Australian Defence Force Academy

About: Australian Defence Force Academy is a education organization based out in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Robust control & Control theory. The organization has 651 authors who have published 1211 publications receiving 28607 citations. The organization is also known as: ADFA.

Evolutionary programming made faster

Abstract: Evolutionary programming (EP) has been applied with success to many numerical and combinatorial optimization problems in recent years. EP has rather slow convergence rates, however, on some function optimization problems. In the paper, a "fast EP" (FEP) is proposed which uses a Cauchy instead of Gaussian mutation as the primary search operator. The relationship between FEP and classical EP (CEP) is similar to that between fast simulated annealing and the classical version. Both analytical and empirical studies have been carried out to evaluate the performance of FEP and CEP for different function optimization problems. The paper shows that FEP is very good at search in a large neighborhood while CEP is better at search in a small local neighborhood. For a suite of 23 benchmark problems, FEP performs much better than CEP for multimodal functions with many local minima while being comparable to CEP in performance for unimodal and multimodal functions with only a few local minima. The paper also shows the relationship between the search step size and the probability of finding a global optimum and thus explains why FEP performs better than CEP on some functions but not on others. In addition, the importance of the neighborhood size and its relationship to the probability of finding a near-optimum is investigated. Based on these analyses, an improved FEP (IFEP) is proposed and tested empirically. This technique mixes different search operators (mutations). The experimental results show that IFEP performs better than or as well as the better of FEP and CEP for most benchmark problems tested.

Resource wars: the anthropology of mining

Abstract: ▪ Abstract The scope for an anthropology of mining has been dramatically transformed since the review by Ricardo Godoy, published in this review journal in 1985. The minerals boom of the 1980s led to an aggressive expansion of mine development in greenfield areas, many of them the domains of indigenous communities. Under considerable pressure, the conventional binary contest between states and corporations over the benefits and impacts of mining has been widened to incorporate the representations of local communities, and broad but unstable mining communities now coalesce around individual projects. Focused primarily on projects in developing nations of the Asia-Pacific region, this review questions the often-monolithic characterizations of state, corporate, and community forms of agency and charts the debate among anthropologists involved in mining, variously as consultants, researchers, and advocates, about appropriate terms for their engagement.