The apocalypse continues in the second installment of the oversized, 48-page MEMETIC. In Day Two of this crisis, Aaron tries to escape his college campus overrun with Screamers, while Marcus and his Pentagon team attempt to track down the source of the meme and eliminate it before time runs out

Humans are extraordinary creatures, with the unique ability among animals to imitate and so copy from one another ideas, habits, skills, behaviours, inventions, songs, and stories. These are all memes, a term first coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 in his book The Selfish Gene. Memes, like genes, are replicators, and this enthralling book is an investigation of whether this link between genes and memes can lead to important discoveries about the nature of the inner self. Confronting the deepest questions about our inner selves, with all our emotions, memories, beliefs, and decisions, Susan Blackmore makes a compelling case for the theory that the inner self is merely an illusion created by the memes for the sake of replication.

How memetic media—aggregate texts that are collectively created, circulated, and transformed—become a part of public conversations that shape broader cultural debates. Internet memes—digital snippets that can make a joke, make a point, or make a connection—are now a lingua franca of online life. They are collectively created, circulated, and transformed by countless users across vast networks. Most of us have seen the cat playing the piano, Kanye interrupting, Kanye interrupting the cat playing the piano. In The World Made Meme, Ryan Milner argues that memes, and the memetic process, are shaping public conversation. It's hard to imagine a major pop cultural or political moment that doesn't generate a constellation of memetic texts. Memetic media, Milner writes, offer participation by reappropriation, balancing the familiar and the foreign as new iterations intertwine with established ideas. New commentary is crafted by the mediated circulation and transformation of old ideas. Through memetic media, small strands weave together big conversations. Milner considers the formal and social dimensions of memetic media, and outlines five basic logics that structure them: multimodality, reappropriation, resonance, collectivism, and spread. He examines how memetic media both empower and exclude during public conversations, exploring the potential for public voice despite everyday antagonisms. Milner argues that memetic media enable the participation of many voices even in the midst of persistent inequality. This new kind of participatory conversation, he contends, complicates the traditional culture industries. When age-old gatekeepers intertwine with new ways of sharing information, the relationship between collective participation and individual expression becomes ambivalent. For better or worse—and Milner offers examples of both—memetic media have changed the nature of public conversations.

This book bridges the widening gap between two crucial constituents of computational intelligence: the rapidly advancing technologies of machine learning in the digital information age, and the relatively slow-moving field of general-purpose search and optimization algorithms. With this in mind, the book serves to offer a data-driven view of optimization, through the framework of memetic computation (MC). The authors provide a summary of the complete timeline of research activities in MC – beginning with the initiation of memes as local search heuristics hybridized with evolutionary algorithms, to their modern interpretation as computationally encoded building blocks of problem-solving knowledge that can be learned from one task and adaptively transmitted to another. In the light of recent research advances, the authors emphasize the further development of MC as a simultaneous problem learning and optimization paradigm with the potential to showcase human-like problem-solving prowess; that is, by equipping optimization engines to acquire increasing levels of intelligence over time through embedded memes learned independently or via interactions. In other words, the adaptive utilization of available knowledge memes makes it possible for optimization engines to tailor custom search behaviors on the fly – thereby paving the way to general-purpose problem-solving ability (or artificial general intelligence). In this regard, the book explores some of the latest concepts from the optimization literature, including, the sequential transfer of knowledge across problems, multitasking, and large-scale (high dimensional) search, systematically discussing associated algorithmic developments that align with the general theme of memetics. The presented ideas are intended to be accessible to a wide audience of scientific researchers, engineers, students, and optimization practitioners who are familiar with the commonly used terminologies of evolutionary computation. A full appreciation of the mathematical formalizations and algorithmic contributions requires an elementary background in probability, statistics, and the concepts of machine learning. A prior knowledge of surrogate-assisted/Bayesian optimization techniques is useful, but not essential.

A meme is an idea that starts with an individual, and then spreads throughout multiple persons and potentially entire societies. Richard Dawkins suggests a meme's success comes from its effectiveness to the host. But history shows that destructive memes can spread just as rapidly through society. MEMETIC shows the progression of a weaponized meme that leads to the utter annihilation of the human race within 72 hours. The root of this apocalypse is a single image on the internet, a "meme" in the popular sense. A meme that changes everything.

Science need not be dull and bogged down by jargon, as Richard Dawkins proves in this entertaining look at evolution. The themes he takes up are the concepts of altruistic and selfish behaviour; the genetical definition of selfish interest; the evolution of aggressive behaviour; kinshiptheory; sex ratio theory; reciprocal altruism; deceit; and the natural selection of sex differences. 'Should be read, can be read by almost anyone. It describes with great skill a new face of the theory of evolution.' W.D. Hamilton, Science

From the GLAAD Award-nominated team of James Tynion IV (Dark Nights: The Casting, Detective Comics) and Eryk Donovan (Constantine: The Hellblazer) comes a new vision of humanity’s future in the vein of Black Mirror. When a plague ravages the world, one scientist discovers the cure and becomes the savior of mankind. Hope is restored, and the world rebuilds. But then people who took the cure begin having children who are... unnatural, and the definition of “normal” is forever altered.