EvoTanks: co-evolutionary development of game-playing agents

This paper describes the EvoTanks research project, a continuing attempt to develop strong AI players for a primitive 'Combat' style video game using evolutionary computational methods with artificial neural networks. A small but challenging feat due to the necessity for agent's actions to rely heavily on opponent behaviour. Previous investigation has shown the agents are capable of developing high performance behaviours by evolving against scripted opponents; however these are local to the trained opponent. The focus of this paper shows results from the use of co-evolution on the same population. Results show agents no longer succumb to trappings of local maxima within the search space and are capable of converging on high fitness behaviours local to their population without the use of scripted opponents

Charting from within a Grounded Concept of Member Control

Organizational charts of membership structures can be useful tools for monitoring member control when they accurately depict a concept of control grounded in context and theory. This paper develops the concept "member control" by placing it within cooperative principles and democratic theory. From this perspective, members control their organization when, through a democratic process of decision making, they are able to keep the cooperative a cooperative, a condition we call "containment." With this conceptual development, a containment method of member control charting is developed and illustrative examples given.Agribusiness,

Toward an Organizational Theory of Membership Structural Design

Various events have led to the development of highly complex cooperative operations and to concepts for understanding operations. However. development of membership structures and concepts for understanding these structures has lagged. This paper imports organizational design and contingency theory into the member control literature. Membership structure is understood as organization-like, producing a service (Le., member control). Member control structure is understood as having three aspects (representation, policy making, and oversight) and two environments (the members themselves, and management and operations). Building from cooperative principles and following the development of cooperatives from simple to complex organizations, this paper develops a series of axiomatic propositions for understanding and designing membership structure. Only some of the propositions are testable, and still others are meant only to give continuity and relevance to the propositions as a group (as a theory). Such work should help develop a language for understanding and furthering discussion and research of membership structure and member control in agricultural cooperatives.Agribusiness,

Is A New International Law On E-book ‘Lending’ Necessary To Satisfy The Requirements of International Human Rights Law?

In the last few years there has been a huge growth in the e-book market, and many copyrighted works are published as e-books before the analogue versions are printed, if they are ever printed. In order to provide e-book lending services, libraries must sign copious amounts of license agreements with materials distributors. Due to restrictive terms in license agreements, legal exceptions to copyright are negated, and libraries are more limited in their ability to deal with the copyrighted work than ever before. The restrictions on distribution and access to e-books in libraries affects an author’s rights to their moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary, or artistic ’production’ of which he or she is the author, because of restrictions on the dissemination of their work. Author’s rights are protected under article 17 of the UDHR (the right to property), article 15 ICESCR, and under copyright law. The practice of restrictive licenses also takes away from the enjoyment of the following human rights under the International Covenant on Economic,Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) : the right to education, the right of everyone to take part in cultural life, the right to share in scientific advancements and its benefits, and the freedom of expression. Both international copyright law and human rights law aim to strike the right balance between the rights of individual users and the rights of authors, but neither legal regime is functioning optimally with respect to e-book lending. How do we reform copyright to make borrowing e-books from libraries as straightforward and economic as borrowing shelfbooks? I argue that it is necessary for the creation of a new international rule to harmonize e-book lending practices in accordance with human rights’ requirements, because merely exploiting the flexibilities of copyright law does not achieve human rights realization. The new rule would include a contract override clause invalidating restrictive licensing terms that conflict with copyright L&Es. It would also include minimum mandatory copyright limitations and exceptions (L&Es) for libraries including a blanket exception to the exclusive right of reproduction of the copyrighted work and/or a rule that would make the doctrine of exhaustion applicable to the digital world. Harmonization, via soft law or treaty law, would persuade States to follow suite in their domestic legislation and court decisions. It is also important to highlight the persistent mistake in the vocabulary used amongst the researchers of licenses: they lobby for ‘e-book ownership’ (the library would buy the e-book) to replace the license agreements. However copyright ownership must be discussed in terms of its component parts since the libraries cannot attain copyright ownership but instead, with shelfbooks, they rely on the right of distribution and the doctrine of exhaustion to fulfil their mandate. However, the doctrine of exhaustion and the right of distribution only apply to analogue versions, according to the Agreed Statement of the WCT. Ownership of the copyright in the content cannot transfer completely to the library, but some of the rights in the copyright bundle could transfer in exchange for reasonable remuneration. The conclusion is that the new international rule on copyright L&Es would include a blanket exception to the right of reproduction, or expand the applicability of the right of distribution to the digital world, to enable the librarians to make a sufficient amount of non-commercial copies for the borrowers, and for preservation purposes. This rule would have to include a contract override clause to nullify any contractual term that undermined the legitimate exceptions to copyright that libraries depend upon to fulfil their function

Feminist Judgments and Women\u27s Rights at Work

The history of the law’s treatment of working women is largely a history of the law’s treatment of women’s bodies. Overwhelmingly created by male judges, that jurisprudence considers women from a remove—their physicality, their reproductive capacity, their stature, their sexuality—eclipsing meaningful consideration of their lived experience, on or off the job. As vividly illustrated by so many of the alternative rulings contained in Feminist Judgments, that erasure resulted in Supreme Court decisions that—even when they came out the “right” way, that is, in favor of the female litigant—squandered opportunities for advancing sex equality. The tantalizing notion of “what might have been” is much of the pleasure in reading this collection, of course. But the book’s overarching thought experiment also offers invaluable lessons to today’s practitioners, myself included, who must tell clients’ stories. Long before we get the opportunity to tell those stories to juries—itself an increasingly rare occurrence—we must tell those stories to judges who themselves may be years, even decades, away from “real” jobs, and who have remained isolated from the realities of working women’s lives

Making Pregnancy Work: Overcoming the Pregnancy Discrimination Act\u27s Capacity-Based Model

This article considers the gaps and obstacles in current law faced by the pregnant woman whose job duties may conflict with pregnancy\u27s physical effects. While there is no inherent conflict between pregnancy and work, women in physically strenuous or hazardous occupations, from nursing to law enforcement, routinely confront situations in which they are physically unable to perform aspects of their job or, though physically able, they seek to avoid certain tasks or situations because of the potential risks to maternal or fetal health. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 (PDA) broadly protects against pregnancy discrimination, but it provides absolute rights only to the extent a pregnant woman is able to work at full capacity, uninterrupted by pregnancy\u27s physical effects. To the extent that the law grants the pregnant worker with temporary physical limitations affirmative rights, such as the right to workplace accommodation, it is only on a comparative basis - that is, only to the extent those rights already are provided to similarly situated temporarily disabled employees. In this way, pregnancy continues to inhibit equal employment opportunity for millions of women, three decades after the PDA\u27s passage. After briefly examining the medical literature documenting the conflicts between pregnancy and certain kinds of work, as well as the law as applied to pregnant workers who are fully capable or fully incapable due to the effects of pregnancy or childbirth, we consider the predicament of women in physically demanding fields whose work capacity is partially diminished by pregnancy. We focus here on the problem of access to light-duty work - temporary alternative job assignments that accommodate the pregnant worker\u27s limitations. Without such accommodation, the pregnant firefighter or home health care aide whose doctor directs her to avoid heavy lifting or other tasks is faced with a Hobson\u27s choice: ignore medical advice and continue to perform all job duties, or stop working altogether, usually sacrificing wages and other benefits for several months. We describe the limits of the existing PDA framework for protecting these pregnant workers, and suggest litigation strategies for maximizing pregnant workers\u27 rights under current law. These include re-framing the similarly situated analysis for disparate treatment challenges to light-duty policies, and exploring the untapped potential of the disparate impact theory in the light-duty context

Is a one-size-fits-all ‘12-month-rule' appropriate when it comes to the last search date in systematic reviews?

The problem: Searches conducted a year or more before submission of a systematic review (SR) paper can result in journal editors or peer-reviewers rejecting it. Their concerns are that findings from SRs with ‘out-of-date’ searches might provide decision-makers with misleading evidence.1 Although recent technological advances have helped to speed up some review processes,2 other methodological advances have increased the work required such that reviews often require longer than 12 months to produce useful and rigorous findings. This puts many SRs at risk of rejection by journal editors. We argue that a blanket 12-month cut-off point for searches is not appropriate, that it may hinder the dissemination of important research, and may have a knock-on impact on reviewers’ willingness to undertake the most ambitious reviews. We also argue that not all SRs are equally at risk of being ‘out of date’ at 12 months; while intervention effectiveness reviews in fast-moving areas may become outdated well before 12 months,3 others, such as qualitative evidence syntheses, are unlikely to have their findings substantially changed by the inclusion of new evidence. We focus on recent developments in SR designs, methods and technologies, to reflect on whether existing journal publishing guidelines are at odds with current SR approaches designed to improve review quality and usefulness