Hampshire College

About: Hampshire College is a education organization based out in Amherst Center, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Genetic programming & Population. The organization has 461 authors who have published 998 publications receiving 40827 citations.

Evolving teamwork and coordination with genetic programming

Abstract: Some problems can be solved only by multiagent teams. In using genetic programming to produce such teams, one faces several design decisions. First, there are questions of team diversity and of breeding strategy. In one commonly used scheme, teams consist of clones of single individuals; these individuals breed in the normal way and are cloned to form teams during fitness evaluation. In contrast, teams could also consist of distinct individuals. In this case one can either allow free interbreeding between members of different teams, or one can restrict interbreeding in various ways. A second design decision concerns the types of coordination-facilitating mechanisms provided to individual team members; these range from sensors of various sorts to complex communication systems. This paper examines three breeding strategies (clones, free, and restricted) and three coordination mechanisms (none, deictic sensing, and name-based sensing) for evolving teams of agents in the Serengeti world, a simple predator/prey environment. Among the conclusions are the fact that a simple form of restricted interbreeding outperforms free interbreeding in all teams with distinct individuals, and the fact that name-based sensing consistently outperforms deictic sensing.

Court-ordered obstetrical interventions

Abstract: In a national survey, we investigated the scope and circumstances of court-ordered obstetrical procedures in cases in which the women had refused therapy deemed necessary for the fetus. We also solicited the opinions of leading obstetricians regarding such cases. Court orders have been obtained for cesarean sections in 11 states, for hospital detentions in 2 states, and for intrauterine transfusions in 1 state. Among 21 cases in which court orders were sought, the orders were obtained in 86 percent; in 88 percent of those cases, the orders were received within six hours. Eighty-one percent of the women involved were black, Asian, or Hispanic, 44 percent were unmarried, and 24 percent did not speak English as their primary language. All the women were treated in a teaching-hospital clinic or were receiving public assistance. No important maternal morbidity or mortality was reported. Forty-six percent of the heads of fellowship programs in maternal-fetal medicine thought that women who refused medical advice and thereby endangered the life of the fetus should be detained. Forty-seven percent supported court orders for procedures such as intrauterine transfusions. We conclude from these data that court-ordered obstetrical procedures represent an important and growing problem that evokes sharply divided responses from faculty members in obstetrics. Such procedures are based on dubious legal grounds, and they may have far-reaching implications for obstetrical practice and maternal and infant health.

The Movement Precuing Technique: Assumptions, Applications, and Extensions

Abstract: The movement precuing technique is designed to reveal the major information-processing steps that lead up to the execution of voluntary movements. The main idea in the technique is to supply the subject with partial information about the defining characteristics of a motor response and then observe how long it takes the subject to perform the response when its corresponding reaction signal is presented. On the assumption that the time to perform the response includes the time to specify those parameters that were not precued in advance, times to perform the response in different precue conditions can be used to find out whether its defining parameter values are specified in a fixed or variable order, serially or in parallel, etc. This chapter reviews the studies that have utilized the movement precuing technique. These studies have focused on aimed hand movements, finger movements, and aimed foot movements. A common finding of the studies is that the parameters of movements can be specified in a variable rather than fixed order and serially rather than in parallel, although some notable exceptions have been found. Much of the chapter is concerned with methodological variations of the precuing technique which a number of investigators have introduced.

Infant and childhood morbidity and mortality risks in archaeological populations.

Abstract: Infants and children are nearly universally found to be among the most vulnerable subgroups of a population. Their health can be a sensitive indicator of the health of the population as a whole. Furthermore, repeated bouts of illness during infancy and childhood, periods of rapid development, can have lasting functional effects on the individual and the group. In this paper we provide a framework for studying infant and childhood health in archaeological populations, briefly review methods for studying infant‐childhood health in skeletal remains, and provide examples of the sensitivity and adaptive significance of this segment of the population by examining infant and childhood health at Dickson Mounds, Illinois and Wadi Haifa, Sudanese Nubia. A variety of methods are available for studying infant and childhood health in archaeological groups. Taken together, these methods can provide insights into the patterns and consequences of health in prehistory.