Origins of caprine herding

Origins of caprine herding.

The PNAS article by Stiner et al. (1), “A forager–herder trade-off, from broad-spectrum hunting to sheep management at Aşıklı Höyük, Turkey,” adds a major new element to our evidence for—and understanding of— the appearance of the first animal herding in southwest Asia, involving the earliest management of caprines (managed caprines including sheep and goat), as well as an important methodologi...

Herding Folksongs

Cataloging a large, multi-media collection of traditional song and drama in preparation for online presentation highlights issues of song identity and access in the context of contemporary digitized archives. In the James Madison Carpenter collection a particular folksong sung by a particular individual may exist in multiple manifestations: typed song text, sound recording(s), and/or manuscript...

Parametric Herding

A parametric version of herding is formulated. The nonlinear mapping between consecutive time slices is learned by a form of self-supervised training. The resulting dynamical system generates pseudo-samples that resemble the original data. We show how this parametric herding can be successfully used to compress a dataset consisting of binary digits. It is also verified that high compression rat...

Herding Cats

Herding with Costly Observation

We characterize optimal strategies in a simple herding model where observations have a small cost. We assume that there are two states and two possible signals that each agent may get. The prior distribution is biased towards adopting behavior. That is, ex-ante, adopting gives a higher expected utility than not adopting. Contrary to Kultti & Miettinen (2005) herding does not arise deterministic...