Bees can solve complex mathematical problems which keep computers busy for days, research has shown.
Bees can solve complex mathematical problems which keep computers busy for days, research has shown.
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The insects learn to fly the shortest route between flowers discovered in random order, effectively solving the “travelling salesman problem” , said scientists at Royal Holloway, University of London
The conundrum involves finding the shortest route that allows a travelling salesman to call at all the locations he has to visit. Computers solve the problem by comparing the length of all possible routes and choosing the one that is shortest.
Bees manage to reach the same solution using a brain the size of a grass seed.
Phi Beta Iota: This is one reason why we continue to believe that Human Intelligence (HUMINT) is vastly superior to Signals “Intelligence” (SIGINT) which we have come to think of as grotesquely expensive out of control unprocessed noise of little intelligence value. Of course, HUMINT without intelligent management is not intelligent at all, but our going in proposition is that HUMINT and Open Source Source Intelligence (OSINT) allow intelligent management to do much more with much less in the way of dollars, time, and footprint.
Our government and food industry both encourage more “personal responsibility” when it comes to battling the obesity epidemic and its associated diseases. They say people should exercise more self-control, make better choices, avoid overeating, and reduce their intake of sugar-sweetened drinks and processed food. We are led to believe that there is no good food or bad food, that it's all a matter of balance. This sounds good in theory, except for one thing…
New discoveries in science prove that industrially processed, sugar-, fat- and salt-laden food — food that is made in a plant rather than grown on a plant, as Michael Pollan would say — is biologically addictive.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a HUGE story that merits more emphasis at The Huffington Post. It is a perfect example of a newly-discovered “true cost” of the industrialization of agriculture which IS a contradiction in terms. It is a perfect example of government complacency, ignorance, and ultimately irresponsibility. This is precisely what public intelligence in the public interest is about.
The article, “Supply Chain Management and Sustainability: Procrastinating Integration in Mainstream Research” presents the results of a study conducted by several university researchers in The Netherlands. The researchers noted that “procrastination can be viewed as the result of several processes, determined not only by individual personality, but also by the following factors:
– availability of information;
– availability of opportunities and resources;
– skills and abilities;
– dependence on cooperation with others.”
In addition, in a review of more than 100 additional studies on procrastination, the following additional items were found to likely to influence procrastination:
– the nature of the task, and
– the context of the issue.
It is these last two issues that the authors raised as primary reasons for procrastination, especially regarding embedding sustainability research and practices in supply chain operations and management. The authors found that “the nature of the task”, because it’s often complex and requires many internal and external stakeholders, and therefore tends to “generate conflicts”. Also, the roots of supply chain management and related research are generally grounded in operations management and operations/logistics. Therefore, the researchers noted that environmental and social aspects of supply chain management are foreign, “out of context” and not wholly integrated into supply chain management and research. I would also argue that dependence on others is a key issue as well given the widespread, outward facing challenges associated with supply chain coordination.
Phi Beta Iota: Public Intelligence addresses this in two ways. First, it harnesses cognitive surplus while also integrating education, intelligence, and research to MAKE the information available to BOTH the public and the enterprises in question. Second, when the public sees an enterprise that is NOT making use of the information, the public begins to buycott (Jim Turner's term) that enterprise. Public Intelligence is going to shape markets starting in 2012 and starting with Health. See Summit '11.
Economic historians have long recognized that one of the biggest mistakes deepening and prolonging the Great Depression was the establishment of beggar-thy-neighbour policy wars, like trying to protect domestic production by imposing protective tariffs. But these tariffs hurt everyone, because the reduction in world trade depressed demand and production to a greater extent than tariffs protected production. The US contribution to this debacle was the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, passed by Congress and signed into law in June 1930. Smoot-Hawley raised the already high tariffs of the US by an average tariff by 20%. This prompted retaliatory — i.e., beggar-thy-neighbour — tariff increases in about two dozen other countries, thereby contributing materially to a collapse of world trade by two-thirds between 1930 and 1934 and materially worsening the global depression. FDR began to reverse course by reducing tariffs in 1934, but the damage was done. Some historians have argued that nationalistic beggar-thy-neighbor policies in the Depression's early years contributed to the rise in political extremism in Europe and to a lesser extent in the US.
The information contained in the attached report by Professor Michael Hudson suggests beggar-thy-neighbor policies are again raising their ugly heads. This time, they are taking the form of the predatory financial policies evolved by the US and its copycats in the Eurozone, who are trying to handoff the pain to each other and others in the world economy. Whereas Smoot-Hawley related directly to the real economy of production and consumption, and in that sense was at least theoretically related to the well being of the working class, the predatory financing policies described below are both parasitic and speculative. They benefit an already wealthy financial class that does not produce things. Moreover, the pattern of speculation described below may be even more dangerous economically, because, it is being financed by the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing policy, which like TARP, has the effect of postponing inevitable asset revaluations (downward) and debt liquidations, thereby feeding a festering cancer that is threatening to metastasize into a full-blown global debt deflation — i.e., a collapse of demand and consumer confidence via a massive repudiation and/or liquidation of debts.
Ominously, like the 1930s, right-wing political extremism is again on the march, but this time that extremism is evolving more rapidly in the US than in Europe.
I urge you to read the attached report carefully and … fasten your seat belts.
October 11, 2010
A CounterPunch Special Report
“Who Needs an Army When You Can Obtain the Usual Objective (Monetary Wealth and Asset Appropriation) Simply by Financial Means?”
What is to stop U.S. banks and their customers from creating $1 trillion, $10 trillion or even $50 trillion on their computer keyboards to buy up all the bonds and stocks in the world, along with all the land and other assets for sale in the hope of making capital gains and pocketing the arbitrage spreads by debt leveraging at less than 1 per cent interest cost? This is the game that is being played today.
Finance is the new form of warfare – without the expense of a military overhead and an occupation against unwilling hosts. It is a competition in credit creation to buy foreign resources, real estate, public and privatized infrastructure, bonds and corporate stock ownership. Who needs an army when you can obtain the usual objective (monetary wealth and asset appropriation) simply by financial means? All that is required is for central banks to accept dollar credit of depreciating international value in payment for local assets. Victory promises to go to whatever economy’s banking system can create the most credit, using an army of computer keyboards to appropriate the world’s resources. The key is to persuade foreign central banks to accept this electronic credit.
Phi Beta Iota: The obvious global response could be–should be–the immediate nationalization and expropriation of all US corporate “assets” derived from a history of predatory capitalism in the context of virtual colonialism and unilateral militarism. This means that the US stock market will crash again. It could mean that domestically the US could begin to see local movement expropriating land from absentee landlords such as the mega-agriculture companies that have destroyed agriculture, communities, and the land. These are interesting times. Washington is operating on 2% of the relevant information, lacks integrity, and has zero focus on “the public interest.”
DENVER — It has been one of the great murder mysteries of horticulture: what is killing off the honeybees?
Since 2006, 20 to 40 percent of the bee colonies in the United States alone have suffered “colony collapse.” Suspected culprits ranged from pesticides to genetically modified food.
Now, a unique partnership — of military scientists and entomologists — appears to have achieved a major breakthrough: identifying a new suspect, or two.
A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem, according to a paper by Army scientists in Maryland and bee experts in Montana in the online science journal PLoS One.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a very exciting story, and a real accomplishment by the US Army team applying Cold War bio-chemical skill sets to what may be the single greatest threat to US agriculture other than vanishing water. The Times did not, however, reference other causes of bee disorientation and dysfunction, such as cell phones and other electromagnetic pollutants.
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