Education is not a panacea for reducing human–black bear conflicts

The long-term survival of carnivores is greatly challenged by conflict with humans. Such conflicts can bolster risk perceptions,lower tolerance, and lead to support of lethal control of carnivores.To address this ubiquitous challenge and improve conservation outcomes specifically for American black bears (Ursus americanus),Marley et al. (2017) used an agent based model to explore how management strategies could alter the use of the urban environment by bears, and subsequently reduce the occurrence of human-bear conflicts. Management strategies entailed education only, where people were taught to remove food attractants, apply aversive conditioning, or both, and the authors considered different spatial configurations of implementation (border, clustered, and random). Education resulting in food removals led to a reduction in the food values of urban cells. Education resulting in aversive conditioning led to increased vigilance by humans and increased probability of a bear being deterred, which in turn, resulted in the bear moving a significant distance away from the urban cell as well as a reduced memory value for those cells. Food and memory cell values deter-mined the movement choices of the bears in the next time step, and cell visits along with the occurrence of deterrence events deter-mined the habituation and food conditioning status of bears. When bears reached thresholds determined by the authors, they changed their status from ‘graduated’ to ‘survival’ and eventually ‘conflict’ status, which was modeled as a function of independent variables including initialization conditions (e.g., percent urbanization; Table5 of Marley et al., 2017) and management strategies (e.g., clustered vigilance; Fig. 5 of Marley et al., 2017). The authors concluded that,compared to a ‘no teaching’ scenario, education works to reduce‘conflict’ bears in urban areas, and that teaching people to apply aversive conditioning was the most effective strategy

A Flexible Inventory of Survey Items for Environmental Concepts Generated via Special Attention to Content Validity and Item Response Theory

We demonstrate how many important measures of belief about the environmental suffer from poor content validity and inadequate conceptual breadth (dimensionality). We used scholarship in environmental science and philosophy to propose a list of 13 environmental concepts that can be held as beliefs. After precisely articulating the concepts, we developed 85 trial survey items that emphasized content validity for each concept. The concepts’ breadth and the items’ content validity were aided by scrutiny from 17 knowledgeable critics. We administered the trial items to 449 residents of the United States and used item response theory to reduce the 85 trial items to smaller sets of items for use when survey brevity is required. The reduced sets offered good predictive ability for two environmental attitudes (R2 = 0.42 and 0.46) and indices of pro-environmental behavior (PEB, R2 = 0.23) and behavioral intention (R2 = 0.25). The predictive results were highly interpretable, owing to their robust content validity. For example, PEB was predicted by the degree to which one believes nature to be sacred, but not by the degree of one’s non-anthropocentrism. Concepts with the greatest overall predictive ability were Sacredness and Hope. Belief in non-anthropocentrism had little predictive ability for all four response variables—a claim that previously could not have been made given the widespread poverty of content validity for items representing non-anthropocentrism in existing instruments. The approach described here is especially amenable to incremental improvement, as other researchers propose more informative survey items and potentially important concepts of environmental beliefs we overlooked

Perceived risk of infection while traveling during the COVID-19 pandemic: Insights from Columbus, OH

The COVID-19 outbreak caused major disruptions on individuals’ out-of-home activities. Worldwide mandates to slow down the spread of the disease resulted in significant reductions in travel. This study analyzes the changes in individuals’ travel outcomes and their risk perceptions related to exposure and specific travel modes during the COVID-19 pandemic. We use data collected through an online survey with residents of Columbus, OH from April 30 to May 7, 2020. Employing multiple generalized estimating equations (GEEs) with a logit link function, we analyze the perceived risk of infection while traveling with different modes controlling for socio-demographics. The findings show that on average individuals are more likely to find shared modes (i.e., transit, ride-hailing, carsharing) riskier as compared to individual ones (i.e., walking, autos) when it comes to COVID-19 exposure. This study also suggests that the associations between perceptions related to exposure and various travel modes vary across groups with (1) different primary mode preferences (auto users vs non-auto users (e.g., transit users, bicyclists, etc.)), and (2) different socio-demographics. For example, auto users are more likely to find shared modes such as ride-hailing or transit riskier as compared to personal car. The conclusions present recommendations for future transportation policies in the post-COVID era. These include building upon the emerging positive perceptions towards non-motorized modes as an opportunity to promote sustainable transportation as well as formulating viable solutions to address the high-risk perceptions associated with transit

Education is not a panacea for reducing human–black bear conflicts

The long-term survival of carnivores is greatly challenged by conflict with humans. Such conflicts can bolster risk perceptions,lower tolerance, and lead to support of lethal control of carnivores.To address this ubiquitous challenge and improve conservation outcomes specifically for American black bears (Ursus americanus),Marley et al. (2017) used an agent based model to explore how management strategies could alter the use of the urban environment by bears, and subsequently reduce the occurrence of human-bear conflicts. Management strategies entailed education only, where people were taught to remove food attractants, apply aversive conditioning, or both, and the authors considered different spatial configurations of implementation (border, clustered, and random). Education resulting in food removals led to a reduction in the food values of urban cells. Education resulting in aversive conditioning led to increased vigilance by humans and increased probability of a bear being deterred, which in turn, resulted in the bear moving a significant distance away from the urban cell as well as a reduced memory value for those cells. Food and memory cell values deter-mined the movement choices of the bears in the next time step, and cell visits along with the occurrence of deterrence events deter-mined the habituation and food conditioning status of bears. When bears reached thresholds determined by the authors, they changed their status from ‘graduated’ to ‘survival’ and eventually ‘conflict’ status, which was modeled as a function of independent variables including initialization conditions (e.g., percent urbanization; Table5 of Marley et al., 2017) and management strategies (e.g., clustered vigilance; Fig. 5 of Marley et al., 2017). The authors concluded that,compared to a ‘no teaching’ scenario, education works to reduce‘conflict’ bears in urban areas, and that teaching people to apply aversive conditioning was the most effective strategy

Spending on social and public health services and its association with homicide in the USA: an ecological study

Objective: To examine whether state-level spending on social and public health services is associated with lower rates of homicide in the USA. Design: Ecological study. Setting: USA. Participants: All states in the USA and the District of Columbia for which data were available (n=42). Primary outcome measure Homicide rates for each state were abstracted from the US Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting. Results: After adjusting for potential confounding variables, we found that every $10 000 increase in spending per person living in poverty was associated with 0.87 fewer homicides per 100 000 population or approximately a 16% decrease in the average homicide rate (estimate=−0.87, SE=0.15, p<0.001). Furthermore, there was no significant effect in the quartile of states with the highest percentages of individuals living in poverty but significant effects in the quartiles of states with lower percentages of individuals living in poverty. Conclusions: Based on our findings, spending on social and public health services is associated with significantly lower homicide rates at the state level. Although we cannot infer causality from this research, such spending may provide promising avenues for homicide reduction in the USA, particularly among states with lower levels of poverty

Artificial transmembrane oncoproteins smaller than the bovine papillomavirus E5 protein redefine sequence requirements for activation of the platelet-derived growth factor beta receptor

The bovine papillomavirus E5 protein (BPV E5) is a 44-amino-acid homodimeric transmembrane protein that binds directly to the transmembrane domain of the platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) beta receptor and induces ligand-independent receptor activation. Three specific features of BPV E5 are considered important for its ability to activate the PDGF beta receptor and transform mouse fibroblasts: a pair of C-terminal cysteines, a transmembrane glutamine, and a juxtamembrane aspartic acid. By using a new genetic technique to screen libraries expressing artificial transmembrane proteins for activators of the PDGF beta receptor, we isolated much smaller proteins, from 32 to 36 residues, that lack all three of these features yet still dimerize noncovalently, specifically activate the PDGF beta receptor via its transmembrane domain, and transform cells efficiently. The primary amino acid sequence of BPV E5 is virtually unrecognizable in some of these proteins, which share as few as seven consecutive amino acids with the viral protein. Thus, small artificial proteins that bear little resemblance to a viral oncoprotein can nevertheless productively interact with the same cellular target. We speculate that similar cellular proteins may exist but have been overlooked due to their small size and hydrophobicity