Group items tagged

The global spread of the H5N1 avian influenza has already extensively damaged economies worldwide and food security in developing countries. The spread of infection to new ecosystems results in viral adaptation to new hosts, including humans, which inevitably amplifies the potential for pandemic flu. H5N1 represents an unprecedented model of how influenza infections may become widespread. It is recognized that avian influenza viruses may be the progenitors of the next human pandemic virus, and for this reason their genetic evolution should be monitored and investigated in a timely manner. The full support of the international scientific community is therefore urgently required to better understand the spread and evolution of the virus, and the determinants of its transmissibility and pathogenicity in humans. This in turn demands that scientists with different fields of expertise have full access to comprehensive genetic sequence, clinical, and epidemiological data from both animal and human virus isolates.

A new model of evolution's origins traces the possible outlines of a critical and mysterious stage in Earth's infancy, when a few odd chemicals developed into the molecular ancestors of life as we know it.

an international team of researchers, headed by Timothy Wright, a professor at New Mexico State University and a researcher at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, collaborated to study the early evolution of the parrots.

The Future of the Internet - a federating theme for activities on future networks, software and service architectures, networked media systems and the Internet of Things. Over the last 20 years society, economy and technology evolved in many directions and into new areas. Many of these evolutions have created opportunities which must be taken into account when crafting future Networks.

Our focus is on what we are finding to be a powerful and intruiging intersection: the meeting of Hypermedia and Discourse - both theory and technology. Our interests are conceptual, and intensely practical: understanding and practicing the co-evolution of new digital media and practices for discussing and arguing about problems.

In a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, linguists observed an artificial language evolve from random to ordered, naturally adapting in ways that assured its reproduction.

The new Open Semantic Collaboration Architecture Foundation aims at common standards in collaborative software. The OSCA Foundation brings together organisations and individuals interested in ensuring interoperability between desktops and collaborative environments. It provides a discussion and exchange forum as well as a meeting place for different stakeholder to explore joint interests and define and execute appropriate actions, aiming to ensure the continued evolution and standardisation of an open vendor- and platform-neutral interoperable collaborative environment architecture.

The idea behind wectar is the fusion of two worlds, dmoz.org (open directory project) and delicious.com. This fusion is seen by us as a mutual enrichment of two stages in the evolution of the world wide web. What makes both of these two great services for sure true pioneers of web 3.0 is their generosity of making their unique knowledge available for mashups like wectar. Obviously wectar couldn't be without this generosity. We hope that we can repay this kindness to some extend by promoting both services through our web site.

The Gibeo Network is a new online service built by Gibeo. It's a rapidly growing community, a web annotation service, a open content-enhancing platform, an amazingly simple and useful tool for browsing and sharing the web. The Internet is still a fundamentally changing environment and this is the latest evolution in powerful online services. Simply browse the web by adding .gibeo.net to the end of any site, and it will be transparently enhanced by adding any community annotations and highlights to the page as well as enable the menu of personal tools available.

'"A Science of Non-Classical Dynamics Based on the Progressive Evolution of the Larger Whole" In this paper, I am trying to lay out a new form of computation, which focuses on the harmony reached in a system. This type of computation in some way resembles certain recent results in chaos theory and complexity theory. However, the orientation of harmony-seeking computation is toward a kind of computation which finds harmonious configurations, and so helps to create things, above all, in real world situations: buildings, towns, agriculture, and ecology. I try to show that this way of thinking about computation is closer to intuition and personal feeling than the processes we typically describe as "computations." It is also more useful, potentially, in a great variety of tasks we face in building and taking care of the surface of the Earth, and quite different in character since it is value-oriented, not value-free. Examples are taken from art, architecture, biology, physics, astrophysics, drawing, crystallography, meteorology, dynamics of living systems, and ecology'

A sixty-six page think piece

Evolution of the US Army knowledge management - It's not just an After Action Review anymore.

In particular, I am thinking about intentional communities -- communities in which people live geographically near one another, and participate in community together, by choice. They may live together or not, dine together or not, work together or not, worship together or not -- but at least they need to live within some limit of proximity to one another and participate in community together. These are the minimum requirements. But is there a model that works? Or is it time to design a new model that fits the time and place in which we live better?

This doctoral thesis offers a quantitative analysis of the top ten language editions of Wikipedia, from different perspectives. The main goal has been to trace the evolution in time of key descriptive and organizational parameters of Wikipedia and its community of authors.

We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems, which are considered to be robust, self-organising and scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex, dynamic problems.

complex brains and sophisticated cognition have arisen multiple times in independent lineages of animals during the earth's evolutionary history.

PHYLIP is a free package of programs for inferring phylogenies. It is distributed as source code, documentation files, and a number of different types of executables.

"Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive."

Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of "Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life," and his fellow social scientists are building the case that humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits.

The Tree of Life Web Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists and nature enthusiasts from around the world. On more than 10,000 World Wide Web pages, the project provides information about biodiversity, the characteristics of different groups of organisms, and their evolutionary history (phylogeny). Each page contains information about a particular group, e.g., salamanders, segmented worms, phlox flowers, tyrannosaurs, euglenids, Heliconius butterflies, club fungi, or the vampire squid. ToL pages are linked one to another hierarchically, in the form of the evolutionary tree of life. Starting with the root of all Life on Earth and moving out along diverging branches to individual species, the structure of the ToL project thus illustrates the genetic connections between all living things.