scholarly journals Large-scale cooperation in small-scale foraging societies

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Boyd ◽  
Peter J Richerson

We present evidence that people in small-scale, mobile hunter-gatherer societies cooperated in large numbers to produce collective goods. Foragers engaged in large-scale communal hunts, constructed shared capital facilities; they made shared investments in improving the local environment; and they participated in warfare, alliance, and trade. Large-scale collective action often played a crucial role in subsistence. The provision of public goods involved the cooperation of many individuals, so each person made only a small contribution. This evidence suggests that large-scale cooperation occurred in the Pleistocene societies that encompass most of human evolutionary history, and therefore it is unlikely that large-scale cooperation in Holocene food producing societies results from an evolved psychology shaped only in small group interactions. Instead, large scale human cooperation needs to be explained as an adaptation, likely rooted in the distinctive features of human biology, grammatical language, increased cognitive ability, and cumulative cultural adaptation.

2022 ◽  
pp. 388-398
Author(s):  
Ayesha Khalid ◽  
Shariq Aziz Butt ◽  
Tauseef Jamal ◽  
Saikat Gochhait

The agile model is a very vast and popular model in use in the software industry currently. It changes the way software is developed. It was introduced in 2001 to overcome deficiencies of software development in a workshop arranged by researchers and practitioners who were involved with the agile concept. They introduced the complete agile manifesto. The agile model has main components that make it more viable for use in well-organized software development. One of these is scrum methodology. The reason for the agile-scrum popularity is its use for small-scale projects, making small teams and allows change requests at any stage of a project from the client. It works for client satisfaction. Instead of so much popularity and distinctive features, agile-scrum also has some limitations when used for large scale projects development that makes it less efficient for development. This article discusses the agile-scrum methodology and its limitations when using for large-scale project organization.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis P. McManamon ◽  
John Doershuk ◽  
William D. Lipe ◽  
Tom McCulloch ◽  
Christopher Polglase ◽  
...  

AbstractPublic agencies at all levels of government and other organizations that manage archaeological resources often face the problem of many undertakings that collectively impact large numbers of individually significant archaeological resources. Such situations arise when an agency is managing a large area, such as a national forest, land management district, park unit, wildlife refuge, or military installation. These situations also may arise in regard to large-scale development projects, such as energy developments, highways, reservoirs, transmission lines, and other major infrastructure projects that cover substantial areas. Over time, the accumulation of impacts from small-scale projects to individual archaeological resources may degrade landscape or regional-scale cultural phenomena. Typically, these impacts are mitigated at the site level without regard to how the impacts to individual resources affect the broader population of resources. Actions to mitigate impacts rarely are designed to do more than avoid resources or ensure some level of data recovery at single sites. Such mitigation activities are incapable of addressing research question at a landscape or regional scale.


Animals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 3179
Author(s):  
Joshua N. Lorbach ◽  
Magnus R. Campler ◽  
Brad Youngblood ◽  
Morgan B. Farnell ◽  
Tariku J. Beyene ◽  
...  

The U.S. swine industry is currently inadequately prepared to counteract the increasing threat of high-consequence diseases. Although approved and preferred depopulation guidelines exist, ventilation shutdown (VSD+) is currently the only method being deployed during a state of emergency to depopulate large swine populations. However, the permitted use of VSD+ during constrained circumstances has been criticized due to raised swine welfare concerns. The objective of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of carbon dioxide gas (CO2), nitrogen gas (N2), compressed air foam (CAF), compressed nitrogen foam (CAF-N2) and aspirated foam (AF) during a 15-min dwell time on adult swine in an emergency depopulation situation. A small-scale trial using 12 sows per depopulation method showed the highest efficiency to induce cessation of movement for AF and CO2 (186.0 ± 48 vs. 202.0 ± 41, s ± SD). The ease of implementation and safety favored AF for further investigation. A large-scale field study using AF to depopulate 134 sows in modified rendering trailers showed a mean fill time of 103.8 s (SD: 5.0 s) and cessation of movement of 128.0 s (SD: 18.6 s) post filling. All sows were confirmed dead post-treatment for both trials. The implementation of AF in modified rendering trailers may allow for a safe and reliable method that allows for the expedient and mobile depopulation of both small and large numbers of sows during an emergency.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
William K. Chang ◽  
David VanInsberghe ◽  
Libusha Kelly

Abstract Microbiome dynamics influence the health and functioning of human physiology and the environment and are driven in part by interactions between large numbers of microbial taxa, making large-scale prediction and modeling a challenge. Here, using topological data analysis, we identify states and dynamical features relevant to macroscopic processes. We show that gut disease processes and marine geochemical events are associated with transitions between community states, defined as topological features of the data density. We find a reproducible two-state succession during recovery from cholera in the gut microbiomes of multiple patients, evidence of dynamic stability in the gut microbiome of a healthy human after experiencing diarrhea during travel, and periodic state transitions in a marine Prochlorococcus community driven by water column cycling. Our approach bridges small-scale fluctuations in microbiome composition and large-scale changes in phenotype without details of underlying mechanisms, and provides an assessment of microbiome stability and its relation to human and environmental health.


2020 ◽  
Vol 495 (4) ◽  
pp. 4463-4474
Author(s):  
J G Sorce

ABSTRACT Provided a random realization of the cosmological model, observations of our cosmic neighbourhood now allow us to build simulations of the latter down to the non-linear threshold. The resulting local Universe models are thus accurate up to a given residual cosmic variance. Namely some regions and scales are apparently not constrained by the data and seem purely random. Drawing conclusions together with their uncertainties involves then statistics implying a considerable amount of computing time. By applying the constraining algorithm to paired fixed fields, this paper diverts the original techniques from their first use to efficiently disentangle and estimate uncertainties on local Universe simulations obtained with random fields. Paired fixed fields differ from random realizations in the sense that their Fourier mode amplitudes are fixed and they are exactly out of phase. Constrained paired fixed fields show that only 20 per cent of the power spectrum on large scales (> tens of megaparsecs) is purely random. Namely 80 per cent of it is partly constrained by the large-scale/ small-scale data correlations. Additionally, two realizations of our local environment obtained with paired fixed fields of the same pair constitute an excellent non-biased average or quasi-linear realization of the latter, namely the equivalent of hundreds of constrained simulations. The variance between these two realizations gives the uncertainty on the achievable local Universe simulations. These two simulations will permit enhancing faster our local cosmic web understanding thanks to a drastically reduced required computational time to appreciate its modelling limits and uncertainties.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Andrew Cardow ◽  
Jean-Sebastien Imbeau ◽  
Bill Willie Apiata ◽  
Jenny Martin

Abstract Transition from the military environment into a civilian environment is a topic that has seen increasing attention within the last two decades. There is, in the literature, a clearly articulated issue that transition from the military to the civilian world is somewhat different to transitioning from school to work, or from career to career, or from work to retirement. Many, but not all, of the extant examples regarding military transition are case studies, focus groups or small-scale qualitative surveys. The following article details a large-scale survey that took place in New Zealand in 2019. From just over 1400 responses, a wide range of information was gathered. The aim of the survey was to uncover the experiences of military who had undergone transition within New Zealand. In this respect, the survey was exploratory. We report here the qualitative results that expand the existing body of knowledge of military transition. Our results are in line with international results and demonstrate that a large majority of respondents had a less than desirable transition experience. The contribution made therefore is a reinforcement that current practice in this area is needing a great deal of attention. The following outlines the experiences our New Zealand-based respondents had and how this mirrors the extant international literature. As this was the first survey of its kind to attract large numbers of respondents within New Zealand, the results and discussion that follow present aspects of transition that the Ministry of Defence and the New Zealand Defence Force may wish to consider when planning future transition programmes.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
William K. Chang ◽  
Dave VanInsberghe ◽  
Libusha Kelly

AbstractMicrobiome dynamics influence the health and functioning of human physiology and the environment and are driven in part by interactions between large numbers of microbial taxa, making large-scale prediction and modeling a challenge. Here, using topological data analysis, we identify states and dynamical features relevant to macroscopic processes.We show that gut disease processes and marine geochemical events are associated with transitions between community states, defined as topological features of the data density. We find a reproducible two-state succession during recovery from cholera in the gut microbiomes of multiple patients, evidence of dynamic stability in the gut microbiome of a healthy human after experiencing diarrhea during travel, and periodic state transitions in a marine Prochlorococcus community driven by water column cycling. Our approach bridges small-scale fluctuations in microbiome composition and large-scale changes in phenotype without details of underlying mechanisms, and provides a novel assessment of microbiome stability and its relation to human and environmental health.


1986 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernest L. Schusky ◽  
Peter Heinricher

Recent technological and political changes in the Sahel resemble earlier innovations that have failed to increase production or achieve equity in distribution, but perceived needs for large-scale changes remain, based on numerous misperceptions of what occurred in the famine of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drought, large numbers of deaths, and decimation of cattle herds have been stereotyped to justify large capital-intensive development projects. Large dams, cash crops, and complex controls of the desert are among the projected schemes to increase production. The thesis of this article is that if a valid perspective of what occurred to the Sahel ecology in the 1960s is constructed, then capital-intensive projects frequently encouraging commercialization of agriculture will be replaced by labor-intensive, small-scale projects that involve primarily subsistence farming. The possible surplus from subsistence patterns is likely to exceed the surplus of large-scale efforts for a variety of reasons.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-94
Author(s):  
Ayesha Khalid ◽  
Shariq Aziz Butt ◽  
Tauseef Jamal ◽  
Saikat Gochhait

The agile model is a very vast and popular model in use in the software industry currently. It changes the way software is developed. It was introduced in 2001 to overcome deficiencies of software development in a workshop arranged by researchers and practitioners who were involved with the agile concept. They introduced the complete agile manifesto. The agile model has main components that make it more viable for use in well-organized software development. One of these is scrum methodology. The reason for the agile-scrum popularity is its use for small-scale projects, making small teams and allows change requests at any stage of a project from the client. It works for client satisfaction. Instead of so much popularity and distinctive features, agile-scrum also has some limitations when used for large scale projects development that makes it less efficient for development. This article discusses the agile-scrum methodology and its limitations when using for large-scale project organization.


2000 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 396-398
Author(s):  
Roger Smith
Keyword(s):  

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