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

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.

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.

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.

Cognetic is the story of a powerful psychic being that once controlled one-third of the world's population as a part of its hivemind, and his return to humanity in modern-day New York City. It's also the story of a young woman, the assistant to the director of the FBI, who might be the only one who can save humanity, but at a terrible, terrible cost. Collects the complete limited series by writer James Tynion IV (Detective Comics, The Woods) and artist Eryk Donovan (Memetic), plus character profiles, essays, sketches, and cover gallery. "œCognetic stands alone, giving familiar sci-fi and horror themes a fresh Mission Impossible twist with a fascinating arc and eerie illustrations." - Newsarama

Taking “Gangnam Style” seriously: what Internet memes can tell us about digital culture. In December 2012, the exuberant video “Gangnam Style” became the first YouTube clip to be viewed more than one billion times. Thousands of its viewers responded by creating and posting their own variations of the video—“Mitt Romney Style,” “NASA Johnson Style,” “Egyptian Style,” and many others. “Gangnam Style” (and its attendant parodies, imitations, and derivations) is one of the most famous examples of an Internet meme: a piece of digital content that spreads quickly around the web in various iterations and becomes a shared cultural experience. In this book, Limor Shifman investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture. Shifman discusses a series of well-known Internet memes—including “Leave Britney Alone,” the pepper-spraying cop, LOLCats, Scumbag Steve, and Occupy Wall Street's “We Are the 99 Percent.” She offers a novel definition of Internet memes: digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users. She differentiates memes from virals; analyzes what makes memes and virals successful; describes popular meme genres; discusses memes as new modes of political participation in democratic and nondemocratic regimes; and examines memes as agents of globalization. Memes, Shifman argues, encapsulate some of the most fundamental aspects of the Internet in general and of the participatory Web 2.0 culture in particular. Internet memes may be entertaining, but in this book Limor Shifman makes a compelling argument for taking them seriously.

WHAT THE HECK IS AN INTERNET MEME? Meme (pronounced meem): An idea, belief or element of social behavior spread that is transmitted from one person or group of people to another. This word was coined in the '70s by Richard Dawkins, the atheist godman worshipped by neckbeards everywhere. Simply put, Internet memes are memes that spread on the Internet through social networking sites, blogs, email, news sources, and so on. In the real world they're called "ideas," but pseudo-intellectuals prefer "memes." WHERE DO INTERNET MEMES COME FROM? Amongst all the stupid crap on the Internet are hilarious gems of wit and wisdom. Most of the best memes start as images shared on the Web and, by some great misfortune, they find their way into the lecherous hands of drunken basement trolls who mutate these images into the hilarious, the lame, and sometimes the downright bizarre. WHAT IS THIS BOOK? This book will take you on bizarre journey through the bilges of the Internet and introduce you to 23 of its funniest and most popular memes, complete with a sh*tload of images that might just make you wet your panties. "On this journey you will share lulz with unsavory characters like..." "Foul Bachelor Frog" "Socially Awkward Penguin" "Paranoid Parrot" "Courage Wolf" "Advice God" "Joseph Ducreux" "Hipster Kitty" "Inglip" "Successful Black Man" "Forever Alone" "Bill O'Reilly" "And more..." Scroll up and click the "Buy" button now to laugh your a** off at the twisted hive mind of the Internet underworld...

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

These two volumes, LNCS 7076 and LNCS 7077, constitute the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Swarm, Evolutionary, and Memetic Computing, SEMCCO 2011, held in Visakhapatnam, India, in December 2011. The 124 revised full papers presented in both volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 422 submissions. The papers explore new application areas, feature new bio-inspired algorithms for solving specific hard optimization problems, and review the latest progresses in the cutting-edge research with swarm, evolutionary, and memetic computing in both theoretical and practical aspects.