Should Evolution Necessarily be Egolution?

In the article I study the evolutionary adaptivity of two simple population models, based on either altruistic or egoistic law of energy exchange. The computational experiments show the convincing advantage of the altruists, which brings us to a small discussion about genetic algorithms and extraterrestrial life

Computer Game Elements and its Impact on Higher Education

This review paper analyses authors who used gamified e-learning systems in higher education. Their thoughts, problems and conclusions are accompanied and observed. Positive guidelines are provided for the inclusion of computer game elements in the education system. Review paper includes a comparison of the gamified and traditional education system with an incentive to conduct further research activities. The list of researchers is provided who had experiments on students in the higher education system. Duration of those experiments is shown as well as the number of used game elements for their gamified systems. The list of survey questions for teaching staff (N=98) is provided as well as their thoughts on gamified systems and its use. The conclusions are that it is necessary to pay attention to the visual appearance and environment in which teaching materials are presented and studied

Rational choice, preferences over actions and rule-following behavior

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The Economics of Peer-to-Peer Networks

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have emerged as a significant social phenomenon for the distribution of information goods and may become an important alternative to traditional client-server network architectures for knowledge sharing within enterprises. This paper reviews and synthesizes the relevant computer science and economics literatures as they relate to P2P networks, and raises important questions for researchers interested in studying the behavior of these networks from the perspective of the economics of information technology. With regard to the economic characteristics of these networks, we show that while the characteristics of services provided over P2P networks are similar to public goods and club goods, they have many important differences and hence there is a need for new theoretical models as well as empirical and experimental analysis to understand P2P user behavior. We then identify several important areas for study with regard to the economics of P2P networks and review recent academic papers in each area

The Lumberjack, October 15, 1986

The student newspaper of Humboldt State University.https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/studentnewspaper/3122/thumbnail.jp

Gap analysis for the recruitment and retention of volunteer firefighters

The purpose of this research project was to determine the gaps, if any, between existing recruitment and retention practices of volunteer fire departments in the Regional District of Fraser-Fort George and best practices as assessed through a review of the relevant research literature. I was particularly interested in determining the motivations of people to join and stay in volunteer fire fighting, and in whether there were age differences in these motivations. I first conducted a review of the relevant research literature to locate previous studies conducted on this topic. The results of these studies helped to inform the interview methodology used in this research. I then interviewed fire chiefs from volunteer departments in the Fraser-Fort George Regional District, British Columbia, to determine what practices they are presently using to recruit and retain their firefighters, and whether they are using different procedures to recruit from younger and older age groups. Based on the background review of research literature and interviews conducted in this project, I make recommendations for the improvement of recruitment and retention strategies for volunteer fire departments in the RDFFG. --Leaf iii.The original print copy of this thesis may be available here: http://wizard.unbc.ca/record=b194716

Learning and Visceral Temptation in Dynamic Saving Experiments

This paper tests two explanations for apparent undersaving in life cycle models: bounded rationality and a preference for immediacy. Each was addressed in a separate experimental study. In the first study, subjects saved too little initially—providing evidence for bounded rationality—but learned to save optimally within four repeated life cycles. In the second study, thirsty subjects who consume beverage sips immediately, rather than with a delay, show greater relative overspending, consistent with quasi-hyperbolic discounting models. The parameter estimates of overspending obtained from the second study, but not the first, are in range of several empirical studies of saving (with an estimated β = 0.6–0.7)

Can We Be Saved?: Edward Owings Guerrant and the Mission Movement on the Cumberland Plateau, 1861-1916

The purpose of this thesis is to study Edward Guerrant’s influence on the benevolence movement in eastern Kentucky. The importance of this work lies in the historiographical revisions made regarding the mission movement and the development of Appalachian identity. Generally, Guerrant is portrayed in scholarly literature as a minor philanthropic figure. As a result, this paper emphasizes the vital role Guerrant played in the expansion of mission projects in Appalachia. Guerrant started by founding churches, congregations, and small schools, which primarily focused on individual salvation. However, he incorporated liberal theological philosophies and Progressive Era reforms to implement a comprehensive social uplift project that culminated with the formation of settlement schools. Guerrant supplemented the growth of his mountain work with promotion articles found in popular religious journals. The writings focused on the pure ethnicity of Appalachian people during a time of extreme xenophobic attitudes. The thesis uses all of Guerrant contributions to identity development, religiosity, and cultural and social change in the Mountain South to illustrate his importance as an altruistic demagogue

A grammar-based technique for genetic search and optimization

The genetic algorithm (GA) is a robust search technique which has been theoretically and empirically proven to provide efficient search for a variety of problems. Due largely to the semantic and expressive limitations of adopting a bitstring representation, however, the traditional GA has not found wide acceptance in the Artificial Intelligence community. In addition, binary chromosones can unevenly weight genetic search, reduce the effectiveness of recombination operators, make it difficult to solve problems whose solution schemata are of high order and defining length, and hinder new schema discovery in cases where chromosome-wide changes are required.;The research presented in this dissertation describes a grammar-based approach to genetic algorithms. Under this new paradigm, all members of the population are strings produced by a problem-specific grammar. Since any structure which can be expressed in Backus-Naur Form can thus be manipulated by genetic operators, a grammar-based GA strategy provides a consistent methodology for handling any population structure expressible in terms of a context-free grammar.;In order to lend theoretical support to the development of the syntactic GA, the concept of a trace schema--a similarity template for matching the derivation traces of grammar-defined rules--was introduced. An analysis of the manner in which a grammar-based GA operates yielded a Trace Schema Theorem for rule processing, which states that above-average trace schemata containing relatively few non-terminal productions are sampled with increasing frequency by syntactic genetic search. Schemata thus serve as the building blocks in the construction of the complex rule structures manipulated by syntactic GAs.;As part of the research presented in this dissertation, the GEnetic Rule Discovery System (GERDS) implementation of the grammar-based GA was developed. A comparison between the performance of GERDS and the traditional GA showed that the class of problems solvable by a syntactic GA is a superset of the class solvable by its binary counterpart, and that the added expressiveness greatly facilitates the representation of GA problems. to strengthen that conclusion, several experiments encompassing diverse domains were performed with favorable results