Curious Behavior

Provine boldly goes where other scientists seldom tread—in search of hiccups, coughs, yawns, sneezes, and other lowly, undignified, human behaviors. Our earthiest instinctive acts bear the imprint of our evolutionary origins and can be valuable tools for understanding how the human brain works and what makes us different from other species.

Robert Provine boldly goes where other scientists seldom tread—in search of hiccups, coughs, yawns, sneezes, and other lowly, undignified human behaviors. Upon investigation, these instinctive acts bear the imprint of our evolutionary origins and can be uniquely valuable tools for understanding how the human brain works and what makes us different from other species. Many activities showcased in Curious Behavior are contagious, but none surpasses yawning in this regard—just reading the word can make one succumb. Though we often take it as a sign of sleepiness or boredom, yawning holds clues to the development of our sociality and ability to empathize with others. Its inescapable transmission reminds us that we are sometimes unaware, neurologically programmed beasts of the herd. Other neglected behaviors yield similar revelations. Tickling, we learn, may be the key to programming personhood into robots. Coughing comes in musical, medical, and social varieties. Farting and belching have import for the evolution of human speech. And prenatal behavior is offered as the strangest exhibit of all, defying postnatal logic in every way. Our earthiest acts define Homo sapiens as much as language, bipedalism, tool use, and other more studied characteristics. As Provine guides us through peculiarities right under our noses, he beckons us to follow with self-experiments: tickling our own feet, keeping a log of when we laugh, and attempting to suppress yawns and sneezes. Such humble investigations provide fodder for grade school science projects as well as doctoral dissertations. Small Science can yield big rewards.

A highly effective guide to the use of organizational politics using strategies and tactics derived out of scholarly research.

Curious Dave's Behavior Journey reveals the ground-level events of the author's life for the past thirty-five years. Dave uses examples of unhealthy and healthy behavior to support the need for us to improve our character. He believes that most of our unhealthy behaviors are only being human and can be improved. This book is amazing because it reveals views of organizational and individual behaviors that most of us never see. Purely by accident, Dave was placed in office locations where it was easy to eavesdrop on management meetings. He learned some very disturbing information. Many leaders and managers make decisions based on their insecurities; and often these decisions cause the demise of the organization. Dave has conducted studies in three types of personal behavior. These studies, like the eavesdropping, reveal that we must improve our character. The studies were performed over five years. The studies were about personal driving habits, safety and security habits, and sexual arousal. His conclusions are fresh and rather alarming in some areas. And in some cases the findings are riveting. The book represents a great view of what is going on in America and how we can improve and improve our country.

Comparative Blended Learning Practices and Environments offers in-depth analysis of new technologies in blended learning that promote creativity, critical thinking, and meaningful learning.

An exhilarating, genre-bending exploration of curiosity’s powerful capacity to connect ideas and people. Curious about something? Google it. Look at it. Ask a question. But is curiosity simply information seeking? According to this exhilarating, genre-bending book, what’s left out of the conventional understanding of curiosity are the wandering tracks, the weaving concepts, the knitting of ideas, and the thatching of knowledge systems—the networks, the relations between ideas and between people. Curiosity, say Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett, is a practice of connection: it connects ideas into networks of knowledge, and it connects knowers themselves, both to the knowledge they seek and to each other. Zurn and Bassett—identical twins who write that their book “represents the thought of one mind and two bodies”—harness their respective expertise in the humanities and the sciences to get irrepressibly curious about curiosity. Traipsing across literatures of antiquity and medieval science, Victorian poetry and nature essays, as well as work by writers from a variety of marginalized communities, they trace a multitudinous curiosity. They identify three styles of curiosity—the busybody, who collects stories, creating loose knowledge networks; the hunter, who hunts down secrets or discoveries, creating tight networks; and the dancer, who takes leaps of creative imagination, creating loopy ones. Investigating what happens in a curious brain, they offer an accessible account of the network neuroscience of curiosity. And they sketch out a new kind of curiosity-centric and inclusive education that embraces everyone’s curiosity. The book performs the very curiosity that it describes, inviting readers to participate—to be curious with the book and not simply about it.

Louis Brownlow, one of public administration’s historical thinkers, once argued, “[T]he principal requirement of a good administrator is an insatiable curiosity.” This book is rooted in the notion that public administrators must practice insatiable curiosity to be effective, fair, and democratic. By seeking to uncover how the world works, and therefore practicing curiosity, public administrators may be more likely to move toward evidence-based decisions, improving the efficacy and efficiency of public service. Curiosity encourages public administrators to seek answers in a caring manner and, in doing so, to empathize with the communities that they serve. First, the book incorporates the concept of curiosity into the field of public administration. Scholarship in philosophy, business administration, social science, and other scholarly fields addresses curiosity, but public administration has yet to examine this concept in detail. This book fills that hole in the literature. Second, the book presents novel primary data on curiosity in public agencies by examining curious organizations and surveying local government officers. Third, the book presents novel primary data on how public affairs faculty view curiosity and incorporate the concept in their research and the classroom. Lastly, author William Hatcher integrates this information in the book’s final chapter to present a model of administrative curiosity, focusing on creating a guide for future research and teaching. Thus, this book serves as a roadmap for developing a new doctrine of curiosity in public administration theory and practice, and it will be of enormous interest to students enrolled in public affairs courses as well as practicing public administrators and nonprofit managers.

This book provides the foundation for a lifelong journey of ethical practice in service for individuals with autism spectrum disorder and other developmental disabilities. The second edition of Understanding Ethics in Applied Behavior Analysis includes an explanation of each element in the Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts, along with considerations for ethical practice and examples from the field. Professional behavior for the behavior analyst is also addressed when fulfilling roles as teacher, employee, manager, colleague, advocate, or member of a multidisciplinary team. This new edition expands on the first chapter’s introduction of moral philosophy, adds a new chapter on ethical decision-making and core principles, and provides a study guide to assist those preparing for the Behavior Analyst Certification Board exams. Drawing upon Beirne and Sadavoy’s combined 40 years of clinical experience as well as the reflections of colleagues in the field, this is an indispensable guide to ethics for behavior analysis students.