To Begin so Early and to Persevere over a Long Period of Time.​ Reflections on Time on the Horizon of Human Experience in the Anonymus Iamblichi

Previous articleNext article FreeBook SymposiumBeyond order, beyond the human Unruly socionatures and contested politics Daston, Lorraine. 2019. Against nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Melissa LeachMelissa LeachInstitute of Development Studies, University of Sussex Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLorraine Daston’s short, eloquent book makes a compelling set of arguments. To summarize my reading, she contends that order in nature provides a model for order in human society; that across a diversity of cultural and historical settings, people have looked to nature as a source of norms for human behavior and moral reasoning. This happens through diverse mechanisms through which different aspects of nature—glossed as the specific, the local, and the universal—are called upon to justify or decry particular human behaviors. It also happens generically—order in nature providing the basis against which the very idea of normativity in human society is justified and calibrated. Disruptions and disorder in nature—especially if caused by instances of human immorality—invoke deep passion, whether wonder, horror, or terror. While particular disruptions, as nature “bites back” in revenge, are of concern in themselves, they also hint at a possible descent into generic disruption and disorderliness, a chaos in nature which presages a chaos in human society, as normativity is abandoned. Daston joins an array of philosophers in problematizing this pervasive tendency. She argues that appeals to natural order are contingent, not necessary; that they are a product of human cognition (put another way, they are socially constructed). Thus, she concludes, such appeals are fundamentally a matter of human reasoning, and we should recognize this: “human reason in human bodies is the only kind of reason we have.”This is an interesting and timely thesis, good to think with as we grapple with our histories, current predicaments, and future worlds. As a social anthropologist and interdisciplinary, engaged researcher long interested in how people understand, live with, and represent human relations with nonhuman natures across a diversity of places and issues, there is much that strikes home. Yet three issues bother me. First is an underplaying of politics—who precisely appeals to order in nature, what political work do these constructions do, and what alternatives are excluded? Second, is nature really so ordered—and if it is actually more unruly, where does this leave appeals to natural order as a means to calibrate human behavior? Third, is humanity really so separate from nonhuman nature—and if relations are more entangled and co-constructed, where does this leave the possibility of an exclusively human reasoning? Let me elaborate briefly on each of these concerns.The modeling of social norms on apparent natural orders has been everywhere in my work. In ethnographic engagements with Kissi people in Guinea, West Africa, “maa,” transgressing social norms such as having sex in the bush or burying a deceased pregnant woman without removing her fetus, is argued by elders to mix inappropriately parts of human, plant, and animal reproductive orders, disrupting both with devastating consequences—crop failure, societal infertility. In the same region, deforestation of once pristine landscapes, contributing to climate change and biodiversity loss, is portrayed by scientists, policymakers, and sometimes villagers themselves as a disruption to balanced equilibrium between forest societies and ecologies (Fairhead and Leach 1996). Turning to issues of human health, tropes of disrupted balance with nature also recur. So we find the origins of the West African Ebola epidemic attributed to the zoonotic spillover of a virus from a bat to so-called patient zero, a small boy playing near a tree in a Guinean village: a symptom of disruption to the balanced harmony that had kept human habitation and activity separate from pristine, bat-inhabited natural forest. The spillover in Wuhan, China perhaps at the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, too, has been represented as a revenge by nature for our unregulated “wet markets” and intensive, industrialized food systems.In these examples and others, it is particular people and groups who are making claims about disrupted balance, in narratives that attribute blame and shore up authority and interests. Thus, and to put it too briefly and instrumentally, claims about sex in the bush by wayward youth support Kissi elders in their attempts to exert authority over the young, and control over their labor. The young men and women so blamed find their freedoms constrained. Narratives about disrupted harmony in deforested landscapes support state and international projects to enclose “relic” forest islands from supposedly ecosystem-destroying small farmers. Such narratives occlude the knowledge and experience of farmers and villagers, for whom forest islands are anthropogenic, shaped and enriched by their own actions and practices, suggesting very different rights and claims. Narratives about human disruption to wildlife as a cause of zoonotic disease easily support the closing and closing-off of wildlife habitats and markets, undermining the livelihoods of land users and traders. COVID-19 has further spurred environmental and conservation agencies in their call for a “new deal” to address “the urgent need to fix our unbalanced relationship with nature”; deals that could support state and commercial interests in “green grabbing” wildlife habitats. Yet as they seek to counter these, in struggles for land and resource ownership, indigenous peoples and user rights activists themselves sometimes call on images of balance and their unique role in upholding it. They may also articulate quite different views of human-nature relations, associated with different social and political relationships—as I indicate later.In our current era, the tropes of balance and harmony in nature have gone multiscalar, extending to the global. Their use here is also profoundly political, as imagery of natural orders disrupted is deployed by governments, international agencies, and activists to support diverse purposes and claims. In the so-called Anthropocene humans are seen as the main drivers of earth system processes at the planetary scale, as manifested in discussions of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pandemics. Scientific and policy discourses around “planetary boundaries” and “planetary health” argue for a resteering of societal change within acceptable natural limits to avoid future turbulence and disruption. They support aspirations for control—to redress the balance and avoid dangerous tipping points—and the power of the aspirant controllers, be they earth system scientists, planners and managers, technology companies, or the alliances between them.Across all these issues and scales, then, appeals to nature’s order—and the panic and responses when that order is disrupted—are part of political struggle, involving contestations over both material power and resources, and over whose claims and knowledge counts. Assuming appeals to nature’s order to be a generic human proclivity, and discussing this primarily as a matter of moral philosophy, glosses over these often visceral, high-stakes politics. It also detracts attention from the deeper, structural political-economic drivers of the actions seen to disrupt nature—in industrialized commercialized systems and values around production, consumption, and mobility. For example, while the likelihoods of zoonotic disease spillover may indeed be increased in farmers’ markets with multiple wild animals in close proximity and unsanitary conditions (the Wuhan story), we must ask how such conditions emerge: what are the politics of regulation in such places; who makes use of such markets; how are animals hunted, captured, and farmed, for whom, and so on? Wild resources have long been harvested and been central to diets across the world. Treating “wet markets” as a smoking gun for zoonotic spillover obscures the real drivers and leaves them unaddressed. So like Daston I would problematize appeals to nature’s order as particular, selective representations, but would wish to extend her argument to address more fully the contested politics and politics of knowledge in play.The idea of “natural order” is also problematic. Nature is never just nature. What we might think of as nature is always and already shaped by entanglements of processes that involve human action. This applies to landscapes—as the so-called wilderness of a park or a forest turns out to be an anthropogenic landscape shaped through histories of farming and settlement. It applies to species—as novelist and art critic Huysmans explored in an 1884 book also titled Against nature, the flowers chosen for depiction by painters frequently select the aesthetic of a highly bred bloom, a rose shaped by human action for size and color. It extends to the planet, where the implication of Anthropocene thinking is that earth system and atmospheric processes are co-constructed with human action. Put another way, natures are socionatures, constructed through pathways that intertwine human, animal, plant (and technological) practices in diverse assemblages. Moreover, such (socio) natures are highly dynamic. Their pathways of change are rarely linear, but as diverse perspectives in the sciences of complexity confirm, more often involve state shifts, contingent effects, and nonequilibria which render them disorderly. Daston’s claim that “natural orders are, in effect, more orderly than human orders, which may offer a clue as to why natural orders are invoked to buttress human orders and not vice versa” thus seems doubtful. She admits that “in an age of genetic engineering and anthropogenic climate change this imbalance of power may be shifting in the opposite direction” (p. 69). Yet disorderliness in (socio) natures is not new; nonequilibria, unruliness, and uncertainties have long been appreciated, whether by climate historians and paleoecologists documenting abrupt shifts in past lake levels and forest extents, or pastoralists living with and adapting to nonequilibrial rangeland ecologies. In such circumstances, aspirations to control nature to maintain or restore balance may be illusory at best. And if natures are socionatures and unruliness rules, where does this leave “natural orders” as a baseline for human normativity? Perhaps—to follow Daston—just in the realm of representation; certainly it sharpens their represented quality. But to leave it there obscures critical aspects of experience, practice, and politics in living with unruly socionatures, and may close off alternatives that we need to thrive in current and future worlds.If nature is never just nature, is the human always just human? Is human reasoning always and only practiced in human bodies as Daston suggests? “Maa” for the Kissi is not a social disturbance of a natural order, but a socionatural disturbance to socionatural orders in which human, plant, and animal vitality are inextricably intertwined. As explored in the growing fields of multispecies ethnography (e.g., Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Locke and Muenster 2015; Lock 2018) and “more than human” geography (Dowling, Lloyds, and Suchet-Pearson 2017), human lives are intimately entangled with all living things, their dynamism and agency, whether in bodies, homes, communities, ecologies, or planetary and cosmological worlds. These interrelationships are often intimate, affective, emotional, and embodied. They are important to people’s individual and collective senses of themselves, their identities, and appropriate behavior. For Guinean villagers bats are part of intimate home life; forest islands embed connections with ancestors and the continuity of settled sociality; and the kola trees planted within them over the buried umbilical cords of children embody something of their personalities and identities. Intersecting with advances in ecological and animal science that recognize modes of intelligence and communication among plants and animals, with each other and with humans, these perspectives in effect redefine humanity as part of nature, or at least as part of interconnected socionatural networks or assemblages (Haraway 2016) that question the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman—or at least render those boundaries contingent and negotiable.It is critical to avoid “othering” such perspectives into so-called indigenous societies and cultures. While understandings of human-nonhuman natures as deeply, intimately interconnected, and the importance of these to human thriving and identity are sometimes most obviously found among people living further from centers of global power whether in West Africa, the Amazon, the Asia-Pacific region, and beyond, they are by no means confined to them. Among Maori people today, for instance, the dynamic agency that entwines human and nonhuman action extends to views of morality and rights, and court cases involving trees and rivers as claimants and rights-holders are commonplace. But there are plenty of similar cases in European history (the celebrated trial of a pig for murder in fifteenth-century Britain is a well-documented example: see Cohen 1986; Sullivan 2013). And were we to think that these are outdated notions of the past, look at the ways people in so-called modern industrial societies relate to their pets (Haraway 2003), accuse particular dogs of viciousness or attacks, engage with the plants in their gardens or the animal life in cities, or seek to protect particular individual trees from road developments. In such examples, elements of nonhuman nature prove to have personalities and communicative capacities, and people develop intimate connections with them that are important to their humanity. It may also be arrogant to suggest that only human beings reason, represent, and communicate, and other species do not. From Lewis Henry Morgan’s early studies of beavers’ reasoning, to an array of contemporary works on animal communication, this is a frontier area of study in anthropology which at the same time displaces its “anthro” centrism. “Human” reasoning, it follows, may actually be practiced not just in human bodies but in reciprocally constituted human and nonhuman natures.In our current era, disconnection and rupture of such intimate relations between human and nonhuman natures has become a pervasive problem. Such disconnections emerge when modern Cartesian scientific and industrial cultures divide the human and the nonhuman. We see this in many realms, including—to follow my themes here—when mainstream economics and environmental policy redefine nature as generalized “environment,” “biodiversity,” or “natural capital,” separate from humans and thus able to be commoditized, priced, or exploited. In this vein, more intertwined perspectives on human-nonhuman natures bring an important critique and counter to current views of nature as a provider of “ecosystem services,” as well as of current market logics in environmental governance for conservation and sustainability, which tend to disaggregate nonhuman natures into discrete units to which monetary value can attach (Sullivan 2013). There is a politics and political economy to such separations and, again, some gain while others lose. We must ask whether current predicaments—whether around environment, health, or in other domains—are well served by these disconnections, or whether they might be better served by reweaving our intimate, caring connections with nonhuman natures in all their characters and capabilities.Greater attention to the socionatural shaping and mutuality that characterize relations between human and nonhuman natures, to the unruliness and disorder that often pervade these, and to the power-laden processes through which certain versions of these complex assemblages are selected and deployed, are more extensions and elaborations of Daston’s thesis than fundamental contradictions of it. However they do shift the balance, asking us to interrogate more fully the power and implications of dominant representations that call on natural order, and to address more fully whom and what they exclude. This in turn offers the prospect of enriching this philosophical anthropology through dialogue with emerging perspectives in other fields, from political and cultural anthropology to political economy and ecology. And it takes us to a scholarly position which is less “against nature,” than continuing to engage, actively and robustly, with the plurality of ways our multispecies, more-than-human relations are constructed, represented, and lived.ReferencesCohen, Esther. 1986. “Law, folklore and animal lore.” Past and Present 110 (1): 6–37.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarDowling, Robyn, Kate Lloyds, and Sandra Suchet-Pearson. 2017. “Qualitative methods II: ‘More-than-human’ methodologies and/in praxis.” Progress in Human Geography 41 (6): 823–31.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarFairhead, James, and Melissa Leach. 1996. Misreading the African landscape: Society and ecology in a forest-savanna mosaic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarHaraway, Donna. 2003. The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people, and significant otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar———. 2016. Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarHuysmans, J.K. 1884. Against nature. London: Penguin Classics.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarKirksey, S. Eben, and Stefan Helmreich. 2010. “The emergence of multispecies ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 25 (4): 545–76.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarLock, Margaret 2018. “Mutable environments and permeable human bodies.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24 (4): 449–74.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarLocke, Piers, and Ursula Muenster. 2015. “Multispecies ethnography.” Oxford bibliographies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarSullivan, Sian. 2013. “Nature on the move III: (Re)countenancing an animate nature.” New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry 6 (1–2) : 50–71.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarMelissa Leach is a social anthropologist, Professor and Director of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex. She has carried out long-term ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa while engaging with scientific, policy, and public discourses and debates around health, sustainability, and development. Her book publications include a trilogy of works with James Fairhead questioning deforestation discourses (Cambridge, 1996; Routledge, 1998; Cambridge, 2003), Epidemics (edited with Sarah Dry, Routledge, 2010), and The politics of green transformations (edited with Ian Scoones and Peter Newell, Routledge, 2015). She is currently leading a Collaborative Award on Pandemic Preparedness funded by Wellcome Trust.Melissa Leach[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 11, Number 2Autumn 2021 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/716593 © 2021 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Cooperative Reproduction in Ituri Forest Hunter-Gatherers: Who Cares for Efe Infants?

DEVELOPMENT OF HUMAN DAILY BEHAVIOR MODEL AND IT'S APPLICATION

This article was created with the aim of knowing how far and how much influence the philosophy of science has on the ethics of learning among students or students who are currently studying. The reason for raising this case is considered very important because of the decline in ethics among educational units at the elementary, secondary, and even tertiary levels compared to educational units in the past. The method used in writing this article is study literature, the basis used in discussing the ethics of learning uses the basis of Islamic theory or ethics according to Islam. Then the guidelines for learning ethics use the Al-Qur'an and hadith as well as the perspective of scholars who observe education. Ethics is the philosophy of human action as a human (human action). In a philosophical perspective, ethics is a philosophical investigation of human obligations and human behavior in terms of the good and bad of this behavior. Ethics also has a very basic nature, namely critical nature. In general it can be said that ethics is a philosophy of human action as a human being. An action has ethical value if it is carried out by humans and within a humane framework. It is clear that ethics deals directly with human actions or behavior. This humane behavior is not a meaningless behavior, but one that pursues good values.

Agent-based simulation of affordance-based human behaviors in emergency evacuation

Natural relativism in lieu of moral absolutism

L'etude menee aupres des enfants d'un village rural sur la cote orientale de Dominique montre la relation entre le stress et la composition du groupe domestique (âge, sexe, relation intergenerationnelle, nombre de personnes). Les enfants vivant dans des foyers ou prendre soin d'eux est une attitude frequente et stable ont un niveau de cortisol modere contrairement aux enfants connaissant des evenements familiaux traumatiques

Understanding the behavior of humans is a very important concern for socialcommunication. Especially in real-time, predicting human activity and behavior hasbecome the most vigorous research area in digital image processing and computervision. To enhance the security in public and private domains in the field of humancomputerinteraction and intelligent video surveillance, human behavior analysis is animportant challenge in various applications. There are many basic approaches toanalyze human activity, but recently, deep learning approaches have been shown thatyield very interesting results in different domains. Human actions and behavior can beobserved in the open as well as in sensitive areas, such as airports, banks, bus and trainstation, colleges, parking areas, etc., and prevent terrorism, theft, accidents, fighting, aswell as other abnormal and suspicious activities through visual surveillance. Thischapter thus seeks to reflect on methods of human activity recognition. This chapterpresents a brief overview on human behavior recognition along with its challenges orissues and applications. Also, we have discussed the framework of recognition ofsuspicious human activity and various datasets used to train the system. The objectiveof this chapter is to provide general information about human behavior analysis andrecent methods used in this field.

A cursory glance at human history makes it very clear that civilizations are born as human beings, reach maturity and growth, and collapse and die due to more internal causes. The death of civilizations is something that history has talked about a lot and it is called forgotten civilizations. In the science of history and more in the philosophy of history, the issue of how the causes and factors of the emergence, flourishing and destruction of civilizations are mentioned and history analysts study these causes and factors. According to them, the mentioned causes and factors are natural and in the field of events related to natural and human laws. But in intra-religious analysis, looking at causes and factors is done from another angle; The Qur'an, with the aim of guiding human beings, looks at events from an educational point of view. On this basis, each of the events is closely related to the issues of punishment and encouragement of human beings and finds meaning and meaning with monotheism and its belongings. Although it is necessary to look at the events and their causes from the perspective of philosophy of history and natural traditions and laws, but these traditions are closely related to human actions and behavior. In a comprehensive analysis, although earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters are related to natural laws, but human actions are effective in its creation and emergence, and these actions can have a positive and negative impact on natural laws and nature. Hence, human behavior and actions can cause the rise and fall of civilizations in a serious way. In intra-religious analysis, God has a permanent presence as the source of all events, and human behavior causes changes in natural causes and factors. Therefore, the issue of the emergence, flourishing and destruction of civilizations from this perspective needs to be analyzed, which will be addressed in this article.

The economic approach to the study of human behavior has been presented by its foremost representative as the most effective method of studying social phenomena. Gary Becker’s view supposes that, on the one hand, all social phenomena can be explained as a consequence of individual actions and, on the other, there is a stable pattern of individual behavior economics has been able to understand thoroughly. Hence, economics, according to this view, is no longer limited to the study of a certain domain of human actions or to the understanding of material wealth or the necessary conditions for the material reproduction of society. Economics is a method that gives the social scientist the necessary tools to understand and even transform the world that surrounds him/her. Becker clearly acknowledges the direct link between his approach and Jeremy Bentham’s theory. Beyond the apparent connections regarding their conception of human nature there is one central point that links the two authors: their view of economics as an attitude of the human mind, an inherent capacity to calculate that explains all human actions. This paper argues that Bentham provides the philosophical groundings for Becker’s theory. The application of the principle of utility to every aspect of human behavior justifies economic imperialism by transforming economics into a method of general analysis of human behavior. Indeed, economics is no longer defined according to its subject matter but according to its method, which means an increasing scope explaining Becker’s claim that the economic approach provides a rigorous framework for the analysis of all social phenomena.

An approach to human behavior recognition is presented in this paper. The system is separated into two parts: human action recognition and object recognition. The estimation result is composed of a simple action “Pointing” and a virtual assumed object, which has two attributes, one is “current status” and the other is “acceptable behavior”. Once the human action and object are recognized, then detect whether a vector calculated by human elbow intersected the object. If the vector is intersected, then estimate human behavior by combining the human action and the object attribute. The artificial neural network (ANN) is discussed as a main part of the current research. Whole ANN processing is simulated by Octave 3.8, the human actions are captured by Microsoft Kinect, and a human model is built by using human joint data.

This paper investigates the relationship of medical practitioners based on the concepts of Naturalism and Power of natural treatment(自然治癒力) in Taoism. It focuses on how the concept of Naturalism has been applied and evolved in 『Laozi』, 『Zhuangzi』, 『Huainanzi』, and 『Huangdi-Neijing』. The characteristic of the Naturalism in 『Laozi』 is to minimize artificial acts(人爲) and preserve the essence(精) and spirit(神) of the body, achieving maximum effects with minimal involvement and effort. 『Laozi』 emphasizes emptying desires and delusions, achieving inner stability, behaving with gentleness and humility, practicing moderation in vital energy(精氣) and conduct, and cultivating physical essence. The teaching of 『Laozi』 aims to let the state and the body operate naturally without artificial acts. Furthermore, 『Laozi』 suggests that even when problems occur in any process, the body has an inherent self-healing power that resolves the health problems and restores its original state.
 『Zhuangzi』 depicts the ideal of living with empty mind without greed for external things, practicing deep breathing, and cultivating the union of heaven and human(天人合一). It emphasizes the possibilities of the universal system and the motive power of medicine and science within the concept of Naturalism. Interpreted through Guo Xiang(郭象)'s theory of self-becoming(獨化論), Taoist philosophy of 『Zhuangzi』 enhances its natural scientific characteristics. If the meaning of self-perception(自得) in 『Zhuangzi』 is interpreted through Guo Xiang's theory of inner sage and outer ruler(內聖外王論), it can be summarized as the perception of governing the external world through the inactive attitude(無爲). The theory of Naturalism in 『Zhuangzi』 respects the principles of nature and individual nature and personality, aiming to govern all affairs in accordance with the will of heaven(天命) and prolong the lifespan of individuals and communities.
 In 『Huainanzi』, the concept of Naturalism is supplemented with the notion of assisting the realization of one's innate nature, emphasizing the necessity of active efforts and education. According to 『Huainanzi』, there are conditions for natural healing in the spirit(神) and body(形). If the body follows the spirit, it leads to survival and healing, while if the spirit follows the body, it leads to death. The theory of mutual response(感應論) and the relation of heaven and men(天人相通) in 『Huainanzi』 control the fundamental aspects to the terminal symptoms through the power of natural healing. 『Huainanzi』 emphasizes the importance of active actions based on one's nature. In the context of 『Huainanzi』, Naturalism as an inactive attitude, amplifies the realization of all possibilities by adding human actions, embodying an active and intentional philosophy. The characteristic of 『Huainanzi』 is respecting the natural disposition while considering the importance of human actions.
 『Huangdi-Neijing』 is a medical theory that applies the Taoist concept of Naturalism. In 『Huangdi-Neijing』, the role of medical techniques based on the power of natural healing is crucial. The direction of life and death is determined by the principles of direct motion(順行) and retrogression(逆行) respectively. The treatment approach focuses on balancing and promoting circulation. The human body possesses dynamism. It is important to regulate the balance between Yin and Yang and the fullness and emptiness of Qi(氣) within the appropriate therapeutic period. By addressing the problem within the progressing time period, one can resolve a problem and restore the body to its original healthy state. The emphasis here lies in the timing propriety of treatment. The logic of cause and effect(本末) from Taoism has been specialized into the medical theory of 『Huangdi-Neijing』. In essence, diseases have both root causes and peripheral symptoms, and the relationship between diseases and treatments involves addressing both the root cause and the peripheral symptoms.

Hunting Ability and Reproductive Success Among Male Ache Foragers: Preliminary Results

<p>Natural systems’ models have done tremendous progress in accurately reproducing a large variety of physical processes both in space and time. Conversely, despite human footprint is increasingly recognized as a major driver of undergoing global change, human behaviors and their interactions with natural processes still remain oversimplified in many models supporting strategic policy design. Recent years have seen an increasing interest and effort by scientists in quantitatively characterizing the co-evolution of nature and society. Nevertheless, state-of-the-art models often relies on behavioral rules empirically defined or derived by general social science or economic studies, which lack proper formalization for the specific case study as well as validation against observational data.</p><p>In this talk I will discuss my experiences in modeling human behaviors by taking advantage of the unprecedented amount of information and data nowadays available and of the improvements in machine learning and optimization algorithms. The resulting decision-analytic behavioral models flexibly blend descriptive models, which derive if-then behavioral rules specifying human actions in response to external stimuli, and normative models, which assume fully rational behaviors and provide optimal decisions maximizing a given utility function, where the ultimate goal is not to support optimal decisions but, rather, to understand and model human decisions and behaviors at different spatial and temporal scales.</p><p>A number of real world examples in the water domain will be used to provide a synthesis of recent advances in behavioral modeling and to stimulate discussion on key challenges, such as the role of individual behavioral factors in modeling decisions under uncertainty, the scalability of the models for capturing heterogenous behaviors, the definition of model’s boundaries, the identification of behavioral preferences in terms of tradeoff among multiple competing objectives and the dynamic evolution of this tradeoff driven by extreme hydroclimatic events.</p>

Systems engineers and project managers have a wide range of tools and approaches they use to assess risk, but these approaches have not helped to reduce failures as much as hoped. Post‐failure analyses may not be enough to prevent a future failure, even at the same organization. In this paper, we present a risk assessment prototype that goes beyond collecting information about the failures or failure causes themselves and aims to consider the human actions that lead to failure. Our method adds “crowd signals” to capture the human actions and behaviors that we know eventually lead to failures. Crowd signals are data derived from a set of questions that members of a project team answer, and are used as input for our prediction models. We collected data from 18 different engineering student projects at Purdue University and built two types of models: one to predict schedule failures and one for technical requirements failure.In both cases, we found that a failure during the previous week increases the likelihood of the same type of failure the following week. Some human behaviors such as students knowing more about their teammates, understanding all implications of their project actions, and not wasting time discussing trivial matters help reduce the likelihood of failures. In contrast, when students are not learning anything new through their involvement with the projects, postponing or cancelling required meetings or tasks, or having problems resurface due to poor solutions, the likelihood of failures increases. In future work, we intend to use the predictive models to provide feedback to the student teams. The work presented in this paper is part of ongoing research efforts to improve risk assessment approaches with the goal to test our methods with industry partners and evaluate the possibilities to integrate with their existing protocols.