Hive Mind Research Articles

Second-year success: offering differentiated support to high achieving students

Transition to university has long been identified as a key issue for institutions, however, much of the research focuses on the transition from level 3 to University and progression into employment. What is less commonly addressed, is the transition through university, helping students to understand and navigate the different challenges, expectations, and opportunities associated with starting levels 5 and 6 (Hill and Tinker, 2018; Gahagan and Hunter, 2006). Additionally, there is often a focus on provision for learners who are struggling academically and much less consideration for those who are doing well and achieving high marks. Informed by the University of Surrey’s STARS programme, we, in collaboration with students, worked to identify issues and challenges faced by high achieving students when they entered their second year. Along with further work related opportunities, a multi-disciplinary network for high achieving students was identified as a useful approach. We are looking to the hive mind of ALDCon24 for practical examples of how student-led academic networks and other innovative initiatives can enhance transition through university for high-achieving students. (How) Does your institution/LD team support high achievers? (How) Should we be offering differentiated support? Can you share examples of any initiatives that may support this project?

Speculative Aetiology in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift: Towards a Decolonial Critique of History and Human

Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019) yokes together human, technological and ecological shifts in a sinister speculative register. While it seemingly corresponds to the posthuman Gothic, this framing is insufficient to describe gothic presentations of the postcolony where people are treated as inhuman surplus. Posthumanist approaches risk reinscribing the dehumanizing discourses that sustain coloniality as a social and environmental organization. The novel presents a two-fold decolonial critique. First, it irreverently rehearses Eurocentric Zambian history and the gothic tropes that enlivened it, only to decentre this account for a decolonial aetiology voiced by a mosquito hive mind. Second, given that history is a story of how the ‘human’ came to be, the figures of biological excess unsettle the colonial category ‘human.’ These interwoven strands of decolonial critique unseat colonial evolutionary teleology in favour of a plural, multispecies aetiology, best read through a decolonial ecoGothic lens that exposes coloniality as both an ecological and social project.

Cybernetic Hive Minds: A Review

Insect swarms and migratory birds are known to exhibit something known as a hive mind, collective consciousness, and herd mentality, among others. This has inspired a whole new stream of robotics known as swarm intelligence, where small-sized robots perform tasks in coordination. The social media and smartphone revolution have helped people collectively work together and organize in their day-to-day jobs or activism. This revolution has also led to the massive spread of disinformation amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic by alt-right Neo Nazi Cults like QAnon and their counterparts from across the globe, causing increases in the spread of infection and deaths. This paper presents the case for a theoretical cybernetic hive mind to explain how existing cults like QAnon weaponize group think and carry out crimes using social media-based alternate reality games. We also showcase a framework on how cybernetic hive minds have come into existence and how the hive mind might evolve in the future. We also discuss the implications of these hive minds for the future of free will and how different malfeasant entities have utilized these technologies to cause problems and inflict harm by various forms of cyber-crimes and predict how these crimes can evolve in the future.

A High-Speed Scientific Hive Mind Emerged: Researchers found new forms of rapid communication and collaboration.

A High-Speed Scientific Hive Mind Emerged: Researchers found new forms of rapid communication and collaboration.

Exhausted and Not Doing Enough? The Productivity Paradox of Contemporary Academia

Professors today struggle with unreasonable workloads and a work management format antithetical to high quality research and teaching. Recent studies show that many professors suffer from high levels of stress, anxiety, and exhaustion, and several studies report high levels of burnout. The reasons for this situation are not yet fully understood. In this article, I discuss the current academic work management format as a key motive that hinders the well-being of professors and the quality of their work. To understand this issue, the article explores the concept of deep work in relation to academia. It examines the contrasting circumstances of deep work and the continual and disruptive mode of communication required by the hyperactive hive mind. Work based on instant digital communication tools takes a hidden toll on the ability of professors to manage their attention. Instant communications among academic staff members disrupts the deep work required for engagement in research and teaching. To obtain the best possible results from faculty, we should manage attention as a scarce and valuable resource. To do this requires redesigning the management of academic work, a project outside the remit of most academic professionals—or the professors subject to the demands of the hyperactive hive mentality.

Collective Action and Social Ontology in Thomas Aquinas

Abstract In this paper I argue that there are resources in the work of Thomas Aquinas that amount to a unique approach to what David P. Schweikard and Hans Bernhard Schmid’s call the “Central Problem” facing theorists of collective intentionality and action. That is to say, Aquinas can be said to affirm both (1) the “Individual Ownership Claim” and (2) the “Irreducibility Claim,” coherently and compellingly. Regarding the Individual Ownership Claim, I argue that Aquinas’s concept of “general virtue” (virtus generalis) buttresses an account of the way in which individuals act collectively qua individuals, i.e., without invoking hive minds or other scientifically problematic phenomena. Further, with respect to the Irreducibility Claim (2), I argue that Aquinas’s concept of “common good” (bonum commune) offers an account of the way in which some powers and acts of social groups are importantly irreducible to those of their members. Considered together, I argue that these two positions in Aquinas are correlative, and therefore amount to a coherent account of collective action and group agency, respectively.

AWWA Water Science Author Spotlight

Having recently published an article in AWWA Water Science, Megan Plumlee answered questions from the publication's editor-in-chief, Kenneth L. Mercer, about the research. Real-Time Reverse Osmosis Monitoring for Antiscalant Dose Selection in Advanced Treatment of Wastewater Anditya Rahardianto, Han Gu, Bilal M. Khan, and Megan H. Plumlee Megan Plumlee visits Huntington State Beach in Southern California. Right now our team at the Orange County Water District (OCWD) is especially focused on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), such as exploring novel treatment methods for removing PFAS from drinking water. We're also studying ways to demonstrate, and therefore get appropriate credit for, enteric virus removal during advanced water purification as part of potable reuse of (waste)water. Broadly speaking, we research topics relevant to our organization. OCWD (Fountain Valley, Calif.) manages a groundwater aquifer and employs potable reuse. Megan (front row, at left) is a member of the Research and Development Department at Orange County Water District in Fountain Valley, Calif. Department staff gather at a holiday luncheon in 2019. I remember fondly my undergraduate chemistry professor and advisor, who passed away recently, Jim Currie of Pacific University. He was humble and kind. He pushed me to apply to a lot of really noteworthy and famous universities to pursue my PhD; I don't think I would have reached so high or been so confident on my own. I ended up at Stanford for my master's and PhD degrees. I thank you—and miss you—Professor Currie. Our best work is through collaborations since people always do better in a team with diverse inputs and different drivers. For this project, we wanted to collaborate with the developer (Noria Water Technologies out of University of California, Los Angeles) on their new and improved technology (RO-SpotlightTM) to explore practical applications of a novel sensor in our treatment plant. The overarching goal is to be able to better manage and address the inevitable fouling and scaling of reverse osmosis membranes through better, real-time data. Because people are only human and don't have computer brains (yet), I think our biggest challenge across all of science and engineering is how to better solve problems via systems-level thinking. Since we aren't connected with a hive mind, I suspect that people are inefficiently working on the “same” problems over and over again in different fields or even the same field. What solutions can we environmental engineers or chemists adopt from, say, medicine or materials science or food science? As we strive to make recycling water for potable use more efficient and therefore less expensive, I hope it will open up the feasibility of this water supply for other communities. Especially now with telecommuting every day and having gotten awfully comfortable with it in my armchair, I am trying to avoid being too sedentary. I walk my dogs every day, prepare nearly all my food from scratch (including bread and oat milk), and I literally run up and down the stairs as much as possible as a sorry form of exercise. To learn more about Megan's research, visit the article online at https://doi.org/10.1002/aws2.1196. This article is part of the Topical Collection on Potable Reuse. Visit https://news.awwa.org/reuse-collection to learn more about this collection.

Interview with Novelist Sarah Bird

Interview with Novelist Sarah Bird Richard J. Golsan (bio) Richard J. Golsan (RJG): What is your favorite novel? Sarah Bird (SB): My comfort food novel, the one I pulled out back in those high anxiety days when we were bleaching our groceries was Dog of the South by the inimitable Charles Portis. RJG: When did you first discover this novel? SB: Charles Portis arrived at a golden moment in my reading life. I was in my late-twenties, so this would have been late-Seventies, early eighties. Though I wasn't exactly conscious of it, I was groping my way toward writing comic novels. I was probably set on this path early by my wildly idiosyncratic family. We were six children in a military family that moved far, far too much for our group of pathologically shy introverts. In endless drives, flights, and ocean crossings to an endless succession of new bases we formed a sort of six-way twinship. The only humans we were actually comfortable with were each other. We were able to endure the purgatories of our new schools with their bewildering assault of strangers because, at the end of each day, we could go home and lose ourselves in books. Books seemed to simply filter into our lives the way food, borne on underground ocean currents, filters into an amoeba. We'd reach out and ingest whatever reading matter a sib introduced into our biosphere and it would be digested and absorbed into our hermetic little world. My sisters who adored all non-human animals infected us with Watership Down and we all joyfully re-entered our lost childhood worlds of talking animals. To this day we will praise an exceptionally fine meal in Lapine, calling it "flay-rah." Or note that a surprised or perplexed sibling has "gone tharn." If feeling particularly frisky we might even pretend to freeze in fear, "go tharn," at the sound of the rabbit's greatest enemy, those gas-powered monsters, the "hrududil." We re-enacted Eliza's escape on the ice floes from Uncle Tom's Cabin with flattened packing boxes from our latest move strewn across the backyard of whatever base house we'd been assigned. At the Base Pool [End Page 178] we pretended to be either Karana from Island of the Blue Dolphins or the dolphins she befriended. We all wept together while reading Sophie's Choice and Confessions of Nat Turner. But the novel that marked the Before and After in our hive mind reading was Confederacy of Dunces. RJG: What was it about "Confederacy" that spoke to all of you? SB: This is simple: It made us laugh. I probably would have chosen Dunces as my pandemic comfort food book except that I've read and re-read it too many times. Also, it feels a bit too claustrophobic for a pandemic. Dog, a road trip novel, is far more expansive. I'm going to have delay speaking of my love of Dog for a moment to set the stage for its arrival, so back to Dunces. I had the glorious experience of encountering John Kennedy Toole's masterpiece without knowing a thing about it when my youngest brother, who was studying bio-chemical engineering at the time, stuck it in my hands, and said, "Read." One way to understand how sui generis Dunces was is to consider the authors Toole's posthumous 1981 Pulitzer was sandwiched between: Cheever, Updike, and Mailer. Imagine going, for example, from Cheever's overachieving characters awakening to the emptiness of their lives in the suburbs to Ignatius J. Reilly, the ultimate outsider, an oafish, obese, scabrous gargantuan, as dedicated to self-abuse as he is to the Middle Ages. This novel plugged into my family's genome like a missing strand of DNA. We lived that novel like no other. We christened our mother "Santa Battaglia," took to cursing "Fortuna, that vicious slut," and excused any dyspeptic behavior by explaining that our "valve had plopped shut." For a very long time after, all our reading sought to duplicate the experience of Dunces. My youngest brother introduced Sotweed Factor into our literary food stream and we milked a few...

Thinking through the integration of corporate reporting: exploring the interplay between integrative and integrated thinking

PurposeThis paper aims to introduce an analytical focus on an individual’s integrative thinking capacity to further understand integrated thinking within the organisation. Integrated thinking is an elusive concept, gaining in prominence through its use by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC), without specific guidance or a commonly understood framework. To date, the academic debate on integrated thinking addresses the organisational level only. However, thinking is a process occurring within the mind of an individual and therefore the prerequisites for integrated thinking at the individual level needs to be considered. Critical reflection is, therefore, provided on the interplay between integrative and integrated thinking.Design/methodology/approachThis paper draws on conceptual systems theory and case site analysis to reflect how integrative thinking can be encouraged and supported within the individual and how integrated thinking can hence be fostered within organisations.FindingsThe paper analyses and discusses four sites of integrative thinking: the Athenian democracy; the Minangkabau community; the Quakers and consensus decision-making; and the Apis Mellifera and the hive mind. The findings from these different sites illustrate that integrative thinking can be supported by specific structural, organisational and individual contexts and stimuli.Originality/valueExtending the context of integrated thinking analysis outside of the organisation and analysing these sites through components of integrative thought, this article provides further insights into how integrated thinking can be fostered within different organisations. The implications of these findings for accounting and professional institutions, organisations and the ongoing professional development of accountants are discussed.

Resistance, professional agency and the reform of education in England

Much research into structural reform in education has reported on the success or failure of individual projects. Less attention has been paid to how the discourses associated with reform are normalized in teachers’ and head teachers’ thinking, and realized in their actions. In this article, we engage with resistance at the interface of legal policy positioning and position-taking by educational professionals. Drawing on empirical data from an ethnographic study of structural change in a school in England, we deploy the metaphor of ‘the Borg’ to develop new insights into the different stances that educational professionals can take to avoid assimilation into a hive mind.

The LDHEN hive mind: Learning Development in UK higher education as a professional culture

The Learning Developer in higher education (HE) works with students to help them make sense of the language and practices of HE. It is a relatively new role and has grown in response to the Widening Participation agenda which has seen an increase in entry of 'non-traditional' students into HE. Learning developers' job descriptions, employment contracts and institutional location vary between institutions and the role is often misunderstood across academia. There has long been discussion and debate within the learning development community regarding the professionalisation of the role and what this might look like. The literature in this area is sparse and to date consists of small-scale surveys of learning development practitioners with inconclusive findings. This study aims to contribute to our understanding of learning developer professional identity by analysing six months of discourse from the Learning Development in Higher Education Network (LDHEN) Listserv. This is explored through the lens of social identity theory and findings suggest that the learning development community functions as a professional culture based on collegiality, trust, shared values and a protected collective knowledge base. This attitudinal perspective of professional identity as professional culture is proposed as a more productive approach to the debate than more traditional interpretations of professionalism based on qualifications and formal training.

The art of rest, hive minds, and traversing Canada: Books in brief

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the week’s best science picks. Andrew Robinson reviews five of the week’s best science picks.

Reading the hive mind

Summary Information technology connecting billions of human minds has changed our lives but not always for the better. There are growing concerns that the electronically facilitated human swarming behaviour feeds trolling, conspiracy theories and antidemocratic tendencies. Insect states are well understood but hardly comparable. Can the studies of swarm intelligence in vertebrates help us to read our own hive mind? Michael Gross reports.

I am not the hive mind of Transetti Prime

A difficult decision. I am trying to help.

“You Are Turning into a Hive Mind”: Storytelling, Ecological Thought, and the Problem of Form in Generation A

This article discusses the relationship between literary form and contemporary ecological anxiety in Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation A. Coupland’s speculative fiction envisions a possible future in the wake of Colony Collapse Disorder, but the more generalized eco-anxiety the novel explores is applicable to a number of contemporary environmental issues ranging from climate change to ocean acidification. I argue that Coupland’s novel invites readers to consider the problem of representing ecological problems characterized by global scale, temporal uncertainty, and multiple origins. I then explore how Coupland responds to these challenges by stretching form in two directions. First, he juxtaposes and recycles a series of stories in a manner that capitalizes on lateral, shortened forms of attention, leading readers to detect larger patterns of significance within a database of what might initially seem like insignificant or banal details. Second, he cultivates the development of a form of “hive mind” among characters and readers that stretches ideas of personhood beyond the corporeal boundaries of the individual subject. The latter opens new possibilities for conceiving of a collective, networked mode of political agency in the era of social media and global scale effects.

Hive Mind: Creating a Science-Driven Solution to Improve the Yield of Commercial Beekeeping

We typically think of the phrase "ripped from the headlines" when referring to movies or books, but for Dr. Fiona Edwards Murphy, the news of the moment ended up informing her Ph.D. research and, ultimately, a business. "During university, I got involved with the embedded systems network and fell in love with wireless sensor networks and the Internet of Things," recalls Edwards Murphy, who completed her undergraduate degree in electrical and electronic engineering at University College Cork, Ireland. "I wanted to pursue a Ph.D., but there wasn't a topic that set my world on fire. At the time-2012 and 2013-I saw how everyone was panicking about colony collapse disorder, and I wondered if anyone had looked into putting sensors into beehives. A little bit of research showed there had been some work in the area but nothing extensive, so I decided to focus my Ph.D. there."

Gesture based terrain mapping and recognition-overview

Up until a few years ago, the only way to get an aerial overview of a designated area was to fly over it with a manned aircraft and physically inspecting the areas or taking pictures of it. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, have been a blessing to all the industries which relied on aerial images or drawings for their work. Unmanned aerial vehicles also knows as drones, in more colloquial terms, is a blessing to all industries in the world. The cost of manufacturing and assembling drones have gone down significantly as majority of people adapted to using it. The film industries are using it to get excellent footage with accurate direction and lighting. Civilians can use it as toys. Students can use it to learn avionics and flight mechanisms. Youtubers use it for professional high resolution footage. Rescue teams use it for surveying the area. Armies use it to get a tactical advantage in a firefight and recently, Amazon is using drones for superfast delivery service. The possibilities are endless if properly invested on. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are next best thing in the field of Computer Science and that’s why I plan to merge these two fields and present something which fundamentally adds more features and a hive mind facility to even work without a commanding signal.

Welcome to the singularity

Who can say no to the hive mind's promise of cybernetic immortality, for free?

"Balance Is the Trick": Feminist Relationality in The Amazing Maurice and the Tiffany Aching Series

"Balance Is the Trick":Feminist Relationality in The Amazing Maurice and the Tiffany Aching Series Mary Jeanette Moran (bio) A woman whose self is split into two identical beings; intelligent rats who conceptualize their community as a larger form of rat; a clan of hundreds of wee fairy men who are born in litters, have few distinguishing physical characteristics, and reuse names frequently in the same generation; a "rat king" created by tying together the tails of eight rodents, who develops power over the thoughts and actions of other beings; an apprentice witch who has "minds within minds" that encompass the land where she was born, long-dead magicians, and a saber-toothed tiger (A Hat Full of Sky 512).1 With these and numerous other images, Terry Pratchett's young adult Discworld novels encourage readers to contemplate the nature of selfhood. By depicting multiple identities that blur boundaries between self and other, these texts present a sustained imaginative challenge to the individualist model of mature selfhood as preeminently rational, independent of others, and unaffected by embodiment. In doing so, the novels parallel the work of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminist ethicists such as Nel Noddings, Virginia Held, and Diana Tietjens Meyers, who argue that identity emerges relationally, shaped by each person's interactions with others. Pratchett's Discworld fiction for young people, which includes The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (2001) and the Tiffany Aching series—The Wee Free Men (2003), A Hat Full of Sky (2004), Wintersmith (2006), I Shall Wear Midnight (2010), and The Shepherd's Crown (2015)—makes up a significant portion of the prolific writer's twenty-first-century publications.2 Roderick McGillis characterizes Pratchett's attitude toward writing for young people as a sense that "he is able to address larger issues in children's books" (18); I argue that a central one of these larger issues—perhaps the central issue of these books—is how their young [End Page 259] characters negotiate the challenges and promise of a relational model of selfhood. The Amazing Maurice and the Tiffany series first acknowledge, then undermine both the illusory concept of ontological self-sufficiency that is central to modern Western philosophy, and the corollary assumption that to exist in relationship with others—and particularly to depend on others—indicates weakness, immaturity, and a degradation of the capacity to make ethical decisions. The resulting societal fear of connection, vividly described by Carol Gilligan in her work on care ethics (In a Different Voice; Joining the Resistance), creates the sense that any kind of relational selfhood will destroy individuality entirely. Mirroring this notion of relationship as engulfment, The Amazing Maurice and A Hat Full of Sky both feature as the chief antagonist a dangerous being with a hive mind. These creatures depict a destructive kind of communal identity that subsumes individual difference and continually thirsts to increase its power over others: relational identity as assimilation. Only a sense of empathy and ethical responsibility can disrupt this control and replace it with a mutually supportive, relational process of identity construction. While both The Amazing Maurice and the Tiffany books challenge the misapprehension that relationship is necessarily threatening to the self, the novel and the series depict different aspects of an associated dilemma: how those who have traditionally done the work of caring can conceive of a relational self that does more than nurture others. By highlighting the development of female selfhood within patriarchal culture, these novels not only explore a general idea of relationality, but also address the issue from a feminist perspective. In The Amazing Maurice, one of the two main female characters embodies a caring interpersonal awareness, while the other is self-assertive but fairly oblivious to the needs of her fellow creatures. Through the differences between these characters, the novel suggests that a false opposition between relationality and autonomy may be particularly damaging for women and other groups trying to claim space for their individual stories while retaining a sense of solidarity. In contrast to the cautionary mode of The Amazing Maurice, the Tiffany series presents a delicate success, one where "balance is the trick," to quote Granny Weatherwax—in this case an...

Hive mind: how your nation's IQ matters so much more than your own

Hive mind: how your nation's IQ matters so much more than your own