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.

Ecolead is a major European applied research project on collaborative networked organisations (CNOs)

Ecolead (European Collaborative Networked Organisations Leadership Initiative) looks like it could be one of the most important strategic research projects in the virtual collaboration area in Europe and beyond over the next 4 years.

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:

James Thornton in “You Have Three Brains” for TheBiggestIdeas.com reports on research by Paul D Maclean on the ‘triune’ brain. Apparently Maclean’s research suggests that we each have, not one but, three brains nested within our skulls – a lizard brain, a dog brain, and a human brain. This research got me thinking – if teams are really living systems then they might have 3 brains too?

Last week I made a post seeking interest from organisational team leaders who would like to collaborate with me in a unique mini research project into the beliefs of high-performing teams. Thank you to those who have expressed an interest - I will be getting back to you shortly. I am now announcing that the closing date for me to be able to consider any further expressions of interest in this collaborative research project is next Friday (October 21).

The importance of team ‘early movers’

(or Why do I always have to take out the garbage?)

IMPORTANT BIOTEAMING COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH OPPORTUNITY

I am seeking interest from organisational team leaders who would like to collaborate with me in a unique mini research project into the beliefs of high-performing teams.

VE-Forum is an excellent source of information on European research activity in the virtual networks and clusters area. It has also just has produced a special edition of its Newsletter "DG INFSO D5 Enterprise Networking Clusters" which gives an overview of the huge amount of European Union research underway in this area which includes:

Human agents - learning from advances in distributed computing

I am delighted to republish a bioteams guest essay on “Agents: Technology and Usage” by James Odell which is attached in full as a pdf.

Evolutionary science has many lessons for our online communities

David Bollier offers a very interesting overview perspective of a workshop co-sponsored by the Berkman Centre and The Gruter Institute.The workshop, involving lawyers, biologists, social scientists, technologists and policy experts, focussed on what evolutionary science and "commons scholarship" can teach us about the social architecture of co-operative on-line communities ('on-line commons').