Saturday, August 19, 2023

Wine from Brazil's unsung savannah makes a splash

by Marcelo SILVA DE SOUSA

Brazilian winemaker Ronaldo Triacca shows his vineyard in Paranoa, Brazil's emerging wine country just outside Brasilia — Brazilian winemaker Ronaldo Triacca shows his vineyard in Paranoa, Brazil's emerging

The tropical savannah around Brazil's ultra-modernist capital is not exactly known as wine country, but French enologist Jean-Michel Barcelo gushes as he plucks a ruby-red grape and pops it in his mouth.

"This terroir has real potential," says the 52-year-old wine consultant, who is in the high plateau of central Brazil making his annual visit to Villa Triacca, a vineyard located a 50-minute drive from the sweeping white buildings of the seat of power in Brasilia.

With its predominantly tropical climate, Brazil is far less known for wine than fellow South American producers Argentina and Chile—never mind France.

But a new production technique developed by Brazilian researchers in the 2000s has helped winemakers in the Brasilia region hack the local climate to harvest in the winter, producing better-quality grapes—and wines that are starting to make a splash.

"The technique they're using here is different from what you see anywhere else in the world," says Barcelo, a silver-haired Frenchman who takes his wine very seriously.

He lavishes praise on the freshness and complexity of Brazilian highlands wines, and the "exceptional" conditions at Villa Triacca: an altitude of 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) above sea level, a dry climate and a difference of up to 15 degrees Celsius between daytime and nighttime temperatures in winter—perfect for ripening grapes.

Visitors on a wine tasting at the vineyard are also impressed.

"I was surprised by the quality," says Luciano Weber, a 45-year-old Brasilia resident.

"I had no idea they were making something so good here."

Brazilian wine grower Ronaldo Triacca now sells 15,000 bottles a year.

Unusual technique

But it was not an obvious choice to grow grapes in central-western Brazil, the heart of the country's powerful soybean, corn and beef industries.

The key is a technique called "double pruning," in which producers prune their vines twice a year, once in winter and once in summer.

That enables them to push their grape-picking season back from autumn, the usual time—when the region's heavy rains would threaten the harvest—to July and August, the heart of winter in the southern hemisphere.

The technique also involves using a synthetic hormone that regulates the vines' growth and keep them dormant so the grapes will be ready at the right time.

Producers say the hormone leaves no trace in the final product.

But some wine lovers are dubious.

"We don't know what the effects are. I've never seen a study on it," says Suzana Barelli, resident wine expert at newspaper Estado de Sao Paulo.

Still, she is impressed by the region's wines, praising their "very high quality."

Syrah grapes growing in a vineyard at Villa Triacca winery Brazil, where wine makers say their vintages will one day rival Argen — Syrah grapes growing in a vineyard at Villa Triacca winery Brazil, where wine makers say

Dream come true

The Brasilia region, known as the Federal District (DF), has just 10 vineyards, all opened in recent years.

But the industry is growing.

Farmland devoted to wine production leapt from 45 hectares (111 acres) in 2018 to 88 (217) last year.

Ronaldo Triacca, owner of the namesake vineyard, launched it six years ago.

"I had always dreamed of making wine, but I thought I could only make table wine—until I learned about inverted pruning," says the 57-year-old farmer, sitting amid his prized vines, his denim shirt rolled up at the sleeves.

"That's when I realized it was possible to make high-quality wine."

He started planting grapes—Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc—on six hectares of land, alongside his existing corn and soy fields.

Now, he sells 15,000 bottles a year, and is part of a collective of regional producers called Vinicola Brasilia.

For now, most of their production is sold to specialty stores and restaurants in the capital.

But they are starting to get noticed.

"A lot of people still think if a wine isn't Argentine, Portuguese or French, it's no good," says Felipe Camargo of regional agricultural agency Emater.

"We're going to change that fast."

'Kind of complicated': Growing grapes in the world's driest desert

Dogs can detect COVID-19 infections faster and more accurately than conventional technology, research shows

by University of California - Santa Barbara

nose — Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

It's an idea that has finally gained scientific consensus: Dogs can be a faster, more precise, less expensive—not to mention friendlier—method of detecting COVID-19 than even our best current technology.

A growing number of studies over the last two or so years has highlighted the power of dogs in detecting the virus and its variants, even when they are obscured by other viruses, like those from common colds and flu.

"It went from four papers to 29 peer-reviewed studies—that includes more than 400 scientists from over 30 countries and 31,000 samples," said University of California Santa Barbara Distinguished Professor Emeritus Tommy Dickey, who with collaborator Heather Junqueira of BioScent, Inc., gathered the recent massive number of findings into a review published in the Journal of Osteopathic Medicine.

From their rigorous survey of exclusively peer-reviewed studies published by traditional academic publishers covering both field and clinical experiments, Dickey and Junqueira assert that the collective research demonstrates that trained scent dogs are "as effective and often more effective" than the antigen tests we're keeping handy at home, as well as the gold-standard reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests deployed in clinics and hospitals.

Not only can dogs detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus faster, they can do so in a non-intrusive manner, without the environmental impact that comes with single-use plastics.

The dog standard

The magic lies in their highly evolved noses, with physical and neural optimizations for smell. Dogs have hundreds of millions of olfactory receptors, compared to roughly five to six million for humans, and a full third of their brains are devoted to interpreting smells, compared to a scant 5% in human brains. All these enhancements mean that dogs can detect very low concentrations of odors associated with COVID infections.

"They can detect the equivalent of one drop of an odorous substance in 10.5 Olympic-sized swimming pools," Dickey said. "For perspective, this is about three orders of magnitude better than with scientific instrumentation." In some cases, dogs were able to detect COVID in pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic patients whose viral load was too low for conventional tests to work. And not only that, Dickey added, dogs can distinguish COVID and its variants in the presence of other potentially confounding respiratory viruses, such as those of the common cold or flu.

"They're much more effective," Dickey said. "In fact one of the authors that we quote in the paper commented that the RT-PCR test is not the gold standard anymore. It's the dog.

"And they're so quick," he added. "They can give you the yes or no within seconds, if they're directly smelling you."

In some scenarios the dog gave the person a quick sniff, sitting down to indicate the presence of COVID. In others, the dog was given a sweat sample to smell, a process that could take a few minutes. The speed is especially important in situations like the earlier phase of the pandemic, when a gap of days between test and result could mean an exponential rise in infections if the person was positive, or scenarios that involve a high volume of people.

Scent dogs such as beagles, basset hounds and coonhounds would be the ideal dog for the task, given their natural tendencies to rely on odors to relate to the world, but the studies showed a variety of other dogs are up to the challenge. Given a few weeks of training, puppies and older dogs, males and females, purebreds and mixed breeds all performed admirably. In one study, a "problem" pit bull terrier that had been abused found a second chance by becoming a perfectly capable COVID detector.

Despite these glowing reviews, there remain challenges to placing man's best friend in the mainstream of medical diagnoses, although the animals have proven successful in the detection of other conditions, such as diabetes and cancer.

"There's quite a bit of research, but it's still considered by many as a kind of a curiosity," said Dickey, a professor emeritus of geography whose love for Great Pyrenees dogs led him to become a certified therapy dog handler and author of therapy dog books after he retired from formal teaching at UCSB.

Places that were open to using dogs in field experiments tended to be smaller countries such as Finland and Colombia, where there was a desire to explore fast and cost-effective methods of detecting COVID without having to wait for expensive tests to be developed or for reagents to become available.

Of their study, Dickey and Junqueira added, "After conducting this comprehensive review, we believe that scent dogs deserve their place as a serious diagnostic methodology that could be particularly useful during future pandemics, potentially as part of rapid routine health screenings in public spaces."

"Perhaps, most importantly, we argue that the impressive international quality and quantity of COVID scent dog research described in our paper for the first time, demonstrates that medical scent dogs are finally ready for a host of mainstream medical applications."

More information: Tommy Dickey et al, COVID-19 scent dog research highlights and synthesis during the pandemic of December 2019−April 2023, Journal of Osteopathic Medicine (2023). DOI: 10.1515/jom-2023-0104

Provided by University of California - Santa Barbara Scent dogs can detect COVID-19 more rapidly and accurately than current tests, finds review study

Research finds teachers perceive more conflict with Black boys and the least with white girls

by Mary Kate Brogan, Virginia Commonwealth University

A team of researchers led by a Virginia Commonwealth University professor found that teachers, regardless of race, perceived the most conflict with Black boys and the least conflict with white girls in their classrooms. Teachers also perceived their relationships with Black boys as increasing in conflict at higher rates than with white and female children across kindergarten through second grade, according to findings published in the Journal of School Psychology.The study analyzed nationally representative survey data from 9,190 participants—teachers who evalua

ted relationships with their students in terms of perceived closeness and perceived conflict toward the end of the school year in the spring semester—in the U.S. Department of Education National Center for Education Statistics' Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010–2011.

The findings indicated that teachers rated their level of perceived conflict with Black boys as nearly 40% higher in kindergarten than their level of perceived conflict with white girls. The gap increased from kindergarten to second grade: Teachers' perceptions of conflict with white girls, white boys and Black girls stayed nearly flat, but their perceptions of conflict with Black boys increased by 8%.

Kathleen Rudasill, Ph.D., interim dean of VCU's School of Education and a professor in its Department of Foundations of Education, led the study, serving as first and corresponding author on the paper.

"We were surprised at the disparities in teacher perceptions of their relationships with Black and white boys and girls at the start of formal school," Rudasill said. "This is the point in the school experience where teacher-child relationships are typically at their most positive, so the fact that Black students, Black boys in particular, are starting off at such a disadvantage in terms of teacher perceptions was discouraging."

Rudasill said the study isn't about individual teachers' bias; it instead uncovers how systemic racism and white privilege in society unfold in the U.S. educational system.

"Although some studies have examined child and teacher race as variables in teachers' perceptions of teacher-child relationship quality, there has not been a focus on systemic racism as potentially impacting teacher perceptions," Rudasill said.

"Given the historic and current educational disparities between Black and white students' opportunities and outcomes—and the critical role that teacher-child relationships have in predicting students' academic and social success in school—it is important to examine the extent to which teachers' perceptions of their relationship with students differ according to child race."

While teachers' ratings of closeness with all students decreased from kindergarten to second grade, their level of closeness with white girls remained highest, followed by Black girls, white boys and finally Black boys.

Based on previous studies, the research team expected that white teachers would perceive their relationships with white children more positively than with Black children. However, when they controlled for teacher race, Rudasill said, the research team did not find evidence that teacher-child relationships differed based on teacher-child racial match.

"We found evidence that teacher perceptions of their relationships with Black and white children in early elementary U.S. classrooms systematically advantaged white children and demonstrated an anti-Black racial bias representative of the structural and systemic racism endemic to the U.S.," Rudasill and her co-authors wrote in the paper.

Rudasill and her team have identified pathways for professional learning for current and future teachers to address the effects of systemic racism and white privilege in the U.S.

"Teachers are a mostly white—approximately 80%—workforce. As such, they have lived and been educated in primarily segregated environments, with very little exposure to individuals or cultures beyond that of the dominant, European American culture," Rudasill said. "If pre-service and in-service teachers are aware of the potential biases they have owing to systemic racism and if they are provided with opportunities to learn how to check their potential biases, racial disparities can be reduced."

Opportunities include educating teachers in anti-racism, with attention to the current and historical forces that situate institutions, policies, practices and beliefs in white supremacy; implementing cultural competency interventions, including "self-checks" for bias; and cultural competency skill-building for teachers that "place an emphasis on diversity, tolerance and respect for others, knowledge of cultural perceptions, examination of personal suppositions and biases, and the development of strategies for removing racial barriers," Rudasill and her co-authors wrote.

The study also looked at teachers' perceptions of their relationships with students based on their families' socioeconomic status. Higher socioeconomic status was related to "more positive teacher perceptions of relationships, with the exception of how teachers perceived conflict with Black boys in kindergarten," Rudasill said. "Teachers' perceptions of higher rates of conflict decreased for Black boys from families with higher socioeconomic status from kindergarten through second grade, but their perceptions of conflict did not decrease for Black boys from families with lower socioeconomic status."

"Because we used a large, nationally representative dataset and controlled for the effects of family socioeconomic status, we were able to isolate the role of racism and sexism in teachers' perceptions of their relationships with students in the early elementary grades," Rudasill said.

More information: Kathleen Moritz Rudasill et al, White privilege and teacher perceptions of teacher-child relationship quality, Journal of School Psychology (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.jsp.2023.04.002

Journal information: Journal of School PsychologyRacial biases seen when white teachers hear low-quality stories

Researchers uncover unconscious biases in the music of Carmen Sandiego

by University of Kansas

According to contributing authors in a new book on music for animation, some versions of the popular educational franchise Carmen Sandiego serve to "corroborate the power structures connoted in exoticist and imperialist narratives."

University of Kansas School of Music doctoral candidate T.J. Laws-Nicola and their co-author, Brent Ferguson, who holds a doctorate in music theory from KU, wrote the chapter, "Who on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego? Two Case Studies in Aural Identity," in the new book "The Intersection of Animation, Video Games, and Music: Making Movement Sing," (Routledge) edited by Lisa Scoggin and Dana Plank.

Laws-Nicola and Ferguson wrote that the composers who scored the 1992 deluxe version of the video game "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" (WWCS) and the 1994 animated series "Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?" (WECS) have chosen motifs that function as "an ironic set of musical chains—binding Carmen sonically where she is otherwise free."

Carmen Sandiego is an antihero in the game's universe. As Nicola and Ferguson wrote, players "travel the Earth as an A.C.M.E. (The Agency to Classify and Monitor Evildoers) agent capturing villains of the organization V.I.L.E. (Villain's International League of Evil), which is led by Sandiego." She is, they wrote, nonspecifically Latinx in ethnicity.

"It's part of my dissertation research," Laws-Nicola said. "I look at animation, and in particular bad women, women antagonists, and how they're treated sonically. I'm looking at what the trends are and the unconscious bias we have when we're listening to and also creating sounds."

In the two Carmen Sandiego series they studied, Laws-Nicola said, "There are all of these intentional or unintentional power structures being put out on display.

"The whole series is sort of a cat-and-mouse game between her organization and A.C.M.E. ... and there are a lot of symbols and ways you can take it. I don't necessarily say that the animators of the game or the show expressly wanted Carmen thought of as an imperialist symbol. But often, when you create something, once you show it to the world, your intent doesn't really matter so much as how it's interpreted by those that consume what you've made. I just felt that there was a way to look at this sort of animation or show critically, which is how we how we approach things."

The authors make particular note of exoticism in the theme song for WECS, which is an adaptation of a song in Mozart's opera "The Abduction of the Seraglio."

"The opening title theme for the show is a rock adaptation of the end of Act 1," Laws-Nicola said. "It's a big finale number from the opera. The Pasha, who is the antagonist of the opera because he stole the protagonist's love interest—physically kidnapped and kept her—comes in with his entire crew ...

"It's done in the Alla Turca style, which was very popular at the time. Mozart was well known for creating or contributing to the creation of this style, which musically connoted the Turkish Janissaries. Typical aspects were lots of cymbals or percussion and big chorus-type numbers. An audience watching "The Abduction of the Seraglio' at that time would have felt that that number was exotic, in part because the antagonist is supposed to be foreign, but also because the musical style was markedly different than anything else in the opera.

"The show uses an adaptation of that same theme. They just update it, which adds this extra layer. The song is already exoticist, and you have it filtered through a pop adaptation for a theme song for a thief who goes around the world stealing things. It just seemed like really tongue-in-cheek. A bit on the nose, if you will.

"Whether or not Mozart respected the Turkish Janissaries, there's an exoticist connotation that is developed on top of all of this," Laws-Nicola said.

"So this connotation of thieving or taking what isn't yours, or the keeping the racial purity of women, these are all sort of undertones and connotations of this exoticist style. And when you toss that in with a children show, and the woman antagonist happens to be a thief ... you buy into that negative connotation, intentional or not. What we were trying to get at in the article is that the song's a whole jam, and you can still enjoy the show. But keep in mind that the sonic layer of what's being done here isn't completely innocent."

More information: Lisa Scoggin et al, The Intersection of Animation, Video Games, and Music, (2023). DOI: 10.4324/9781032172231

Provided by University of Kansas

Animal Crossing among 4 inductees to Video Game Hall of Fame

Astronomers scan 11,680 nearby stars for signals from advanced civilizations

by Carolyn Collins Petersen, Universe Today

The hunt for alien life and its radio signals from beyond our solar system is still coming up dry. But, it's not for lack of looking for possible advanced civilizations.

A recent search led by Jean-Luc Margot of UCLA's Earth, Planetary, & Space Sciences Department scanned stars within a few hundred light-years of Earth. Margot and his team looked for radio signatures of advanced civilizations in a sampling of "TESS Objects of Interest." TESS is the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite doing an all-sky survey of nearby stars and their possible planets. The paper is published on the arXiv preprint server.

Margot is founder of UCLA SETI's "Are Alone in the Universe?" project. It looks for evidence of other civilizations in the universe and pulls information from radio emissions that might identify them. From 2020 to 2023, Margot's team pointed the Green Bank Telescope toward the TESS objects to capture radio emissions coming from a specific region of space. The team used the L-band receiver on the scope, which scans a region of the spectrum between 1.15 and 1.73 GHz. That's a narrowband "window" where they suggest it might be possible to detect alien signals if they exist.

It would be exciting to find a "wow!" signal from another civilization. But, that didn't happen this time. The team wrote a paper detailing their work, and concluded, "Based on our observations, we found that there is a high probability (94.0%–98.7%) that fewer than ~0.014% of stars earlier than M8 within 100 pc host a transmitter that is detectable in our search." That's a rather definitive conclusion that nearby stars aren't sending cosmic "hello" greetings in our direction.

What would advanced civilizations use to communicate across space?

The hunt for extraterrestrial signatures from advanced civilizations is a relatively young science. The first searches began in the mid-20th century. Since then, SETI astronomers have figured out search strategies using available radio telescopes. But, it still faces some physical realities.

It's no surprise that communications across the gulfs of space are difficult. There's a time lag, of course. A signal we send to Proxima Centauri saying "Howdy" would take just over four years to get there at the speed of light. If anybody exists there, they'd sent a "Hi neighbor" back to us—again at the speed of light. Of course, it takes another four years or so to travel between us. That's eight years to establish a connection.

Consider also that signals have to pass through whatever "stuff" exists in space, like gas and dust. Those absorb some forms of radiation. However, radio signals get through pretty well, which makes them a good choice for an interstellar greeting. Next, you have to consider what frequencies to use. It turns out those between 1 and 10 GHz are quite useful because they avoid the galaxy's "hum" at lower frequencies. At higher frequencies, our own atmosphere (and probably those of other planets) can drown out any signals.

So, astronomers assume that another technologically advanced civilization might use that range, too. Of course, there are also language differences and cultural assumptions, which would shape any messages. But, at least having a frequency range helps get the hunt going.

What the team did

In their SETI search, Margot's team reasoned that they'd need to sample for emissions made by technologically savvy beings. They wrote, "The search for technosignatures provides an opportunity to obtain robust detections with unambiguous interpretations. An example of such a technosignature is a narrowband (say, <10 Hz at gigahertz frequencies) signal from an emitter located beyond the solar system. Detection of a signal with these characteristics would provide sufficient evidence for the existence of another civilization because natural settings cannot generate such signals."

In other words, they wanted to exclude natural emissions from the sample. Those would be radio signals created by naturally occurring events and objects. In our own solar system, for example, Jupiter has strong radio emissions. So does the sun, and Earth does, too, for that matter, but we can exclude those easily. Outside of the sun and planets, pulsars give off strong signals, as do star-forming regions, and supernova remnants. And, of course, there are very active emitters such as quasars and the regions around black holes. All of those sources have to be omitted from any surveys looking for techno-signatures.

So, the GBT captured emissions from around 11,680 stars and their planetary systems that lay between 5,385 and 18,173 light-years away. The observations occurred during two-hour sessions on April 22, 202, April 28, 2021, May 22, 2022, and May 13, 2023. They did two scans of about 2.5 minutes each on selected pairs of sources. Then, they processed the data, which included about 37 million narrowband detections of emissions. The resulting conclusion was that there are no advanced civilizations nearby that are transmitting in that range of frequencies.

Are we alone? Crowdsourcing the search

The search by Margot and his team also incorporates citizen scientists from around the world in a project called "Are We Alone in the Universe?" The collaboration has netted more than 300,000 classifications of radio signals in the nearby neighborhood sent in by more than 10,000 volunteers.

In addition, Margot offers a SETI course at UCLA for graduate students. The attendees learn to gather and analyze data from radio telescopes involved in the search. It's an eye-opening exploration of the different disciplines involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. They include signal processing skills, data-gathering, telecommunications, statistics, and data science.

While the latest search for signals showed no evidence of technological civilizations in our near-Earth neighborhood, it does send an important message: if they're "out there" they are not in that sampling. As in so much of science, the lack of a conclusive signal is just as important as a conclusive one. For one thing, it researchers also need to distinguish between signals from space and signals from technology here on Earth. Sorting those out is an important part of any search paradigm.

The entire exercise also allowed the team to refine its pipelines of data and processing algorithms. That will be useful in the future if, and when, a signal is found that could indicate intelligent life out there. And, there is still a lot of sky to explore in the hunt for technologically advanced civilizations.

More information: Jean-Luc Margot et al, A Search for Technosignatures Around 11,680 Stars with the Green Bank Telescope at 1.15-1.73 GHz, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2308.02712

Journal information: arXiv Did that message come from Earth or space? Now SETI researchers can be sure

Study shows gender influences salaries sought by job applicants

by Andrew Sharp, University of Delaware

That nagging gap between how much men get paid on average, and how much less women earn, has stubbornly persisted, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

How to make things more fair? One common theory promotes pay transparency. That is, offering information for job seekers on the salary and how much similar positions offer.

That works up to a point, according to a recent study by researchers including Dustin Sleesman, associate professor of management at the University of Delaware's Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics. Their results, published in the journal Group Decision and Negotiation, indicate that although pay transparency can shrink the gender gap in salary negotiations, it may not work in some cases. The study is published in the journal Group Decision and Negotiation.

According to the Pew Research Center, women's relative pay has gone up in the past 20 years—technically. Its analysis released earlier this year shows that in 2002, women made 80% as much as men. In 2022, that had risen to 82%, a budge on the scale that women aren't likely to describe as thrilling. (At that rate, salaries won't be equal for another 180 years.)

To dig into this disparity, Sleesman and his fellow investigators conducted two studies: One on how men and women find salary information, and another on how those dynamics affect how much money candidates request in a salary negotiation.

Through a survey of MBA students, they discovered that while men and women are similar in how they dig up salary information, women tend to rely more on job websites like salary.com and glassdoor.com, while men tend to gravitate more toward networks of classmates or colleagues, settings where social comparison might come into play.

"Men tend to search for information that allows them to kind of size themselves up … to compare themselves to others," Sleesman said.

Cultural perceptions of masculinity, the authors wrote, encourage men to be more aggressive when negotiating and to react when they feel their masculinity is threatened (like discovering that others are making more money). Thus, negotiations are one area where men often feel they need to demonstrate their masculinity.

To investigate how this plays out, Sleesman and his colleagues recruited a little more than 950 study participants, evenly divided between men and women, and had them participate in a simulated salary negotiation for a product manager position. In this scenario, the job seekers had done their research and learned the salary range. They also knew about another employee's salary level.

Participants were divided into four groups, including a control group.

Some were told that this employee had fewer qualifications than they did, some that the qualifications were about the same, and some that this employee was more qualified. All other factors were the same across conditions. Taking all this into account, participants were asked to come up with a salary request and rate how competitive they felt.

As it turns out, which employee participants compared themselves to mattered significantly.

The control group, in which the participants didn't get any salary information, showed a wide gender gap in salary requests. Men asked for nearly $17,000 more than women, on average.

Participants who had salary information for an employee who was either less qualified or similarly qualified than they were asked for more money than those in the control group. And notably, the gender gap virtually disappeared.

However, it was different for participants who knew the salary of an employee who was more qualified than they were. In this case, men asked for higher salaries than women, to the tune of roughly $5,000. This was a much smaller gap than in the control group, but the difference remained.

Importantly, the researchers also found that the gender gaps they observed were due to a heightened sense of competitiveness among men.

In other words, they argue, men's competitive tendencies can reduce the effectiveness of salary transparency.

A growing number of state and local laws require more pay transparency from companies. And some organizations are fully transparent, making everyone's salary public, Sleesman noted. "But these well-intentioned efforts could unintentionally perpetuate the gender gap because of what information men and women tend to focus on and react to," he said.

Men, he explained, are more likely than women to compare themselves to the most qualified person out there.

It's tough to point to a solution to this disparity, Sleesman said. He teaches negotiation and conflict resolution courses, and he recommends to his students that they arm themselves with as much information as possible before starting any negotiation.

"But before this research, it never even occurred to me that men and women may differ in the kinds of information they use," Sleesman said.

Given this study, he said, "Negotiators, both men and women, should be very cognizant of the information they are seeking and really think about the psychological impact it may be having on them."

Sleesman said gender is not the main driver of negotiation results and only one factor. Preparation, practice and mindset are all more important factors than any demographic or personality characteristic, he said.

"Some people still deny that gender even matters in negotiations," Sleesman said, but since several studies have found that it does play a role, we should be aware of these biases. "But it's not the end all, be all."

He said he hopes it doesn't take 180 years to even things out.

More information: Julia B. Bear et al, Correction to: Gender, Pay Transparency, and Competitiveness: Why Salary Information Sometimes, but Not Always, Mitigates Gender Gaps in Salary Negotiations, Group Decision and Negotiation (2023). DOI: 10.1007/s10726-023-09842-0

Provided by University of Delaware

Can gender-disposed personality traits explain who initiates salary negotiations?

Biased artificial intelligence needs human help to avoid harmful climate action, say researchers

by University of Cambridge

Bias in the collection of data on which artificial intelligence (AI) computer programs depend can limit the usefulness of this rapidly growing tool for climate scientists predicting future scenarios and guiding global action, according to a new paper by researchers at the University of Cambridge, published in npj Climate Action .

AI computer programs used for climate science are trained to trawl through complex data sets looking for patterns and insightful information. However, missing information from certain locations on the planet, time periods, or societal dynamics create "holes" in the data that can lead to unreliable climate predictions and misleading conclusions.

Primary author and Cambridge Zero Fellow Dr. Ramit Debnath said that individuals with access to technology, such as scientists, teachers, professionals and businesses in the Global North are more likely to see their climate priorities and perceptions reflected in the digital information widely available for AI use.

By contrast, those without the same access to technology, such as Indigenous communities in the Global South, are more likely to find their experiences, perceptions and priorities missing from those same digital sources.

Debnath said, "When the information on climate change is over-represented by the work of well-educated individuals at high-ranking institutions within the Global North, AI will only see climate change and climate solutions through their eyes."

"Biased" AI has the potential to misrepresent climate information. For example, it could generate ineffective weather predictions or underestimate carbon emissions from certain industries, which could then misguide governments trying to create policy and regulations aimed at mitigating or adapting to climate change.

AI-supported climate solutions that spring from biased data are in danger of harming under-represented communities, particularly those in the Global South with scant resources. These are often the same communities that also find themselves most vulnerable to the extreme weather events caused by climate change such as floods, fires, heat waves and drought.

That is a combination which could lead to "societal tipping events," the paper warns.

However, these "data holes" can be filled by human knowledge. The authors advocate for a human-in-the loop design to offer AI climate change programs with a sense check on which data is used and the context in which it is used, in an effort to improve the accuracy of predictions and the usefulness of any conclusions.

The authors mention popular AI chatbot model ChatGPT, which has recently taken the world by storm for its ability to communicate conversationally with human users. On ChatGPT, the AI can ask its human users follow-up questions, admit mistakes, challenge incorrect premises and reject inappropriate requests.

This "human-in-the-loop" style AI allows bias to be noticed and corrected, the authors said. Users can input critical social information, such as existing infrastructure and market systems, to allow the AI to better anticipate any unintended socio-political and economic consequences of climate action.

Co-author Cambridge Zero Director and climate scientist Professor Emily Shuckburgh said, "No data is clean or without prejudice, and this is particularly problematic for AI, which relies entirely on digital information."

In highlighting the importance of globally inclusive data sets, the paper also promotes broadband internet access as a public necessity, rather than a private commodity, to engage as many users as possible in the design of AI for contemporary conversations about climate action.

The paper concludes that human-guided technology remains instrumental in the development of socially responsible AI.

Less-biased AI will be critical to our understanding of how the climate is changing, and consequently in guiding realistic solutions to mitigate and adapt to the on-going climate crisis, the authors said.

Professor Shuckburgh, who also leads the UK's Centre for Doctoral Training on the Application of AI to the study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER), said, "Only with an active awareness of this data injustice can we begin to tackle it, and consequently, to build better and more trustworthy AI-led climate solutions."

More information: Harnessing human and machine intelligence for planetary scale climate action, npj Climate Action (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s44168

Provided by University of Cambridge

Solving the climate crisis requires collaboration between natural and social scientists, says study

The modern sea spider had started to diversify by the Jurassic, study finds

by University of Bristol

An extremely rare collection of 160-million-year-old sea spider fossils from Southern France are closely related to living species, unlike older fossils of their kind.

These fossils are very important to understand the evolution of sea spiders. They show that the diversity of sea spiders that still exist today had already started to form by the Jurassic.

Lead author Dr. Romain Sabroux from the University of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences, said, "Sea spiders (Pycnogonida), are a group of marine animals that is overall very poorly studied. "New insights into the sea spider fauna (Arthropoda: Pycnogonida) of La Voulte-sur-Rhône, France (Jurassic: Callovian)" was published in Papers in Palaeontology.

"However, they are very interesting to understand the evolution of arthropods [the group that includes insects, arachnids, crustaceans, centipedes and millipedes] as they appeared relatively early in the arthropod tree of life. That's why we are interested in their evolution.

"Sea spider fossils are very rare, but we know a few of them from different periods. One of the most remarkable fauna, by its diversity and its abundance, is the one of La Voulte-sur-Rhône that dates back to the Jurassic, some 160 million years ago."

Unlike older sea spider fossils, the La Voulte pycnogonids are morphologically similar (but not identical) to living species, and previous studies suggested they could be closely related to living sea spider families. But these hypotheses were restricted by the limitation of their observation means. As it was impossible to access what was hidden in the rock fossils, Dr. Sabroux and his team traveled to Paris and set out to investigate this question with cutting-edge approaches.

Dr. Sabroux explained, "We used two methods to reinvestigate the morphology of the fossils: X-ray microtomography, to 'look inside' the rock, find morphological features hidden inside and reconstruct a 3D model of the fossilized specimen; and reflectance transformation imaging, a picture technic that relies on varied orientation of the light around the fossil to enhance the visibility of inconspicuous features on their surface.

"From these new insights, we drew new morphological information to compare them with extant species," explained Dr. Sabroux.

This confirmed that these fossils are close relatives to surviving pycnogonids. Two of these fossils belong to two living pycnogonid families: Colossopantopodus boissinensis was a Colossendeidae while another, Palaeoendeis elmii was an Endeidae. The third species, Palaeopycnogonides gracilis, seems to belong to a family that has disappeared today.

"Today, by calculating the difference between the DNA sequences of a sample of species, and using DNA evolution models, we are able to estimate the timing of the evolution that bind these species together," added Dr. Sabroux.

"This is what we call a molecular clock analysis. But quite like a real clock, it needs to be calibrated. Basically, we need to tell the clock: 'we know that at that time, that group was already there.' Thanks to our work, we now know that Colossendeidae, and Endeidae were already 'there' by the Jurassic."

Now, the team can use these minimal ages as calibrations for the molecular clock, and investigate the timing of Pycnogonida evolution. This can help them understand, for example, how their diversity was impacted by the different biodiversity crises that distributes over the Earth history.

They also plan to investigate other pycnogonid fossil faunae such as the fauna of Hunsrück Slate, in Germany, which dates from the Devonian, some 400 million years ago.

With the same approach, they will aim to redescribe these species and understand their affinities with extant species; and finally, to replace in the tree of life of Pycnogonida all the pycnogonid fossils from all periods.

Dr. Sabroux added, "These fossils give us an insight of sea spiders living 160 million years ago.

"This is very exciting when you have been working on the living pycnogonids for years.

"It is fascinating how these pycnogonids look both very familiar, and very exotic. Familiar, because you can definitely recognize some of the families that still exist today, and exotic because of small differences like the size of the legs, the length of the body, and some other morphological characteristics that you do not find in modern species."

More information: New insights into the sea spider fauna (Arthropoda: Pycnogonida) of La Voulte-sur-Rhône, France (Jurassic: Callovian), Papers in Palaeontology (2023).

Provided by University of Bristol Examining the complex family relationships of ancient gobies

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