How ants avoid wasted effort: new research
Stumble It!Usually we think of the importance of sharing 'positive' intelligence between organisational team members (for example Virtual Team Behavior - Curiosity and Learning). However recent UK research on foraging Pharaoh ants indicates that sharing 'negative' intelligence to avoid wasted effort may be just as important.
In Scents and sensibility: How foraging ants get the food we read how Pharaoh ants scouting for food place a tiny scent marker on branches that do not lead to a reward, according to a study just published in Nature, the weekly British science journal.
The team concludes that the ants use a repellent pheromone to mark unrewarding branches at "decision-points" - where branches fork.
"It provides advance warning, like human road signs situated before junctions," the authors suggest.
Pheromone-based messaging is the oldest and most evolved form of biological signalling and its potential application in mobile and distributed human teams is described in The perfect mobile group communications system.
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Bioteams Books Reviews
Mobile phone users: are we now cyborgs
The term cyborg is used to designate an organism which is a mixture of organic and synthetic parts so designed to enhance its abilities via technology. William Mitchell a professor at MIT Media Lab believes that through our mobile devices we are all becoming mobile cyborgs and its for the better. In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City which he discusses in an interview with James Harkin Mitchell describes how the new communications technologies have overlaid our city spaces with central nervous systems connecting us into the wireless ether via our mobile devices which act as umbilical cords to anchor us into the information society's digital infrastructure.
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Swarm behavior and organizational teams
Frank Lacombe of the Evolutionary and Swarm Design Group at the University of Calgary offers a good introduction to the concept of Swarm Behavior. Using examples of ants, bees, birds, fish, and termites he identifies the two main advantages of such decentralized systems: robustness and flexibility. The objective of bioteaming is to realise these same two swarm behavior advantages in organisational teams and inter-organisational business networks.
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Bees recognise human faces
The pattern recognition skills of bees are well-known, thought to have evolved to enable them to discriminate between different types of flowers. As social insects, they can also recognise and differentiate between their hivemates. Now a new study shows that these capabilities are so powerful that bees can recognize human faces better than some humans and with one-ten thousandth of the brain cells. The results may help lead to better face-recognition software. To read boingboing synopsis.
Why do humans cooperate
Without perceived fairness cooperation breaks down
Andrew Brown, writing in The Guardian, on Saturday October 29, 2005, Basic instincts - Humans are inclined to love their neighbours, so long as they play fair points out firstly that co-operative and altruistic behavior between humans must make sense or else evolution would have rendered it extinct:
The good thing about a pheromone marker is that it fades over time; it has a built-in sunset clause. A path that was once deemed unproductive can be re-explored and re-evaluated in the future when conditions have changed.
Very good point - I really the idea of 'sunset clauses' on experience and information. It is too easy to say this always/never works and not re-evaluate. I guess this what makes the difference between a team having 10 years experience and a team having 1 years experience repeated 10 times.