.

The reason automated amplification works is because of herd mentality. A great experiment I read recently in Geoffrey West's book Scale - a researcher took 100 crowdfunding campaigns that had been at $0 for a minute already and donated $1 to half of them. The ones who got no donation stayed at zero, and the others gained at least some extra donations. There are dozens of other names for this such as the law of accumulative advantage, the Matthew Effect, and the rich get richer.


Notes:
Study: It only takes a few seconds for bots to spread misinformation
Nov 2018, Ars Technica

The spread of low-credibility content by social bots
Nature, 2018

The spread of true and false news online
Science, 2018

The spread of true and false information online
MIT, 2018

I'm Not a Real Friend, But I Play One on the Internet
Tim Hwang, HOPE#9, July 2012

SocialBots
Network Address, 2012

Institutional Review Board
also known as an independent ethics committee, ethical review board, or research ethics board, is a type of committee that applies research ethics by reviewing the methods proposed for research to ensure that they are ethical

Post Post Script Script:
Looks like something is real popular in the news right now:

On Twitter, limited number of characters spreading fake info
Jan 2019, phys.org

Washington fears new threat from 'deepfake' videos
Jan 2019, The Hill

Humans on a Chip

Treating humans like molecules are the main idea behind computational sociothermodynamics, which is the science of predicting human behavior based on thermodynamics models of particles. It's a way to gain insight into a really complex problem, and from a rather unsuspecting place. And we will be seeing a lot more of this in years to come.

Here's a new model that works by measuring how people distribute themselves as a function of the density of the crowd they're in. It's called a Density-Functional Fluctuation Theory of Crowds.

The model was originally designed for predicting the behavior of quantum systems, and it was already tested using fruit flies, because boy does science love fruit flies.

It generates a "frustration function" that measures the probability that someone will move to a new location given a specific density for that crowd. At a concert, for example, people will try to get a good spot, as long as it's not too crowded. When it gets too crowded, they'll move. And when it gets too crowded after that, they riot. Just kidding. (Not really.)

The model can then predict the "mood" of the crowd by how this frustration function evolves over time. In the article where I found this, it was suggested that this model could be used to predict a rowdy crowd before it starts. Or the moment a peaceful protest changes phase from a liquid to a gas, if you know what I mean.

Then again, who cares about a predictive model when we have neck-rec! [neck-recognition technology, an advance beyond face recognition]

This is a drone that detects movements in human faces and necks in order to accurately source heart rates and breathing rates of crowds. (I like to refer to this as physiodata, because that sounds good.)

In other words, the resolution is so fine that it can see and measure the pulse of your jugular vein, and then face-rec your id, of course. And it will do this for an entire crowd, and in less time than it takes you to snap a picture.


Post Script:
Mathematics can assist cities in addressing unstructured neighborhoods
Aug 2018, phys.org

[straight pasting here]
"...use satellite imagery and municipal data to develop mathematical algorithms that reveal slums and planned neighborhood are fundamentally different.

Their models clearly identify distinctions between the informal arrangement of underserviced urban areas and the formal structure of city neighborhoods. In two case studies, the researchers used real-world data to show that the physical layout of some unplanned neighborhoods does not allow space for sewer lines, roads or water pipes.

The team used a novel topological technique, based on connections between places, to characterize the first-time slums rather than a traditional geometric approach.

"By understanding the fundamental topology — the relationship between places of residence and work to urban infrastructure networks — we can determine parts of cities remain only incipiently connected," said coauthor Luís Bettencourt, director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago.
-phys.org


Notes:

Fruit flies and electrons: Researchers use physics to predict crowd behavior
Aug 2018, phys.org

Drone detects heartbeat and breathing rates
Sep 2017, BBC

Physiodata at Large
Oct 2017, Network Address

Urban Dynamics
Oct 2013, Network Address

The Sante Fe Institute always has cool stuff combining studies of computers, physics, social sciences.

This isn't what I meant by humans on a chip, but then again, yes it is:
3D 'organ on a chip' could accelerate search for new disease treatments
Oct 2018, phys.org