Justice in the Community: Strategies for Dispute Resolution

Effective dispute resolution is an important attribute of stable community relations. In many western societies, however, traditional court systems have proven incapable of handling the increasing numbers of cases before them. The costs of formal adjudication have also been prohibitive for many groups and individuals. In an attempt to advance a more equitable and more responsive means of resolving community and interpersonal conflicts, mediation and arbitration strategies have been developed in many communities. Gelblum's article describes the role of dispute centers as an institutional source of conflict resolution. These organizations provide a framework for cooperative, negotiated dispute settlement. The Chapel Hill Dispute Settlement Center is presented as a case study of effective community conflict mitigation

Ant collective cognition allows for efficient navigation through disordered environments

International audienceThe cognitive abilities of biological organisms only make sense in the context of their environment. Here, we study longhorn crazy ant collective navigation skills within the context of a semi-natural, randomized environment. Mapping this biological setting into the ‘Ant-in-a-Labyrinth’ framework which studies physical transport through disordered media allows us to formulate precise links between the statistics of environmental challenges and the ants’ collective navigation abilities. We show that, in this environment, the ants use their numbers to collectively extend their sensing range. Although this extension is moderate, it nevertheless allows for extremely fast traversal times that overshadow known physical solutions to the ‘Ant-in-a-Labyrinth’ problem. To explain this large payoff, we use percolation theory and prove that whenever the labyrinth is solvable, a logarithmically small sensing range suffices for extreme speedup. Overall, our work demonstrates the potential advantages of group living and collective cognition in increasing a species’ habitable range

Cooperative object transport with a swarm of e-puck robots: robustness and scalability of evolved collective strategies

Cooperative object transport in distributed multi-robot systems requires the coordination and synchronisation of pushing/pulling forces by a group of autonomous robots in order to transport items that cannot be transported by a single agent. The results of this study show that fairly robust and scalable collective transport strategies can be generated by robots equipped with a relatively simple sensory apparatus (i.e. no force sensors and no devices for direct communication). In the experiments described in this paper, homogeneous groups of physical e-puck robots are required to coordinate and synchronise their actions in order to transport a heavy rectangular cuboid object as far as possible from its starting position to an arbitrary direction. The robots are controlled by dynamic neural networks synthesised using evolutionary computation techniques. The best evolved controller demonstrates an effective group transport strategy that is robust to variability in the physical characteristics of the object (i.e. object mass and size of the longest object’s side) and scalable to different group sizes. To run these experiments, we designed, built, and mounted on the robots a new sensor that returns the agents’ displacement on a 2D plane. The study shows that the feedback generated by the robots’ sensors relative to the object’s movement is sufficient to allow the robots to coordinate their efforts and to sustain the transports for an extended period of time. By extensively analysing successful behavioural strategies, we illustrate the nature of the operational mechanisms underpinning the coordination and synchronisation of actions during group transport

Overdiagnosis and overtreatment of early detected prostate cancer

Early detection of prostate cancer is associated with the diagnosis of a considerable proportion of cancers that are indolent, and that will hardly ever become symptomatic during lifetime. Such overdiagnosis should be avoided in all forms of screening because of potential adverse psychological and somatic side effects. The main threat of overdiagnosis is overtreatment of indolent disease. Men with prostate cancer that is likely to be indolent may be offered active surveillance. Evaluation of active surveillance studies and validation of new biological parameters for risk assessment are expected

The role of radiotherapy in localised and locally advanced prostate cancer

For a patient suffering from non-metastatic prostate cancer, the individualized recommendation of radiotherapy has to be the fruit of a multidisciplinary approach in the context of a Tumor Board, to be explained carefully to the patient to obtain his informed consent. External beam radiotherapy is now delivered by intensity modulated radiotherapy, considered as the gold standard. From a radiotherapy perspective, low-risk localized prostate cancer is treated by image guided intensity modulated radiotherapy, or brachytherapy if patients meet the required eligibility criteria. Intermediate-risk patients may benefit from intensity modulated radiotherapy combined with 4–6 months of androgen deprivation therapy; intensity modulated radiotherapy alone or combined with brachytherapy can be offered to patients unsuitable for androgen deprivation therapy due to co-morbidities or unwilling to accept it to preserve their sexual health. High-risk prostate cancer, i.e. high-risk localized and locally advanced prostate cancer, requires intensity modulated radiotherapy with long-term (≥2 years) androgen deprivation therapy with luteinizing hormone releasing hormone agonists. Post-operative irradiation, either immediate or early deferred, is proposed to patients classified as pT3pN0, based on surgical margins, prostate-specific antigen values and quality of life. Whatever the techniques and their degree of sophistication, quality assurance plays a major role in the management of radiotherapy, requiring the involvement of physicians, physicists, dosimetrists, radiation technologists and computer scientists. The patients must be informed about the potential morbidity of radiotherapy and androgen deprivation therapy and followed regularly during and after treatment for tertiary prevention and evaluation. A close cooperation is needed with general practitioners and specialists to prevent and mitigate side effects and maintain quality of life