The Human Swarm

The epic story and ultimate big history of how human society evolved from intimate chimp communities into the sprawling civilizations of a world-dominating species If a chimpanzee ventures into the territory of a different group, it will almost certainly be killed. But a New Yorker can fly to Los Angeles--or Borneo--with very little fear. Psychologists have done little to explain this: for years, they have held that our biology puts a hard upper limit--about 150 people--on the size of our social groups. But human societies are in fact vastly larger. How do we manage--by and large--to get along with each other? In this paradigm-shattering book, biologist Mark W. Moffett draws on findings in psychology, sociology and anthropology to explain the social adaptations that bind societies. He explores how the tension between identity and anonymity defines how societies develop, function, and fail. Surpassing Guns, Germs, and Steel and Sapiens, The Human Swarm reveals how mankind created sprawling civilizations of unrivaled complexity--and what it will take to sustain them.

The epic story of how humans evolved from intimate chimp communities into a world-dominating species.

This book draws inspiration from natural shepherding, whereby a farmer utilizes sheepdogs to herd sheep, to inspire a scalable and inherently human friendly approach to swarm control. The book discusses advanced artificial intelligence (AI) approaches needed to design smart robotic shepherding agents capable of controlling biological swarms or robotic swarms of unmanned vehicles. These smart shepherding agents are described with the techniques applicable to the control of Unmanned X Vehicles (UxVs) including air (unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs), ground (unmanned ground vehicles or UGVs), underwater (unmanned underwater vehicles or UUVs), and on the surface of water (unmanned surface vehicles or USVs). This book proposes how smart ‘shepherds’ could be designed and used to guide a swarm of UxVs to achieve a goal while ameliorating typical communication bandwidth issues that arise in the control of multi agent systems. The book covers a wide range of topics ranging from the design of deep reinforcement learning models for shepherding a swarm, transparency in swarm guidance, and ontology-guided learning, to the design of smart swarm guidance methods for shepherding with UGVs and UAVs. The book extends the discussion to human-swarm teaming by looking into the real-time analysis of human data during human-swarm interaction, the concept of trust for human-swarm teaming, and the design of activity recognition systems for shepherding. Presents a comprehensive look at human-swarm teaming; Tackles artificial intelligence techniques for swarm guidance; Provides artificial intelligence techniques for real-time human performance analysis.

Now a CW Original Series The Der Spiegel number #1 blockbuster bestseller about an intelligent life force that takes over the oceans and exacts revenge on mankind! Whales begin sinking ships. Toxic eyeless crabs poison Long Island’s water supply. Around the world, countries are beginning to feel the effects of the ocean’s revenge. In this riveting novel, full of twists, turns, and cliffhangers, a team of scientists discovers a strange, intelligent life force called the Yrr that takes form in marine animals in order to wreak havoc on man for his abuses. The Day After Tomorrow meets The Abyss in his gripping, scientifically realist, utterly imaginative thriller. With the compellingly creepy and vivid skill of this author to evoke story, character, and place, Frank Schatzing’s book are certain to find a home with fans of Michael Crichton.

Companies and organizations everywhere cite creativity as the most desirable - and elusive - leadership quality of the future. Yet scores measuring creativity among American children have been on the wane for decades. A specialist in creative leadership, professor James Haywood Rolling, Jr. knows firsthand that the classroom is a key to either unlocking or blocking the critical imagination. He argues that today's schools, with their focus on rote learning and test-taking, work to stymie creativity, leaving children cut off from their natural impulses and boxed in by low expectations. Drawing on cutting-edge research in the realms of biological swarm theory, systems theory, and complexity theory, Rolling shows why group collaboration and adaptive social networking make us both smarter and more creative, and how we can design education and workplace practices around these natural principles, instead of pushing a limited focus on individual achievement that serves neither children nor their future colleagues, managers and mentors. The surprising truth is that the future will be pioneered by the collective problem-solvers, making Swarm Intelligence a must-read for business leaders, educators, and anyone else concerned with nurturing creative intelligence and innovative habits in today's youth.

The notion of swarm intelligence was introduced for describing decentralized and self-organized behaviors of groups of animals. Then this idea was extrapolated to design groups of robots which interact locally to cumulate a collective reaction. Some natural examples of swarms are as follows: ant colonies, bee colonies, fish schooling, bird flocking, horse herding, bacterial colonies, multinucleated giant amoebae Physarum polycephalum, etc. In all these examples, individual agents behave locally with an emergence of their common effect. An intelligent behavior of swarm individuals is explained by the following biological reactions to attractants and repellents. Attractants are biologically active things, such as food pieces or sex pheromones, which attract individuals of swarm. Repellents are biologically active things, such as predators, which repel individuals of swarm. As a consequence, attractants and repellents stimulate the directed movement of swarms towards and away from the stimulus, respectively. It is worth noting that a group of people, such as pedestrians, follow some swarm patterns of flocking or schooling. For instance, humans prefer to avoid a person considered by them as a possible predator and if a substantial part of the group in the situation of escape panic (not less than 5%) changes the direction, then the rest follows the new direction, too. Some swarm patterns are observed among human beings under the conditions of their addictive behavior such as the behavior of alcoholics or gamers. The methodological framework of studying swarm intelligence is represented by unconventional computing, robotics, and cognitive science. In this book we aim to analyze new methodologies involved in studying swarm intelligence. We are going to bring together computer scientists and cognitive scientists dealing with swarm patterns from social bacteria to human beings. This book considers different models of simulating, controlling, and predicting the swarm behavior of different species from social bacteria to humans.

In a not-so-far-off future of diminished energy reserves and collapsing economies, thirty-seven-year-old Sandy Burch-Bailey lives a difficult existence. She survives by fishing, farming, and beekeeping in a small island community with her partner, Marvin, and their elderly and ill friend, Thompson. As they wait for an overdue supply ship to arrive with medicine for Thompson, vegetables go missing from their garden. A footprint in the soil leads Sandy to believe the thief is a homeless youngster. Childless and aching to be a mother, Sandy narrates her story to the child, reliving her life in a city plagued by power outages, unemployment, and violent protests. When the girl�â�€�™s life is threatened, Sandy and Marvin must come together to protect both the child and their fragile community. Told in two storylines divided by geography and time, Swarm is a suspenseful and powerful debut novel about survival and coming to terms with life�â�€�™s regrettable choices.

The IgNobel Prize-winner and author of Rock, Paper, Scissors applies science-based solutions to seemingly complex problems in life.