Third-party copyright and public information infrastructure/registries: How much copyright tax must the public pay?

In a case currently before the High Court of Australia (Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) v NSW ) the fundamental question at issue is whether the owner (in this case surveyors) of copyright material (in this case land survey plans) that is submitted as part of a public register (in this case the land titles registry) with all the benefits that entails, should nonetheless have the right to charge the government and end users every time they reproduce or communicate that material to the public. This book chapter examines the merits of this claim

Examination of Silica Sol-Gels and Aerogels Containing Silver Nanoparticles and 4-Mercaptobenzoic Acid Using Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy

Sol-gels and aero-gels containing silver nanoparticles have been investigated for use as substrates in surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). 4-Mercaptobenzoic acid (4-MBA) was chosen as the target molecule in this study, as it has been well-characterized using SERS. The orientation of the 4-MBA at different coverages in gels, and at differing concentrations of silver colloid, has not been well studied. For both base and acid-catalyzed sol-gels, xerogels, and aerogels, the concentration of 4-MBA was varied with a constant silver colloid concentration in the silica gels and the effects were measured with SERS. The effect of varying silver colloid concentration against a constant 4-MBA concentration was also investigated. The results of each process were compared

ANALYZING HUMAN-INDUCED PATHOLOGY IN THE TRAINING OF REINFORCEMENT LEARNING ALGORITHMS

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems trained with reinforcement learning (RL) are increasingly more capable, but agents training to complete tasks in safety critical environments still require millions of trial-and-error training steps. Previous research with a Pong agent has shown that some human heuristics initially accelerate training but cause agent performance to regress to a state of performance collapse. This thesis utilizes the FlappyBird environment to evaluate if the pathology is generalizable. After initially confirming a similar pathology in an unaided agent, comprehensive experimentation was performed with optimizers, weight initialization methods, activation functions, and varied hyperparameters. The pathology persisted across all experiments and the results show the network architecture is likely the principal cause. At a high level, this work illustrates the importance of determining the inherent capacity of an architecture to learn and model complex environments and how more systematic methods to quantify capacity would greatly enhance RL.Outstanding ThesisCaptain, United States Marine CorpsApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Characterization and delineation of caribou habitat on Unimak Island using remote sensing techniques

Thesis (M.S.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2014.The assessment of herbivore habitat quality is traditionally based on quantifying the forages available to the animal across their home range through ground-based techniques. While these methods are highly accurate, they can be time-consuming and highly expensive, especially for herbivores that occupy vast spatial landscapes. The Unimak Island caribou herd has been decreasing in the last decade at rates that have prompted discussion of management intervention. Frequent inclement weather in this region of Alaska has provided for little opportunity to study the caribou forage habitat on Unimak Island. The overall objectives of this study were two-fold 1) to assess the feasibility of using high-resolution color and near-infrared aerial imagery to map the forage distribution of caribou habitat on Unimak Island and 2) to assess the use of a new high-resolution multispectral satellite imagery platform, RapidEye, and use of the "red-edge" spectral band on vegetation classification accuracy. Maximum likelihood classification algorithms were used to create land cover maps in aerial and satellite imagery. Accuracy assessments and transformed divergence values were produced to assess vegetative spectral information and classification accuracy. By using RapidEye and aerial digital imagery in a hierarchical supervised classification technique, we were able to produce a high resolution land cover map of Unimak Island. We obtained overall accuracy rates of 71.4 percent which are comparable to other land cover maps using RapidEye imagery. The "red-edge" spectral band included in the RapidEye imagery provides additional spectral information that allows for a more accurate overall classification, raising overall accuracy 5.2 percent.Chapter 1: High resolution multispectral aerial photography to delineate and assess temporal phenology of caribou habitat on Unimak Island -- Chapter 2: High resolution satellite imagery to quantify and delineate caribou habitat on Unimak Island -- General conclusions -- Appendix

Copyright Future Copyright Freedom: Marking the 40th Anniversary of the Commencement of Australia's Copyright Act 1968

If copyright law does not liberate us from restrictions on the dissemination of knowledge, if it does not encourage expressive freedom, what is its purpose? This volume offers the thinking and suggestions of some of the finest minds grappling with the future of copyright regulation. The Copyright Future Copyright Freedom conference held in 2009 at Old Parliament House Canberra brought together Lawrence Lessig, Julie Cohen, Leslie Zines, Adrian Sterling, Sam Ricketson, Graham Greenleaf, Anne Fitzgerald, Susy Frankel, John Gilchrist, Michael Kirby and others to share the rich fruits of their experience and analysis. Zines, Sterling and Gilchrist outline their roles in the genesis and early growth of Australian copyright legislation, enriching the knowledge of anyone asking urgent questions about the future of information regulation

INDICATORS AND TARGETS FOR SOCIAL INCLUSION IN THE EUROPEAN UNION. ESRI WP151(?). 2003

Until recently, policy co-ordination at European Union (EU) level has mostly been applied to economic policy, with multilateral surveillance provided for in the Maastricht Treaty, and to employment, where the European Council agrees employment guidelines for the Member States and progress is monitored through regular reviews of National Action Plans. In December 2001, the European Council held at Laeken in Belgium adopted a set of commonly agreed and defined indicators, which should play a central role in monitoring the performance of the Member States in promoting social inclusion. These indicators are intended to allow the Member States and the European Commission to monitor national and EU progress towards the four key EU objectives in the area of social inclusion set by the Nice European Council in December 20002, and to support mutual learning and exchange of good practices in terms of policies. They can also prove useful for illustrating areas where more policy action is needed. The detailed content of those common objectives and the implementation arrangements endorsed at the European Council of Nice have been confirmed by the Council of Ministers for Employment and Social Affairs at their December 2002 meeting with a few amendments emphasising the importance of setting targets (following on the decision of the Barcelona European Council, as discussed below), of the need to strengthen the gender perspective in National Action Plans on social inclusion, and of the risks of poverty and social exclusion faced by immigrant

Renormalization of thermal conductivity of disordered d-wave superconductors by impurity-induced local moments

The low-temperature thermal conductivity \kappa_0/T of d-wave superconductors is generally thought to attain a "universal" value independent of disorder at sufficiently low temperatures, providing an important measure of the magnitude of the gap slope near its nodes. We discuss situations in which this inference can break down because of competing order, and quasiparticle localization. Specifically, we study an inhomogeneous BCS mean field model with electronic correlations included via a Hartree approximation for the Hubbard interaction, and show that the suppression of \kappa_0/T by localization effects can be strongly enhanced by magnetic moment formation around potential scatterers.Comment: 2 pages, 1 figure, submitted to M2S-HTSC VIII, Dresden 200

Orthogonal Linear Regression in Roentgen Stereophotogrammetry

Rooted in aerial reconnaissance, mathematical photogrammetry has evolved into a mainstay of biomedical image processing. The present paper develops an algorithm for Roentgen stereophotogrammetry, a method of imaging musculoskeletal systems both static and dynamic, which incorporates a number of novel features employing techniques from projective geometry, orthogonal regression and least squares approximation. Theoretical and numerical evidence is presented of the efficacy of the proposed procedure