Dropping the Amateur: The International Association of Athletics Federations and the Turn Toward Professionalism

When the International Association of Amateur Athletics (IAAF) changed its name to International Association of Athletics Federations in 2001, it was more than an acknowledgment of the organization's acceptance of professional athletes. Rather, this change symbolized a shift in thinking about the nature of athletics, what athletics competitions represented, and the commercialization of the sport that had been decades in the making. This article will consider the IAAF's pursuit to maintain control over global athletics through its transition from an amateur sport federation to a professional sport governing body. Drawing on official documents and personal archives of IAAF officials, we trace the internal views and debates beginning with the IAAF's fight to maintain amateurism against collective pushback over issues of athlete pay, to the full acceptance of professionalism. Our main focus lies on the transition period in the 1980s and 1990s. We show how dropping the amateur from the name reflected not only the new embrace of professional athletes, but also the organizational turn away from amateur athletics. We will identify the processes that finally forced the breakdown of amateurism and ushered in a new era of professional athletics

Economic Impact of the Mid-Term Review on Agricultural Production, Farm Income and Farm Survival: A Quantitative Analysis for Local Sub-Regions of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany

This study analyzes the impact of the Mid-Term Review (MTR) on the agricultural sector in Schleswig-Holstein, a federal state in Germany. First, a very detailed farm group linear programming model is built to quantify the effects on agricultural production and farm incomes. The production adjustment to the MTR and its impact on farm profit vary significantly between individual farms. These results depend mainly on the farm type and the resource endowments of the farms. Second, the impact on structural change is examined with a farm survival model. Although the MTR clearly reduces the incomes of several farm types, it accelerates the structural change only gradually.policy reform; modeling production adjustment; farm income; structural change

Positional bias does not influence Cartesian Genetic Programming with crossover

The recombination operator plays an important role in many evolutionary algorithms. However, in Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP), which is part of the aforementioned category, the usefulness of crossover is contested. In this work, we investigate whether CGP’s positional bias actually influences the usefulness of the crossover operator negatively. This bias describes a skewed distribution of CGP’s active and inactive nodes, which might lead to destructive behaviours of standard recombination operators. We try to answer our hypothesis by employing one standard CGP implementation and one without the effects of positional bias. Both versions are combined with one of four standard crossover operators, or with no crossover operator. Additionally, two different selection methods are used to configure a CGP variant. We then analyse their performance and convergence behaviour on eight benchmarks taken from the Boolean and symbolic regression domain. By using Bayesian inference, we are able to rank them, and we found that positional bias does not influence CGP with crossover. Furthermore, we argue that the current research on CGP with standard crossover operators is incomplete, and CGP with recombination might not negatively impact its evolutionary search process. On the contrary, using CGP with crossover improves its performance

Equidistant Reorder operator for Cartesian Genetic Programming

The Reorder operator, an extension to Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP), eliminates limitations of the classic CGP algorithm by shuffling the genome. One of those limitations is the positional bias, a phenomenon in which mostly genes at the start of the genome contribute to an output, while genes at the end rarely do. This can lead to worse fitness or more training iterations needed to find a solution. To combat this problem, the existing Reorder operator shuffles the genome without changing its phenotypical encoding. However, we argue that Reorder may not fully eliminate the positional bias but only weaken its effects. By introducing a novel operator we name Equidistant-Reorder, we try to fully avoid the positional bias. Instead of shuffling the genome, active nodes are reordered equidistantly in the genome. Via this operator, we can show empirically on four Boolean benchmarks that the number of iterations needed until a solution is found decreases; and fewer nodes are needed to e fficiently find a solution, which potentially saves CPU time with each iteration. At last, we visually analyse the distribution of active nodes in the genomes. A potential decrease of the negative effects of the positional bias can be derived with our extension

Analysing the influence of reorder strategies for Cartesian Genetic Programming

Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP) suffers from a specific limitation: Positional bias, a phenomenon in which mostly genes at the start of the genome contribute to a program output, while genes at the end rarely do. This can lead to an overall worse performance of CGP. One solution to overcome positional bias is to introduce reordering methods, which shuffle the current genotype without changing its corresponding phenotype. There are currently two different reorder operators that extend the classic CGP formula and improve its fitness value. In this work, we discuss possible shortcomings of these two existing operators. Afterwards, we introduce three novel operators which reorder the genotype of a graph defined by CGP. We show empirically on four Boolean and four symbolic regression benchmarks that the number of iterations until a solution is found and/or the fitness value improves by using CGP with a reorder method. However, there is no consistently best performing reorder operator. Furthermore, their behaviour is analysed by investigating their convergence plots and we show that all behave the same in terms of convergence type

Refining mutation variants in Cartesian genetic programming

In this work, we improve upon two frequently used mutation algorithms and therefore introduce three refined mutation strategies for Cartesian Genetic Programming. At first, we take the probabilistic concept of a mutation rate and split it into two mutation rates, one for active and inactive nodes respectively. Afterwards, the mutation method Single is taken and extended. Single mutates nodes until an active node is hit. Here, our extension mutates nodes until more than one but still predefined number n of active nodes are hit. At last, this concept is taken and a decay rate for n is introduced. Thus, we decrease the required number of active nodes hit per mutation step during CGP’s training process. We show empirically on different classification, regression and boolean regression benchmarks that all methods lead to better fitness values. This is then further supported by probabilistic comparison methods such as the Bayesian comparison of classifiers and the Mann-Whitney-U-Test. However, these improvements come with the cost of more mutation steps needed which in turn lengthens the training time. The third variant, in which n is decreased, does not differ from the second mutation strategy listed

Effect of Geometric Uncertainties on the Aerodynamic Characteristic of Offshore Wind Turbine Blades

Offshore wind turbines operate in a complex unsteady flow environment which causes unsteady aerodynamic loads. The unsteady flow environment is characterized by a high degree of uncertainty. In addition, geometry variations and material imperfections also cause uncertainties in the design process. Probabilistic design methods consider these uncertainties in order to reach acceptable reliability and safety levels for offshore wind turbines. Variations of the rotor blade geometry influence the aerodynamic loads which also affect the reliability of other wind turbine components. Therefore, the present paper is dealing with geometric uncertainties of the rotor blades. These can arise from manufacturing tolerances and operational wear of the blades. First, the effect of geometry variations of wind turbine airfoils on the lift and drag coefficients are investigated using a Latin hypercube sampling. Then, the resulting effects on the performance and the blade loads of an offshore wind turbine are analyzed. The variations of the airfoil geometry lead to a significant scatter of the lift and drag coefficients which also affects the damage-equivalent flapwise bending moments. In contrast to that, the effects on the power and the annual energy production are almost negligible with regard to the assumptions made.Ministry for Science and Culture in Lower Saxony/ForWin

Schuldenkrise dämpft Wachstum

Die Weltwirtschaft hat in den letzten Jahren eine Chronologie von Krisen durchlitten. Ausgangspunkt war die Immobilienkrise in den Vereinigten Staaten. Nach einem jahrelangen Anstieg der Immobilienpreise sind diese zusammengebrochen. Die Entwicklung in den USA wurde durch parallele Entwicklungen in einigen europäischen Staaten begleitet. Das Platzen der Preisblase hat das Vermögen der privaten Haushalte zunichte gemacht und zu privaten Verschuldungskrisen geführt. Außerdem wurde eine globale Banken- und Finanzkrise ausgelöst. Zunächst war die Realwirtschaft wenig betroffen. Dies hat sich mit der Insolvenz von Lehman Brothers im September 2008 dramatisch verändert. Die Insolvenz hat zu einer Verunsicherung geführt, die einen allgemeinen Stop in der Weltwirtschaft ausgelöst hat. Schlagartig wurden Aufträge storniert und Investitionspläne verschoben. Die Folge war eine tiefe Rezession. Die Weltproduktion sank im Jahr 2009 um 3,8 %. Es bestand die Befürchtung eines Jahrzehnts ohne Wachstum in der Weltwirtschaft. Weltweite Fiskal- und Geldpolitik war notwendig, um Banken zu retten und die Wirtschaftskrise zu überwinden. Die Folgen waren zum einen eine unerwartet schnelle Erholung der Weltwirtschaft und zum anderen eine massive Ausweitung der staatlichen Verschuldung in einigen Industrieländern. Im Jahr 2010 lag das Wachstum der globalen Wirtschaft bei 4 %. In den letzten Monaten hat sich das Wachstum wieder deutlich abgeschwächt. Die Wachstumsrate in diesem Jahr dürfte deshalb nur noch bei 3,5 % liegen. Dies gilt besonders für die Industrieländer und hier für den Euroraum, der sich in einer schwachen Rezession befindet. Dabei lähmt auf der einen Seite die Verunsicherung durch die ausufernden Staatsschulden und zum anderen die laufenden Konsolidierungsprogramme die Konjunktur. Neben den Staatsschulden ist die hohe Arbeitslosigkeit ein zentrales Problem in vielen Industriestaaten. Diese ist auf verschiedene Strukturprobleme an den Arbeitsmärkten und in vielen Staaten auch auf die noch immer daniederliegende Bauwirtschaft zurückzuführen. Auch die Lage im Finanzsektor ist wieder extrem angespannt. So leihen europäische Banken untereinander kein Geld mehr und deponieren dies lieber bei der EZB. In den Schwellenländern blieb das Wachstum auf einem hohen Niveau, auch wenn es sich etwas abgeschwächt hat. Mit dem schwächeren Wachstum und den zurückgegangen Rohstoffpreisen ist der Inflationsdruck in den Schwellenländern zurückgegangen. Dennoch werden sie weiterhin kräftig, wenn auch mit etwas geringeren Raten als bisher wachsen. Der Euroraum wird hingegen 2012 nur noch um 0,2 % und die Vereinigten Staaten um 1,7 % wachsen. In Japan wird es eine Verbesserung geben. Aufgrund der Katastrophen ging hier die Wirtschaft 2011 um 0,5 % zurück. Eine gewisse Normalisierung wird im nächsten Jahr zu einem Wachstum von etwa 2 % führen. Insgesamt wird die Weltwirtschaft im Jahr 2012 nur noch um gut 3 % expandieren. --