IRV for better or worse now in Minneapolis and St. Paul

So, as was discussed on a post last month, IRV is NOT proportional voting. We seemed to arrive at the conclusion that proportional voting is better than plurality (a subtype of which we currently use nicknamed "first past the post" voting). What's the difference? From what I gather, a vote in proportional voting has the potential for sending MORE THAN ONE representative in voting for a single office. For example, and this is probably extreme, pretend we are voting for our House representatives. In Minnesota we have eight House representatives and all right now are either Democrat or Republican. Each district votes for two-year terms and the first with a majority in a two man/woman race or plurality in 2+ wins the seat and represents the entire district. What about the other votes? If a Republican wins in my district with 60% of votes and 20% goes to the Republican and 20% goes to an Independent. Where do the other 40% of votes go? The answer: under the current system they disappear. Proportional Voting takes these votes and gives them to the House in the form of another person (I'm not quite sure yet how, but maybe 10 people go per district or perhaps districts would need to be removed and simply vote by state). So in the last example, maybe 6 Republicans go, 2 Democrats, and 2 independents and then my district is represented not completely, but more than it was in the plurality system. A particular type of proportional voting, party list, is show here as an example of which other countries use this voting system:

"There are many variations on seat allocation within party-list proportional representation. The three most common are:

• The D'Hondt method (or Jefferson's method), used in Albania Croatia, Spain, Portugal, Israel, Austria, Finland and Poland, among other places;
• The Sainte-Laguë method (or Webster's method), used in many Scandinavian countries, New Zealand, and the German state of Bremen;
• The largest remainder (LR) methods, including the Hamilton method."

1) Barran, Madeleine, "St. Paul voters re-elect Coleman, approve IRV" http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/11/03/st-paul-mayor/

2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party-list_proportional_representation

Open Source Voting

Gregory Miller and John Sebes are making a case for something called 'open source voting'.

“Currently two vendors impact 80 percent of the vote” nationwide, Miller said, referring to Premier/Diebold and Election Systems & Software, which recently merged in a sale. But if all the states that have expressed interest in adopting the open source system follow through with implementing it, about 62 percent of the nation’s electorate would be voting on transparent, fully auditable machines he said." (1)

Apparently these companies make it very difficult for us to have standardization of practice (for reasons which are not obvious, we can extract and dissect in the discussion). Miller purports, "If they simply sold the machines to all the precincts, they would have three million sales and that would be the end of their business." So what do we see instead? Machines which frequently and according to Miller, malfunction, planned obsolence, long-term Draconian-termed contracts and continual "updates".

1)Zetter, Kim, "Nation’s First Open Source Election Software Released" Accessed November 4, 2009, -http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/open-source/-published in Wired online magazine October 23, 2009

Top Tax Bracket: A brief history

Brent and I were discussing this Saturday night. Scroll down near the bottom of this page to see the history of the top tax bracket.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States

How fiscally “responsible” of us to have rates at 80-90% between 1940-1945 when we were funding a war. I’m guessing this was just (i.e., justice) because the top earners were probably those associated with the military-industrial complex and benefiting the most due to the war (probably needs fact checked). Compare that to what Reagan did in 1981 (70% down to 50) and then in 1986 (50% down to 35%) then Bush did in 2003 (Bush: while funding two wars). Fiscally “Conservative”? Someone needs to define this for me, because I don’t get it.

Original Documents

The letter on the left is from Heinrich Himmler to his superiors. It is an answer to the Jewish Problem. The letter on the right is from an 14-year-old Fidel Castro asking FDR for $10.

1) American Originals, http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals/origina2.html

Authorship rules

Was Osha breaking them?

http://www.icmje.org/ethical_1author.html

"Authorship credit should be based on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and 3) final approval of the version to be published. Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3."

Since the paper was never published, I guess not. What has been done in the past however, e.g. Bilal, was to publish several years after his exit from the lab without giving him notice of the pre-publication procedures and therefore not allowing him to participate in the writing process. This has is how she justifies putting him in the "Acknowledgemet" section.
P11: "All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an acknowledgments section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or a department chair who provided only general support."

James Lovelock - he stole my idea!!

It's not really my idea, but I had come to this conclusion maybe 1-2 years ago on my own. He calls what I am talking about the Gaia Hypothesis (1). He uses empathy as his primary hypothesizing system, again something I've been doing now for a while and I wrote an essay on the matter which is in the process of publication. Empathy here has a different connotation than you might be thinking. It is almost synonymous with imagination. Empathy could mean that you are pretending to be an influenza virus in a respiratory droplet and are watching as the host sneezes you out and you land on a different host's shoulder. It could also mean, as is the case with the Gaia, that you are the Earth and operating like a cell or machine, have various functions of homeostasis (among which is humans but other things are included). So empathy here is imagination, not pretending to be someone else as it is normally utilized. This is interesting to think about. Empathy clearly has survival advantage, but it can be used in these other ways which give rise to entire branches of science. Essentially though, empathy is best suited for what it evolved to do, predict the actions of other individuals. How useful could it possibly be when applied to what appears to be completely different situations? And is empathy the seed of imagination/creativity? I'll see what some of my neurology and neuroscience books say, but from what I remember of them, this question is not addressed.



1) Lovelock, J.E. (1965). "A physical basis for life detection experiments". Nature 207 (7): 568–570. doi:10.1038/207568a0

2) http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/11/03/midmorning1/

The Wire - Greatest television show of all time?

Last night I finished season 5 of The Wire. I am more documenting that than anything else as I think I'll need time to process the show and write something meaningful on its behalf. This is likely the best show I have ever seen and may in fact be the best television show of all time. This, of what I've read of Shakespeare, lines right up there (even though the aims of the two are different). It really is like literature on screen.

David Simon the shows creator, worked with Ed Burns, a former detective (and I thought crime journalist for a Baltimore or Washington based newspaper but I may be thinking of Simon). I highly recommend reading any of his books or watching any of his interviews (easily found on google or youtube one of which is linked below). I'll try to find some of his articles from the Baltimore Sun and bring those for discussion here.


http://www.hbo.com/thewire/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire#cite_note-greatest-2

Bill Moyers compares him to Dickens but before that Edward Gibbon!!!
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=david%20simon&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wv#