Imagine watching your dog waddle into the room and noticing that he is walking on the top of his back paw. While you may classify it as a harmless quirk, in reality, that “knuckling” action can actually be a response to the dog’s neurological health in distress.
Dr. Joseph Mankin, a clinical associate professor at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, describes the signs and suggested treatment methods of degenerative myelopathy, a neurological disease that results in hind limb weakness and paralysis.
According to Mankin, degenerative myelopathy is a condition that causes deterioration of the spinal cord and ultimately affects a dog’s ability to use their back legs.
“The exact cause is unknown, but there is evidence that a genetic mutation may predispose dogs to developing this condition,” Mankin said.
Larger dogs, in particular, are more prone to being diagnosed with degenerative myelopathy—with German shepherds, boxers, huskies, mountain dogs, and Labrador retrievers being among the most common breeds with this condition.
What to look for
If you notice a pattern of odd behaviors involving the back legs, it’s time to call the veterinarian.
Dogs beginning to struggle with the diseases may experience the following:
Difficulty rising
Stumbling in the back end when walking
Falling down
Overall weakness
“This is a slowly progressive, non-painful disease process, with clinical signs worsening over several weeks to months,” Mankin said. “It may start in one back leg and progress to both, and they begin to have difficulty placing their back feet appropriately, leading to ‘knuckling’ when walking or standing.”
While Mankin explained that the disease itself is not painful, the habits a furry friend develops to compensate for the lost mobility can leave them in pain. For example, when knuckling, a dog may drag their paw over abrasive terrain, which can lead to painful wounds or cuts and missing fur. As a result, Mankin recommends talking to your veterinarian if you notice your dog knuckling.
The priority of comfort
The older your canine friend, the greater chance they have of developing degenerative myelopathy. With this in mind, it is crucial to stay aware of their mobility as they age.
If you suspect your dog is suffering from this condition, Mankin suggests the following steps.
“A complete neurologic exam is the first step in diagnosing this condition,” Mankin said. “Following that, imaging with MRI is often recommended, as there are multiple other spinal cord diseases that may mimic this condition.”
Currently, there is no approved treatment or cure for degenerative myelopathy, but there are actions that can be taken to ease the condition and improve the dog’s comfortability and overall quality of life.
“Physical therapy may help maintain muscle mass and slow clinical progression,” Mankin said.
Moving around freely is a key part of any dog’s well-being. With help from your dog’s veterinary team, you can help improve their ability to get around if diagnosed with degenerative myelopathy.
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Why your dog may be waddling instead of walking—veterinarian discusses degenerative myelopathy in dogs (2024, September 19)
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For many people, constant pings, buzzes and flashes on their phones, computers and other devices are just a normal part of working life—which, thanks to technology, extends to all hours.
An abundance of research analyzes the effects of overload and stress from technology in the workplace, yet there have been no effective solutions, said Jason Thatcher, professor of organizational leadership and information analytics at the Leeds School of Business.
“We work with technologies that enable people to contact us in different times and spaces. It may increase our anxiety and make us feel invaded, among other things,” Thatcher said.
“And the reason we’re stressed out is that we’re not thinking about it the right way. We have to think about clusters of stressors operating together that make you feel burned out.”
Thatcher co-authored a recent study, published in June 2024 in MIS Quarterly, that examines how digital stressors compound and escalate. It asserts there is no one approach to counteracting different “technostressors”; rather it requires a comprehensive strategy on the part of employers and, specifically, direct managers.
According to the study’s co-authors, who also include Katharina Pflügner, Christian Maier, Jens Mattke and Tim Weitzel, all of the University of Bamberg in Germany, here are five ways digital stress can lead to burnout and disrupt an employee‘s workflow, mental health and productivity:
Techno-overload. Employees already dealing with excessive workloads and tight deadlines feel their stress heightened by constant emails, notifications and alerts.
Techno-invasion. Employees feel pressure to remain constantly connected via their phones, computers and other devices, which prevents them from detaching from work.
Techno-complexity. Difficulty mastering software and information systems at work makes employees feel inadequate and stressed.
Techno-insecurity. This stress results from an employee’s fear that their job will be made redundant or they will be replaced by a colleague with better tech skills.
Techno-uncertainty. Constant change due to technological advancement means employees feel stress and pressure to continually adapt to new systems and tools.
These digital stressors don’t occur in isolation, according to the researchers, which necessitates a multifaceted approach. “To address the problem, you can’t just address the overload and invasion,” Thatcher said. “You have to be more strategic.”
“Let’s say I’m a manager, and I implement a policy that says no email on weekends because everybody’s stressed out,” Thatcher said. “But everyone stays stressed out. That’s because I may have gotten rid of techno-invasion—that feeling that work is intruding on my life—but on Monday, when I open my email, I still feel really overloaded because there are 400 emails.”
It’s crucial for managers to assess the various digital stressors affecting their employees and then target them as a combination, according to the researchers. That means to address the above problem, Thatcher said, “you can’t just address invasion. You can’t just address overload. You have to address them together,” he said.
Empowering employees
So how would the manager fix the above problem?
“Maybe they would talk to the person rather than saying, ‘Don’t look at your email on the weekend’ to the team. The manager might say, “Let’s work on time management so that you look at email for one hour on Saturday, so that on Monday you don’t feel overwhelmed.'”
Another tool for managers is empowering employees, according to the study. “As a manager, it may feel really dangerous to say, ‘You can structure when and where and how you do work.’ But what you’ll find is that most people don’t actually change what they’re doing very much, but they’re going to feel better because they feel in control of their jobs,” Thatcher said.
Managers should also recognize that there may be unintended problems with the introduction of new technologies, he added.
A new communication platform may make some things easier for employees, for example, “but it can increase feelings of overload because they have to deal with so much more,” Thatcher said.
“So you have to look at these technologies as bundles. A tool may be designed to help the company address one problem, but think about the other unintended problems you might be creating. And give employees the tools and the freedom to sort out how to actually manage them,” he said.
Other ways managers can address digital stressors include:
Assessments. Conducting regular assessments such as surveys, conversations with employees and analysis of digital communication patterns can help managers identify and understand the specific digital stressors impacting employees.
Policies. Limit the impacts of digital stressors by setting policies or clear boundaries for after-hours communication, for example.
Training. Training can help employees improve their digital literacy skills and manage boundaries between work and personal life.
Leadership modeling. Call on other managers and company leaders to model and support healthy digital communication practices.
Attentiveness. Digital stress can lead even high-performing employees to burnout, according to the researchers. Managers should recognize the early signs of burnout and consider regular check-ins, assessments, surveys and open communication to identify and address the stressors before they escalate.
Flexibility. Middle managers may need more flexibility to help employees address digital stressors. “You’ll see companies will start a policy that says everyone’s got to have their phones on,” Thatcher said. “But maybe you just have a policy that’s more judicious in terms of thinking about the design of various jobs, and you give the unit manager some discretion.”
He emphasized there is no one-size-fits-all solution to combating digital stressors.
“It’s the different sets of stressors that lead to burnout and job dissatisfaction, and if you’re only focusing on one, your employees are doomed,” Thatcher said.
“But if you focus on the whole person, the whole job and the sets of stressors that the technologies introduce—and you work with your employees to find ways to manage them—you’re going to have a happier workplace with people that perform, on average, better.”
More information:
Katharina Pflügner et al, Deconstructing Technostress: A Configurational Approach to Explaining Job Burnout and Job Performance, MIS Quarterly (2024). DOI: 10.25300/MISQ/2023/16978
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How to fight ‘technostress’ at work (2024, September 19)
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A new study co-led by the Smithsonian and the University of Arizona offers the most detailed glimpse yet of how Earth’s surface temperature has changed over the past 485 million years. In a paper published today, Sept. 19, in the journal Science, a team of researchers produce a curve of global mean surface temperature across deep time—the Earth’s ancient past stretching over many millions of years. Note: University of Alaska Museum Earth Sciences Collection 35034. Credit: Lucia RM Martino, James Di Loreto and Fred Cochard, Smithsonian.
A new study co-led by the Smithsonian and the University of Arizona offers the most detailed glimpse yet of how Earth’s surface temperature has changed over the past 485 million years.
In a paper published Sept. 19, in the journal Science, a team of researchers, including paleobiologists Scott Wing and Brian Huber from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, produce a curve of global mean surface temperature (GMST) across deep time—the Earth’s ancient past stretching over many millions of years.
The new curve reveals that Earth’s temperature has varied more than previously thought over much of the Phanerozoic Eon, the past 540 million years of geologic time when life has diversified, populated land and endured multiple mass extinctions. The curve also confirms that Earth’s temperature is strongly correlated to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The team created the temperature curve utilizing an approach called data assimilation. This allowed the researchers to combine data from the geologic record and climate models to create a more cohesive understanding of ancient climates.
“This method was originally developed for weather forecasting,” said Emily Judd, the lead author of the new paper and a former postdoctoral researcher at the National Museum of Natural History and the University of Arizona. “Instead of using it to forecast future weather, here we’re using it to hindcast ancient climates.”
Refining how Earth’s temperature has fluctuated over deep time provides crucial context for understanding modern climate change.
“If you’re studying the past couple of million years, you won’t find anything that looks like what we expect in 2100 or 2500,” said Wing, the museum’s curator of paleobotany whose research focuses on the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, a period of rapid global warming 55 million years ago.
“You need to go back even further to periods when the Earth was really warm, because that’s the only way we’re going to get a better understanding of how the climate might change in the future.”
Fossils in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History research collection in its Department of Paleobiology. Before this study, a reliable temperature curve for the Phanerozoic did not yet exist. This is largely due to the fragmentary nature of the fossil record. Fossil specimens offer some clues about ancient temperatures, but these are only isolated snapshots of one region at a single time. This makes it difficult to decipher what ancient temperatures looked like on a global scale. To create an accurate curve, the research team used data assimilation. Meteorologists use data assimilation to combine observations of various factors like temperature, humidity and wind speed with weather models to create more accurate forecasts. In a similar vein, the team reconstructed climatic snapshots of the world at various points across the Phanerozoic by integrating data related to ancient ocean temperatures from different parts of the planet with computer simulations of past climates. Credit: Chip Clark.
The new curve reveals that temperature varied more greatly during the Phanerozoic than previously thought. Over the eon, the GMST spanned between 52 and 97 degrees Fahrenheit (11–36 degrees Celsius). Periods of extreme heat were most often linked to elevated levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
“This research illustrates clearly that carbon dioxide is the dominant control on global temperatures across geological time,” said Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona and a co-author of the new paper. “When CO2 is low, the temperature is cold; when CO2 is high, the temperature is warm.”
The findings also reveal that the Earth’s current GMST of 59 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius) is cooler than Earth has been over much of the Phanerozoic. But greenhouse gas emissions caused by anthropogenic climate change are currently warming the planet at a much faster rate than even the fastest warming events of the Phanerozoic.
The speed of warming puts species and ecosystems around the world at risk and is causing a rapid rise in sea level. Some other episodes of rapid climate change during the Phanerozoic have sparked mass extinctions.
“Humans, and the species we share the planet with, are adapted to a cold climate,” Tierney said. “Rapidly putting us all into a warmer climate is a dangerous thing to do.”
The new paper is part of an ongoing research effort that began in 2018, when Wing, Huber and other Smithsonian researchers were helping develop the museum’s “David H. Koch Hall of Fossils— Deep Time.” The new hall aimed to put the museum’s fossils in context by highlighting how Earth’s climate has changed over the past half-a-billion years. For example, several specimens—including fossilized palm fronds found in Alaska—attest to a period in Earth’s past when global temperatures were much warmer than today.
Microscopic, single-celled organisms called foraminifera have a fossil record that extends from today to more than 500 million years ago. Although each organism is just a single cell, they build complex shells around themselves from minerals in the seawater. These shells have accumulated in layers of sediment below the seafloor of the open ocean and in regions where the ocean once flooded the continents for millions of years. By examining the shell chemistry of these ancient organisms, scientists can learn about Earth’s climate long before humans ever walked the planet—and get insight into how climate changed in the past. The research team compiled more than 150,000 published data points from five different geochemical archives (or “proxies”) for ancient ocean temperature that are preserved in fossilized shells and other types of ancient organic matter. Credit: Brian Huber, Smithsonian.
The team wanted to provide museum visitors with a curve that charted Earth’s GMST across the Phanerozoic, which began around 540 million years ago and continues into the present day. But Wing and Huber were surprised to find that a reliable temperature curve for this period did not yet exist. This is largely due to the fragmentary nature of the fossil record.
Fossil specimens offer some clues about ancient temperatures—for example, the chemistry of fossilized shells offer insights into oceanic temperatures in the distant past—but these are only isolated snapshots of one region at a single time. This makes it difficult to decipher what ancient temperatures looked like on a global scale.
“It is like trying to visualize the picture of a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, when you only have a handful of pieces,” Judd said.
To produce a temperature curve across deep time, Wing, Huber and their colleagues started the PhanTASTIC (Phanerozoic Technique Averaged Surface Temperature Integrated Curve) Project.
In 2018, the museum hosted a workshop for paleoclimatologists from across the country. In 2020, Judd arrived at the museum as the PhanTASTIC Postdoctoral Fellow to lead the project.
To create an accurate curve, the PhanTASTIC team used data assimilation. Meteorologists use data assimilation to combine observations of various factors like temperature, humidity and wind speed with weather models to create more accurate forecasts.
In a similar vein, the team reconstructed climatic snapshots of the world at various points across the Phanerozoic by integrating data related to ancient ocean temperatures from different parts of the planet with computer simulations of past climates.
The team compiled more than 150,000 published data points from five different geochemical archives (or “proxies”) for ancient ocean temperatures that are preserved in fossilized shells and other types of ancient organic matter.
Their colleagues at the University of Bristol generated more than 850 model simulations of what Earth’s climate could have looked like at different periods of the distant past based on continental position and atmospheric composition. The researchers then used data assimilation to combine these two lines of evidence and create a more accurate curve of how Earth’s temperature has varied over the past 485 million years.
The “David H. Koch Hall of Fossils—Deep Time,” a 31,000-square-foot dinosaur and fossil hall at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, takes visitors on a journey through deep time to explore ancient ecosystems, experience the evolution of plant and animal life and get up close with some 700 specimens. The new paper is part of an ongoing research effort that began in 2018, when Smithsonian researchers were helping develop the museum’s “David H. Koch Hall of Fossils— Deep Time.” The team wanted to provide museum visitors with a curve that charted Earth’s global mean surface temperature across the Phanerozoic, which began around 540 million years ago and continues into the present day. Credit: Lucia RM Martino, Fred Cochard and James Di Loreto, Smithsonian.
While the new paper is the most robust study of temperature change to date, it is far from a finished project according to Huber, the museum’s curator of foraminifera (amoeba-like single-cell organisms) who studies microscopic fossil shells to understand environmental conditions during the Cretaceous period, the warmest stretch of the Phanerozoic.
“We all agree that this isn’t the final curve,” Huber said. “Researchers will continue to uncover additional clues about the deep past, which will help revise this curve down the road.”
In addition to Judd, Tierney, Huber and Wing, Daniel Lunt and Paul Valdes of the University of Bristol and Isabel Montañez of the University of California, Davis were co-authors on the study.
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Study charts how Earth’s global temperature has drastically changed over the past 485 million years, driven by COâ‚‚ (2024, September 19)
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Zachary Robbins conducts field research in Panama. Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Hydraulic failure in tropical environments is expected to increase, according to new research published in New Phytologist. As weather patterns change and temperatures rise, plants will need to adapt in order to survive. Hydraulic failure occurs when more water is lost from transpiration than is taken in through the roots. If uncorrected, the xylem loses conductivity and the plant will not survive.
“Increases in hydraulic failure rates will likely increase mortality and vegetation turnover. Over extended periods, this will alter the vegetative composition, forcing more drought-tolerant species to become a more significant proportion of forests,” said Zachary Robbins, a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and corresponding author of the paper.
“The long-term risk is that we may be losing natural land carbon stores during a time when we need to reduce atmospheric carbon.”
The paper is the first to use the FATES-HYDRO model to assess the risk of hydraulic failure, which is an important piece of the puzzle for scientists to understand the impacts of changing climates. The results show that, while rising temperatures in tropical climates generally result in short-term productivity improvements, the long-term effects lead to significantly increased mortality rates.
Previous studies have relied on the Penman-Monteith-Leuning model, which does not account for two important variables: increased carbon dioxide and vapor pressure deficit. Robbins’ study analyzed plant trait assemblages to determine which might perform well under future climate conditions. Robbins and his team used 16 Earth-system models to test different traits under potential future scenarios.
Stand-level changes in (a) gross primary productivity (GPP); and (b) evapotranspiration (ET) projected by the FATES-HYDRO model at Barro Colorado Island, Panama, under two climate scenarios (blue: SSP2-4.5 and orange: SSP5-8.5: 2086–2100) and two CO2 scenarios (anticipated: SSP2-4.5 603 ppm and SSP5-8.5 1059 ppm, and contemporary: 367 CO2 ppm), relative to contemporary climate (2003–2016) simulations. Each point represents the mean outcome across trait assemblages for a climate model. Credit: New Phytologist (2024). DOI: 10.1111/nph.19956
Hydraulic failure is an amalgamation of several plant trait assemblages, and the ability to understand how those assemblages interact with one another to contribute to hydraulic failure is crucial to understanding how to promote healthy growth.
Some plants are able to adapt, implementing strategies such as adjusting the percentage of time their stomata remain open. Through this process, plant trail assemblages act as a “functional trait filter” and plants that cannot survive in the changing conditions will give way to plants that are more drought and heat resistant.
The reduction of tropical forests due to hydraulic failure would be felt around the world.
“Simulations like this can help us understand future risks facing natural resources and allow us to respond to or preempt global consequences of ecological change,” Robbins said. “Addressing these changes in hydraulic failure rates will be vital to understanding rates of wildfire, forest dieback and natural resource security.”
The Los Alamos team is continuing its efforts with the FATES-HYDRO model to better understand plant mortality worldwide, and is working on extending this project to the American Southwest.
More information:
Zachary Robbins et al, Future climate doubles the risk of hydraulic failure in a wet tropical forest, New Phytologist (2024). DOI: 10.1111/nph.19956
Citation:
Research predicts rise in tropical hydraulic failure (2024, September 19)
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When German journalist Martin Bernklau typed his name and location into Microsoft’s Copilot to see how his articles would be picked up by the chatbot, the answers horrified him.
Copilot’s results had asserted that Bernklau was an escapee from a psychiatric institution, a convicted child abuser and a conman preying on widowers. For years, Bernklau had served as a court reporter and the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot had falsely blamed him for the crimes he had covered.
The accusations against Bernklau are not true, of course, and are examples of generative AI “hallucinations.” These are inaccurate or nonsensical responses to a prompt provided by the user and are alarmingly common with this technology. Anyone attempting to use AI should always proceed with great caution, because information from such systems needs validation and verification by humans before it can be trusted.
But why did Copilot hallucinate these terrible and false accusations?
Copilot and other generative AI systems like ChatGPT and Google Gemini are large language models (LLMs). The underlying information processing system in LLMs is known as a “deep learning neural network,” which uses a large amount of human language to “train” its algorithm.
From the training data, the algorithm learns the statistical relationship between different words and how likely certain words are to appear together in a text. This allows the LLM to predict the most likely response based on calculated probabilities. LLMs do not possess actual knowledge.
The data used to train Copilot and other LLMs is vast. While the exact details of the size and composition of the Copilot or ChatGPT corpora are not publicly disclosed, Copilot incorporates the entire ChatGPT corpus plus Microsoft’s own specific additional articles. The predecessors of ChatGPT4—ChatGPT3 and 3.5—are known to have used “hundreds of billions of words. “
Copilot is based on ChatGPT4 which uses a “larger” corpus than ChatGPT3 or 3.5. While we don’t know how many words this is exactly, jumps between different versions of ChatGPT tend to be orders of magnitude greater. We also know that the corpus includes books, academic journals and news articles. And herein lies the reason that Copilot hallucinated that Bernklau was responsible for heinous crimes.
Bernklau had regularly reported on criminal trials of abuse, violence and fraud, which were published in national and international newspapers. His articles must presumably have been included in the language corpus which uses specific words relating to the nature of the cases.
Since Bernklau spent years reporting in court, when Copilot is asked about him, the most probable words associated with his name relate to the crimes he has covered as a reporter. This is not the only case of its kind and we will probably see more in years to come.
In 2023, US talk radio host Mark Walters successfully sued OpenAI, the company which owns ChatGPT. Walters hosts a show called Armed American Radio, which explores and promotes gun ownership rights in the US.
The LLM had hallucinated that Walters had been sued by the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), a US organization that supports gun rights, for defrauding and embezzling funds. This was after a journalist queried ChatGPT about a real and ongoing legal case concerning the SAF and the Washington state attorney general.
Walters had never worked for SAF and was not involved in the case between SAF and Washington state in any way. But because the foundation has similar objectives to Walters’ show, one can deduce that the text content in the language corpus built up a statistical correlation between Walters and the SAF which caused the hallucination.
Corrections
Correcting these issues across the entire language corpus is nearly impossible. Every single article, sentence and word included in the corpus would need to be scrutinized to identify and remove biased language. Given the scale of the dataset, this is impractical.
The hallucinations that falsely associate people with crimes, such as in Bernklau’s case, are even harder to detect and address. To permanently fix the issue, Copilot would need to remove Bernklau’s name as author of the articles to break the connection.
To address the problem, Microsoft has engineered an automatic response that is given when a user prompts Copilot about Bernklau’s case. The response details the hallucination and clarifies that Bernklau is not guilty of any of the accusations. Microsoft has said that it continuously incorporates user feedback and rolls out updates to improve its responses and provide a positive experience.
There are probably many more similar examples that are yet to be discovered. It becomes impractical to try and address every lone issue. Hallucinations are an unavoidable byproduct of how the underlying LLM algorithm works.
As users of these systems, the only way for us to know that output is trustworthy is to interrogate it for validity using some established methods. This could include finding three independent sources that agree with assertions made by the LLM before accepting the output as correct, as my own research has shown.
For the companies that own these tools, like Microsoft or OpenAI, there is no real proactive strategy that can be taken to avoid these issues. All they can really do is to react to the discovery of similar hallucinations.
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Why Microsoft’s Copilot AI falsely accused court reporter of crimes he covered (2024, September 19)
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