Consider The Ant

"The church must learn from the ant that Christians cannot be spectators. We are to be transforming the world!" A Christian book for small groups and individuals. Based on Proverbs 6:6-8 "Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest." Each chapter of Consider the Ant focuses on the incredible attributes of ants which offer a surprisingly great model of Christian greatness. Because of their willingness to submit and sacrifice for the good of the whole and because of their drive to self-initiate, ants are highly successful. In fact, their body mass equals that of total human body mass in the world. When local churches learn from ants, we will thrive as well. Pastors and small group leaders will find this book to be an indispensable asset in developing a community of Christ-like disciples who are quick to serve, anxious to reproduce, and sure to grow. Consider the Ant contains 10 chapters with small group discussion questions at the end of each chapter. While it is structured to easily use the first six chapters during Lent and the last four chapters after Easter, it can be used at any time of the year. Practical suggestions for building teams, empowering people and growing the church community and its outreach are given throughout each chapter. "I wrote this book because I want you, your family and your friends to know how much God loves all of us. Though our Creator directs our lives best in Scripture, we are given heaven's light in other ways. God created these ants, and they can teach us wisdom in so many ways. I hope when we see their dedication to others, we might be imitators of their best attributes-and always imitators of Christ." Whether you are building a team spirit or wishing that your group or church were better at multiplying, this book is for you.

A chronologically arranged collection of more than forty Jewish folktales with commentary, including "The Seven Questions of Alexander the Great, " "A Special Way of Thinking, " and "Which One Was Blind?"

Sometime in the first half of the twentieth century, a coterie of fire ants came ashore from South American ships docked in Mobile, Alabama. Fanning out across the region, the fire ants invaded the South, damaging crops, harassing game animals, and hindering harvesting methods. Responding to a collective call from southerners to eliminate these invasive pests, the U.S. Department of Agriculture developed a campaign that not only failed to eradicate the fire ants but left a wake of dead wildlife, sickened cattle, and public protest. With political intrigue, environmental tragedy, and such figures as Rachel Carson and E. O. Wilson, The Fire Ant Wars is a grippingly perceptive tale of changing social attitudes and scientific practices. Tracing the political and scientific eradication campaigns, Joshua Buhs's bracing study uses the saga as a means to consider twentieth-century American concepts of nature and environmental stewardship. In telling the story, Buhs explores how human concepts of nature evolve and how these ideas affect the natural and social worlds. Spotlighting a particular issue to discuss larger questions of science, public perceptions, and public policy—from pre-environmental awareness to the activist years of the early environmental movement—The Fire Ant Wars will appeal to historians of science, environmentalists, and biologists alike.

The application of advanced analytics in science and technology is rapidly expanding, and developing optimization technics is critical to this expansion. Instead of relying on dated procedures, researchers can reap greater rewards by utilizing cutting-edge optimization techniques like population-based metaheuristic models, which can quickly generate a solution with acceptable quality. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is one the most critical and widely used models among heuristics and meta-heuristics. This book discusses ACO applications in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEVs), multi-robot systems, wireless multi-hop networks, and preventive, predictive maintenance.

Ants communicate information by leaving pheromone tracks. A moving ant leaves, in varying quantities, some pheromone on the ground to mark its way. While an isolated ant moves essentially at random, an ant encountering a previously laid trail is able to detect it and decide with high probability to follow it, thus reinforcing the track with its own pheromone. The collective behavior that emerges is thus a positive feedback: where the more the ants following a track, the more attractive that track becomes for being followed; thus the probability with which an ant chooses a path increases with the number of ants that previously chose the same path. This elementary ant's behavior inspired the development of ant colony optimization by Marco Dorigo in 1992, constructing a meta-heuristic stochastic combinatorial computational methodology belonging to a family of related meta-heuristic methods such as simulated annealing, Tabu search and genetic algorithms. This book covers in twenty chapters state of the art methods and applications of utilizing ant colony optimization algorithms. New methods and theory such as multi colony ant algorithm based upon a new pheromone arithmetic crossover and a repulsive operator, new findings on ant colony convergence, and a diversity of engineering and science applications from transportation, water resources, electrical and computer science disciplines are presented.

A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021) From the “author to watch” (Kirkus Reviews) of The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley comes an “equal parts sarcastic and profound” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) novel about a teenage boy who must decide whether or not the world is worth saving. Henry Denton has spent years being periodically abducted by aliens. Then the aliens give him an ultimatum: The world will end in 144 days, and all Henry has to do to stop it is push a big red button. Only he isn’t sure he wants to. After all, life hasn’t been great for Henry. His mom is a struggling waitress held together by a thin layer of cigarette smoke. His brother is a jobless dropout who just knocked someone up. His grandmother is slowly losing herself to Alzheimer’s. And Henry is still dealing with the grief of his boyfriend’s suicide last year. Wiping the slate clean sounds like a pretty good choice to him. But Henry is a scientist first, and facing the question thoroughly and logically, he begins to look for pros and cons: in the bully who is his perpetual one-night stand, in the best friend who betrayed him, in the brilliant and mysterious boy who walked into the wrong class. Weighing the pain and the joy that surrounds him, Henry is left with the ultimate choice: push the button and save the planet and everyone on it…or let the world—and his pain—be destroyed forever.

About the Book King Solomon was a very wise man during his time because God gave him wisdom and exceedingly great understanding, and largeness of heart like the sand on the seashore (1Kings 4:29). He was further described according to verse 33 of 1 Kings 4 (TLB) as a great naturalist, with interest in animals, birds, snakes, fish and trees - from the great cedars of Lebanon down to the tiny hyssop which grows in cracks in the wall. Little wonder he was able to say with all confidence in Proverbs 6:6 that considering the ways of ants is capable of making one wise. He must have learnt certain doses of wisdom from them. With this wise man's recommendation in mind, I became inquisitive as to what lessons could be learnt from the ants. And fortunately for me, I was able to discover some of them which constitute the content of this book. I strongly believe that as you take your time to not only read these laws but also thoroughly digest them with readiness to apply them to your life, in no time you also will be referred to as wise. Now let's learn from the ants.

The series of biannual international conferences “ANTS – International C- ference on Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence”, now in its sixth edition, was started ten years ago, with the organization of ANTS’98. As some readers might recall, the ?rst edition of ANTS was titled “ANTS’98 – From Ant Colonies to Arti?cial Ants: First International Workshop on Ant Colony Op- mization. ” In fact, at that time the focus was mainly on ant colony optimization (ACO), the ?rst swarm intelligence algorithm to go beyond a pure scienti?c interest and to enter the realm of real-world applications. Interestingly, in the ten years after the ?rst edition there has been a gr- ing interest not only for ACO, but for a number of other studies that belong more generally to the area of swarmintelligence. The rapid growth of the swarm intelligence ?eld is attested by a number of indicators. First, the number of s- missions and participants to the ANTS conferences has steadily increased over the years. Second, a number of international conferences in computational - telligence and related disciplines organize workshops on subjects such as swarm intelligence, ant algorithms, ant colony optimization, and particle swarm op- mization. Third, IEEE startedorganizing,in 2003,the IEEE SwarmIntelligence Symposium (in order to maintain unity in this growing ?eld, we are currently establishingacooperationagreementbetweenIEEE SISandANTSsoastohave 1 IEEE SIS in odd years and ANTS in even years). Last, the Swarm Intelligence journal was born.