Coordination, Cooperation, and Control


Book Description

There are two ways people coordinate their actions: through cooperation, exercised by economic power, and through control, exercised by political power. When economic and political power are held by the same people, the result is stagnation; when those who hold economic power are not the same people who hold political power, the result is progress. This book presents the ways in which economic power and political power can be separated, and how they can remain so, by analyzing the nature of power and the differences between economic and political power. The book then discusses the history of economic and political power, including hunter-gatherer societies, agrarian societies, and modern commercial and industrial societies. This background lends insight into why political and economic power were typically held by the same people, and why recently those without political power have been able to acquire economic power. Incentives play a key role in understanding how those two types of power can become separated, and why there is always a tendency for them to recombine. But ideas also play a crucial role, including the influence of the Enlightenment, on the progress that has occurred in the last several hundred years.




Triple C Model of Project Management


Book Description

Project Management: the discipline of organizing and managing resources so that a project is completed within defined scope, quality, time, and cost constraints. Oh, if only it really was that simple. Once you have the specs of the project, it is time to get down to business and manage people. And therein lies many a problem. Fuzzy, ambiguous, and




Group Coordination and Cooperative Control


Book Description

This volume contains the contributions to a Workshop on Group Coordination and Cooperative Control held in Tromsø, Norway, 2006, to focus on control theoretic challenges raised by group coordination and cooperation, and lay a foundation for future research. The book covers a wide range of subjects within the area of group coordination and cooperative control, and forms a valuable and up-to-date text on the newer trends in group coordination and cooperative control.




International Multiparty Mediation and Conflict Management


Book Description

This volume aims to provide a detailed explanation of the effects of cooperation and coordination on international multiparty mediation in conflicts. Contemporary scholarship stresses that the crucial ingredients for a successful multiparty mediation are ‘consistency in interests’ and ‘cooperation and coordination’ between mediators. This book seeks to supplement that understanding by investigating how much the ‘consistency of interests’ and ‘cooperation and coordination’ affect the overall process, and what happens to the mediation process when mediating parties do not share the same idea and interest in finding a common solution. At the same time, it explores the obstacles in achieving coordination and coherence between various mediators in such an environment and how to surmount the problems that multiple mediators face when operating without a ‘common script’ in attempting to mediate a negotiated settlement. The study investigates three distinct mechanisms (both on the systemic and contextual level) that have the potential to deter defection from a (potential) member of the multiparty mediation coalition: geo-political shifts, changes in the conflict dynamics, and mediators’ ability to bargain for a cooperative relationship. As the number of states and international actors that are involved in mediation increases, a careful assessment is necessary not only of their relative institutional strengths and weaknesses, but also of how to promote complementary efforts and how to synchronize the whole process when one actor is transferring the responsibilities for mediation to others. This book will be of much interest to students of mediation, conflict management, war and conflict studies, security studies and IR. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.routledge.com/International-Multiparty-Mediation-and-Conflict-Management-Challenges-of/Vukovic/p/book/9781138087897, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license




Cooperative Control


Book Description

Are there universal principles of coordinated group motion and if so what might they be? This carefully edited book presents how natural groupings such as fish schools, bird flocks, deer herds etc. coordinate themselves and move so flawlessly, often without an apparent leader or any form of centralized control. It shows how the underlying principles of cooperative control may be used for groups of mobile autonomous agents to help enable a large group of autonomous robotic vehicles in the air, on land or sea or underwater, to collectively accomplish useful tasks such as distributed, adaptive scientific data gathering, search and rescue, or reconnaissance.




Co-Opetition


Book Description

Now available in paperback, with an all new Reader's guide, The New York Times and Business Week bestseller Co-opetition revolutionized the game of business. With over 40,000 copies sold and now in its 9th printing, Co-opetition is a business strategy that goes beyond the old rules of competition and cooperation to combine the advantages of both. Co-opetition is a pioneering, high profit means of leveraging business relationships. Intel, Nintendo, American Express, NutraSweet, American Airlines, and dozens of other companies have been using the strategies of co-opetition to change the game of business to their benefit. Formulating strategies based on game theory, authors Brandenburger and Nalebuff created a book that's insightful and instructive for managers eager to move their companies into a new mind set.




Defending Planet Earth


Book Description

The United States spends approximately $4 million each year searching for near-Earth objects (NEOs). The objective is to detect those that may collide with Earth. The majority of this funding supports the operation of several observatories that scan the sky searching for NEOs. This, however, is insufficient in detecting the majority of NEOs that may present a tangible threat to humanity. A significantly smaller amount of funding supports ways to protect the Earth from such a potential collision or "mitigation." In 2005, a Congressional mandate called for NASA to detect 90 percent of NEOs with diameters of 140 meters of greater by 2020. Defending Planet Earth: Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies identifies the need for detection of objects as small as 30 to 50 meters as these can be highly destructive. The book explores four main types of mitigation including civil defense, "slow push" or "pull" methods, kinetic impactors and nuclear explosions. It also asserts that responding effectively to hazards posed by NEOs requires national and international cooperation. Defending Planet Earth: Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies is a useful guide for scientists, astronomers, policy makers and engineers.




The Evolution of Cooperation


Book Description

A famed political scientist's classic argument for a more cooperative world We assume that, in a world ruled by natural selection, selfishness pays. So why cooperate? In The Evolution of Cooperation, political scientist Robert Axelrod seeks to answer this question. In 1980, he organized the famed Computer Prisoners Dilemma Tournament, which sought to find the optimal strategy for survival in a particular game. Over and over, the simplest strategy, a cooperative program called Tit for Tat, shut out the competition. In other words, cooperation, not unfettered competition, turns out to be our best chance for survival. A vital book for leaders and decision makers, The Evolution of Cooperation reveals how cooperative principles help us think better about everything from military strategy, to political elections, to family dynamics.




Discourse, Tools and Reasoning


Book Description

To reason is to talk. To think is to use tools. To learn is to join a community of practice. This book explores thought and reasoning as inherently social practices, as actions situated in specific environments of demand, opportunity, and accountability. Authors from diverse disciplines - psychology, sociology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, anthropology - examine how people think and learn in settings as diverse as a factory, a classroom or an airplane cockpit. The tools that people use in these varied settings are both physical technologies and cultural constructions: concepts, structures of reasoning, and forms of discourse. This volume in the NATO Special Programme on Advanced Educational Technology is based on an international conference on situated cognition and learning technologies.




Recent Developments in Cooperative Control and Optimization


Book Description

Over the past several years, cooperative control and optimization has un questionably been established as one of the most important areas of research in the military sciences. Even so, cooperative control and optimization tran scends the military in its scope -having become quite relevant to a broad class of systems with many exciting, commercial, applications. One reason for all the excitement is that research has been so incredibly diverse -spanning many scientific and engineering disciplines. This latest volume in the Cooperative Systems book series clearly illustrates this trend towards diversity and creative thought. And no wonder, cooperative systems are among the hardest systems control science has endeavored to study, hence creative approaches to model ing, analysis, and synthesis are a must! The definition of cooperation itself is a slippery issue. As you will see in this and previous volumes, cooperation has been cast into many different roles and therefore has assumed many diverse meanings. Perhaps the most we can say which unites these disparate concepts is that cooperation (1) requires more than one entity, (2) the entities must have some dynamic behavior that influences the decision space, (3) the entities share at least one common objective, and (4) entities are able to share information about themselves and their environment. Optimization and control have long been active fields of research in engi neering.




Recent Books