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morslaQ: What is the effect of current communication technologies on the communication process and language?
I find it amusing that I'm now using a blog to collate information on the way communications have been affected by technology...
"Finding a good time to visit with her is an experience in teenage time management. "We’re the most last-minute people you'll ever meet," she says of her posse's complicated lives. To find pattern in the way her crowd swarms, it helps to remind yourself that college kids, like the proteins that underlie much of human nature, really are much more organized than a tangle of spaghetti. There is logic in the complexity. Events do work out."
Joel Garreau - Radical Evolution
Swarming is a seemingly amorphous, but deliberately structured, coordinated, strategic way to perform military strikes from alldirections. It employs a sustainable pulsing of force and/or fire thatis directed from both close-in and stand-off positions. It will work best - perhaps it will only work - if it is designed mainly around the deployment of myriad, small, dispersed, networked maneuver units. This calls for an organizational redesign - involving the creation of platoon-like pods joined in company-like clusters - that would keep but retool the most basic military unit structures.
Swarming and the Future of Conflict
"The people up front and the people in back are in constant communication, by mobile phone and walkie-talkies and hand signals,"says Eidinger. "Everything is played by ear. On the fly, we can change the direction of the swarm, a giant bike mass. That's why the police have very little control."
The US military has been one of the earliest institutions to fear and see the possibilities in swarming. John Arquilla co-authored Swarming and the Future of Conflict two years ago for the think-tank Rand Corporation and the Secretary of Defence. He sees swarming - "a deliberately structured, co-ordinated,strategic way to strike from all directions" - as spearheading a revolution in military affairs.
"The military has much to learn from Critical Mass," he writes in an e-mail. "In future campaigns, leaders might benefit by simply drawing up a list of targets and attaching point values to them. Then units in the field, in the air and at sea could simply pick whatever hadn't yet been taken. The commander would review periodic progress, adjust point values, and basically stay out of the way of the swarm."
Joel Garreau - Global Swarming
IRAQ: A large swarm destroyed twenty out of sixty fuel tankers in an Iraqi Oil Ministryconvoy built to protect tanker drivers against threatened attacks.These threats, some attributed to Ansar al-Sunna, caused a ten daywalk-out of fearful tanker drivers.
SWARM: Cutting Iraq's Gasoline Lines
More swarming links: http://www.sci.fi/~fta/swarming.htm
Also: http://www.mobileactive.org/ (Cell Phones for Civic Engagement)
I find it amusing that I'm now using a blog to collate information on the way communications have been affected by technology...
"Finding a good time to visit with her is an experience in teenage time management. "We’re the most last-minute people you'll ever meet," she says of her posse's complicated lives. To find pattern in the way her crowd swarms, it helps to remind yourself that college kids, like the proteins that underlie much of human nature, really are much more organized than a tangle of spaghetti. There is logic in the complexity. Events do work out."
Joel Garreau - Radical Evolution
Swarming is a seemingly amorphous, but deliberately structured, coordinated, strategic way to perform military strikes from alldirections. It employs a sustainable pulsing of force and/or fire thatis directed from both close-in and stand-off positions. It will work best - perhaps it will only work - if it is designed mainly around the deployment of myriad, small, dispersed, networked maneuver units. This calls for an organizational redesign - involving the creation of platoon-like pods joined in company-like clusters - that would keep but retool the most basic military unit structures.
Swarming and the Future of Conflict
"The people up front and the people in back are in constant communication, by mobile phone and walkie-talkies and hand signals,"says Eidinger. "Everything is played by ear. On the fly, we can change the direction of the swarm, a giant bike mass. That's why the police have very little control."
The US military has been one of the earliest institutions to fear and see the possibilities in swarming. John Arquilla co-authored Swarming and the Future of Conflict two years ago for the think-tank Rand Corporation and the Secretary of Defence. He sees swarming - "a deliberately structured, co-ordinated,strategic way to strike from all directions" - as spearheading a revolution in military affairs.
"The military has much to learn from Critical Mass," he writes in an e-mail. "In future campaigns, leaders might benefit by simply drawing up a list of targets and attaching point values to them. Then units in the field, in the air and at sea could simply pick whatever hadn't yet been taken. The commander would review periodic progress, adjust point values, and basically stay out of the way of the swarm."
Joel Garreau - Global Swarming
IRAQ: A large swarm destroyed twenty out of sixty fuel tankers in an Iraqi Oil Ministryconvoy built to protect tanker drivers against threatened attacks.These threats, some attributed to Ansar al-Sunna, caused a ten daywalk-out of fearful tanker drivers.
SWARM: Cutting Iraq's Gasoline Lines
More swarming links: http://www.sci.fi/~fta/swarming.htm
Also: http://www.mobileactive.org/ (Cell Phones for Civic Engagement)
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no subject
Date: 2006-05-25 03:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-25 03:58 am (UTC)If you chance across anything interesting, post a link in here ;) Research by swarm!
no subject
Date: 2006-05-25 04:26 am (UTC)Swarming is exactly what happens in Battlefield2 when you play it online. I won't go any further as I'd just keep going and going...
It just seems like a (logical) extension to one of the old napoleonic era "rules of warfare"; Divide to move - Concentrate to fight.
If your work is going to focus on swarming, a good thing to throw-in might be a mention of Boids and how a few simple rules in autonomous, neighbour-aware agents can create unexpected behaviours.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-26 02:13 am (UTC)The thing that seems to be making it so effective (in warfare) is the level of communication they are capable of - between patrols, command, air units, etc. The "divided" units cover more ground and bring in far more surveillance data than any concentrated force, and then they have the mobility and range to capitalise on it.
The US started looking into it when they realised how horrifically vulnerable non-military infrastructure is to a swarm attack. Any group that does its research can pick targets that give cascading effects when knocked out, so a couple of nodes can lock down a city.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-26 02:20 am (UTC)Just realised that a swarming attack is basically just a military flashmob!