What are the benefi ts of random allocation in clinical studies? John Worrall, a philosopher of science, recently questioned whether evidence-based medicine’s advice to base therapeutic decisions on the results of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) could be justifi ed.1 2 Here we provide a response to Worrall and others who challenge the epistemological value of RCTs. Worrall’s primary target ...

1. SMART FARMS SET PERFORMANCE GOALS There is an old saying that you can’t get to your destination unless you know where you are going. Many farms that start on the path to milking excellence don’t make it because they don’t have clear quality goals for their farms. Many dairy farms consistently produce high quality milk. In 1998, over 1,800 Wisconsin dairy farms had average bulk tank somatic c...

Temporal diierence methods solve the temporal credit assignment problem for reinforcement learning. An important subproblem of general reinforcement learning is learning to achieve dynamic goals. Although existing temporal diierence methods, such as Q learning, can be applied to this problem, they do not take advantage of its special structure. This paper presents the DG-learning algorithm, whi...

In systemsand software architecting, architecture can be viewed as a highlevel design that supports the construction of ICT-systems. Starting from a list of general requirements, the first part of this chapter gives an overview of the dimensions of such a design. In addition, the various, often contradicting, architectural views that are relevant for the various stakeholders are discussed. Spec...