Raising the Bar: Increasing and Sustaining Diversity within the Hennepin County Legal Community
Professional paper for the fulfillment of the Master of Public Affairs, Master of Public Policy, and Master of Urban and Regional Planning.
Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers.
We introduce a general framework for modeling functionally diverse problem-solving agents. In this framework, problem-solving agents possess representations of problems and algorithms that they use to locate solutions. We use this framework to establish a result relevant to group composition. We find that when selecting a problem-solving team from a diverse population of intelligent agents, a team of randomly selected agents outperforms a team comprised of the best-performing agents. This result relies on the intuition that, as the initial pool of problem solvers becomes large, the best-performing agents necessarily become similar in the space of problem solvers. Their relatively greater ability is more than offset by their lack of problem-solving diversity.
PHOTOGRAMMETRY AND ITS USES IN HIGHWAY PLANNING AND DESIGN
PHOTOGRAMMETRY MIGHT BE DESCRIBED AS THE PROCESS OF CONVERTING PHOTOGRAPHS INTO CONTOURED TOPOGRAPHIC MAPS. FORMERLY GROUND SURVEY METHODS WERE CONSIDERED THE ONLY RELIABLE MEANS OF OBTAINING ACCURATE TOPOGRAPHIC INFORMATION. IT IS NOW POSSIBLE TO DEVELOP TOPOGRAPHIC MAPS OF SPECIFIED ACCURACY BY MEANS OF AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHS WHICH ARE THEN SUBJECTED TO A SERIES OF PHOTOGRAMMETRIC PROCESSES SO THAT MAPS MAY BE DRAWN AT SCALES USEFUL IN HIGHWAY LOCATION AND DESIGN. /AUTHOR/