Which voting method is best depends on how voter preferences are distributed.
Arrow's theorem says no voting method can satisfy all of five particular criteria. However, if you could accurately measure voters' rankings of all candidates on a real number scale, all five criteria would be satisified by summing those rankings and choosing the highest-ranked candidate (Cardinal Rankings). Arrow's theorem still holds because you can't apply measure ideal cardinal rankings in practice. You can't measure that one person has rankings all in 4.2 to 5.6, while another has them in -3 to 27.
But if you're doing computer simulations of voters, you CAN measure their cardinal rankings, and you can compare the ideal result to the results that any particular voting method and strategy will produce.
I did those simulations. It turns out that if voter preferences for all candidates are independent and uniformly distributed, the approval method beat Condorcet -- approval selected the ideal winner more often than Condorcet did. When voter preferences are based on distance from candidate preferences on a one-dimensional issue (voters and candidates both uniformly distributed), Condorcet ALWAYS picked the ideal winner. Approval didn't do so well there. Plurality did horribly compared to both, assuming two random candidates were considered the front runners. But plurality always came out on top when the two truly best candidates were considered top runners.
The question shouldn't imply that instant runoff is the best alternative to plurality voting. Condorcet, approval, and even Borda counts have a better claim to the title.
Dubya's already in that situation. Does he care that he doesn't have a mandate? No, in fact since he knows he's never going to win California, he's allowed to totally ignore its interests, and even intentionally provoke it. Does his lack of a mandate affect is ability to get his policies enacted? No, he's given more leeway than any president in decades. Who shoulda been given power doesn't matter, but who is placed in power does.
I take it back. The US has all this car-road infrastructure in place. Once oil is gone we'll switch to electric, electric-hydrogen, or electric-alcohol cars. We'll still have cars, and we'll still live in suburbs, and every adult will still have a car, and having a car will still be a requirement for teenage boys to attract teenage girls. Solar cells are likely to improve in price and performance to the point where they make a serious contribution to the electric system by 2015.
Switching from 20mpg cars to 60mpg cars compensates for gasoline rising from $2/gallon to $6/gallon. So not much will change up to 2015. But it seems Hard to go significantly beyond 60mpg cars, and after 2015 the supply of gasoline will start shrinking rapidly. There are other uses for oil than cars, for example airplanes, that are much harder put to do without gas than cars are. So petroleum-powered cars seem doomed beyond 2020. Couple that with having no room to build new roads in urban areas, and it's clear that something is going to be significantly different after 2020.
People have a limit on how much time/effort they're willing to put in to get to work. That puts a limit on how far people are willing to live from work. A single person can always move right next to where they work. But a married couple, where both work, they'll both pick jobs in their comfortable commute circle. It's unlikely those jobs will be much closer than the average of their maximum tolerable commutes. So no matter where they choose to live, one of them has to have a long commute.
If you or your spouse assumes they'll be driving a car, you're pretty much guaranteed that you can't both bike to work.
Each tire has its own motor and own steering. A computer translates steering instructions into what angle to place each tire at. Parallel parking is done by going parallel to the desired spot, turning all wheels 90 degrees, and going in. The car can park itself.
This allows a 10' driveway to service a garage whose door is perpendicular to the street. It lets you pack more cars into parking lots.
I'm thinking of buying a 1200 sq ft house in an established area, tearing it down, and building a 6000 sq ft house in its place. Most of that square footage would be underground, but still. I'd have flat roofs for decks or gardens or water heating on top, not really to be green, but just because with a 60'x90' lot and a 50'x60' house, where else would I put the back yard? Trial floor plans here. I'd tear down an old house and build a new because there are no vacant lots left in Silicon Valley.
My current 1400 sq ft townhouse (3 adults 3 small children, really 900 sq ft you can walk on) is cramped. People sleep in the living room. There's more stuff than storage. There's no space for a workshop or a kid-free home office. Reading a newspaper is challenging. I can imagine moving into an 800 sq ft house, but I'd probably have to give up my computer and guitar to do it.
What's the disadvantage to having a large house other than heating? Making houses tiny is a much more intrusive way to address heating costs than using insulation, solar water heating, and glazed windows.
Re:The Google billboard on US Highway 101 in CA
on
Google's Math Puzzle
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· Score: 1
My first guess was that it was advertising a cosmetic procedure that was so powerful it would make a pig look sexy. And they showed a picture of the pig to prove it. Unfortunately, it just looks like a pig wearing sunglasses and a scarf, which doesn't give much support to that claim.
I read through the first ten questions. I was surprised -- Bush was aware of the issues and gave pretty good answers. However, his answers contradict what his actions have been. Kerry, on the other hand, often avoided answering the question. For example, the question about whether Americans should consume less, he answered that we should be diligent about avoiding pollution. I prefer Kerry's approach -- if he's bothering to weasel, that probably means what he says has some bearing on what he'll do.
I'm impressed by just how many topics they manage to be aware of and have an opinion on.
Oh. My strategy was to google for "consecutive digits of e prime". Google told me the answer, that the site pointed to another site, and that it was in the end an ad for Google engineers. I mighta switched to Teoma once I saw Google was involved, I don't remember.
What I want to know is the point behind that other billboard on 101, the one that says "Applications extreme makeovers TENFOLD HOTTER THAN HELL" and has a picture of a hairy pig wearing sunglasses and a scarf. I was guessing it was associated with the digits-of-e billboard, because both so completely fail to communicate anything useful to the passing motorist.
I haven't seen many elderly people using handhelds, but I've seen quite a few using cameras. They have trouble looking through viewfinders or watching tiny LCD displays. Bigger and/or brighter displays (with the same battery consumption) would make them use digital cameras more often, which of course would cause more pictures of grandchildren to come into existence than we have today.
I think the ultimate technology here would be a digital paper display that covers the whole back of the camera. It would be dimmer than LCDs or OLEDs, but it would require power only when you're changing the image, which allows a huge display plus better battery life than we have today. When the image isn't changing, the picture is still displayed but with no power. It would still be displayed after the camera has sat on a shelf for months.
I take it back. The database of phone calls probably already exists. The obvious application for these chips is to record every conversation in every public place in the US and store it, indexed, in a classified database.
I'm not so much against the database, as against access to it being classified. I think I'd be happy if the people could do what the government could do.
Why are they talking about querying online databases for 911 calls as the national security app? It's obvious the national security app is to translate every single phone call to text and store them (indexed) in a classified database. I've attempted to believe the US wouldn't do this because it's illegal, but I can't manage to suspend disbelief. The only way to avoid this is if phone calls are encrypted and the US doesn't have the keys.
There was Philip K. Dick story where a bunch of people fell through the beam of the Belmont Bevatron, they woke up, and they were in a world run where a religion (one of their religions) actually was correct. One character swore, then a bee materialized so it could sting him in retribution. They got cigarettes from a vending machine, got curious, opened it up, and it turned out the machine generated cigarette packages out of thin air. God Almighty gave the sermons on TV on Sunday mornings. Once they knocked the guy out, they went on to a world governed by another one of them's internal models, and so forth.
initial defects, folic acid, brain cells, autism
on
Why We Fall Apart
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· Score: 1
The article says we have a lot of defective components (brain cells) from the get-go. Being extra careful in very early development (taking folic acid) can prevent a lot of those defective components (folic acid in the first month of pregnancy reduces the chance of neural tube defects).
Autism is marked excess brain cells and low blood flow in the connections between brain cells. Perhaps the excess brain cells just take up too much room, so the connections are either cramped or not there.
Evolution takes into account that a large portion of our initial brain cells won't work. Perhaps folic acid makes too many work, leading to too many brain cells, not enough connections, and autism? Folic acid was recommended to pregnant women in 1992 and made an additive to wheat in 1998. Autism rose exponentially then. It was rising exponentially for a decade before that, too, though. Autism now affects 1 in 150 children (detectable at age 2), while neural tube defects affect 1 in 5000 (detectable when 3 months pregnant) (they were 32% more common before folic acid was added to wheat).
So, a theory. Fodder for future research. If this theory happens to be true, supplementing wheat with folic acid should be stopped.
This is a patent on identifying files by their hash. Checking Google, I see Lamport using cryptographic checksums (which are hashes used to identify files) in 1981. +20 years = 2001. The patent's either invalid, or it isn't as simple as identifying files by a hash.
Can a book be read faster (on average) in Chinese or English?
Just looking at the fovea and eye movements, I'd expect that the easiest text to read (once you're trained) would be to do a 2d gray mapping of the text to the page. Words would grow in 2d, not just 1d as in English, so their parts could be recognized in parallel faster. Also the eye would not have to do long jumps at the end of the line.
Oh, I get it now. Absolutely nothing in his vision of the future 10 years from now (that is different from things as they are today) will be correct. It's all stuff people talk about today, but none of it will really take off. I'm not sure why he didn't include flying cars, cheap electricity from fusion, omnipresent fuel cells, and a space elevator. His full-wall TV prediction was risky; that might actually happen.
That's the opposite of how I'd prefer patents to work. I'm willing to grant someone a monopoly on x if they're vigorously making x available to the world (at a price or no). I want to take the monopoly away when they have exclusive rights to x and sit on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Which voting method is best depends on how voter preferences are distributed.
Arrow's theorem says no voting method can satisfy all of five particular criteria. However, if you could accurately measure voters' rankings of all candidates on a real number scale, all five criteria would be satisified by summing those rankings and choosing the highest-ranked candidate (Cardinal Rankings). Arrow's theorem still holds because you can't apply measure ideal cardinal rankings in practice. You can't measure that one person has rankings all in 4.2 to 5.6, while another has them in -3 to 27.
But if you're doing computer simulations of voters, you CAN measure their cardinal rankings, and you can compare the ideal result to the results that any particular voting method and strategy will produce.
I did those simulations. It turns out that if voter preferences for all candidates are independent and uniformly distributed, the approval method beat Condorcet -- approval selected the ideal winner more often than Condorcet did. When voter preferences are based on distance from candidate preferences on a one-dimensional issue (voters and candidates both uniformly distributed), Condorcet ALWAYS picked the ideal winner. Approval didn't do so well there. Plurality did horribly compared to both, assuming two random candidates were considered the front runners. But plurality always came out on top when the two truly best candidates were considered top runners.
The question shouldn't imply that instant runoff is the best alternative to plurality voting. Condorcet, approval, and even Borda counts have a better claim to the title.
That's makes the CPL better than the GPL, no? If a piece of GPL software is copyright free, but unusable because of patents, that's not very Free.
Should there be clauses covering trademarks too?
Dubya's already in that situation. Does he care that he doesn't have a mandate? No, in fact since he knows he's never going to win California, he's allowed to totally ignore its interests, and even intentionally provoke it. Does his lack of a mandate affect is ability to get his policies enacted? No, he's given more leeway than any president in decades. Who shoulda been given power doesn't matter, but who is placed in power does.
I take it back. The US has all this car-road infrastructure in place. Once oil is gone we'll switch to electric, electric-hydrogen, or electric-alcohol cars. We'll still have cars, and we'll still live in suburbs, and every adult will still have a car, and having a car will still be a requirement for teenage boys to attract teenage girls. Solar cells are likely to improve in price and performance to the point where they make a serious contribution to the electric system by 2015.
Switching from 20mpg cars to 60mpg cars compensates for gasoline rising from $2/gallon to $6/gallon. So not much will change up to 2015. But it seems Hard to go significantly beyond 60mpg cars, and after 2015 the supply of gasoline will start shrinking rapidly. There are other uses for oil than cars, for example airplanes, that are much harder put to do without gas than cars are. So petroleum-powered cars seem doomed beyond 2020. Couple that with having no room to build new roads in urban areas, and it's clear that something is going to be significantly different after 2020.
People have a limit on how much time/effort they're willing to put in to get to work. That puts a limit on how far people are willing to live from work. A single person can always move right next to where they work. But a married couple, where both work, they'll both pick jobs in their comfortable commute circle. It's unlikely those jobs will be much closer than the average of their maximum tolerable commutes. So no matter where they choose to live, one of them has to have a long commute.
If you or your spouse assumes they'll be driving a car, you're pretty much guaranteed that you can't both bike to work.
Each tire has its own motor and own steering. A computer translates steering instructions into what angle to place each tire at. Parallel parking is done by going parallel to the desired spot, turning all wheels 90 degrees, and going in. The car can park itself.
This allows a 10' driveway to service a garage whose door is perpendicular to the street. It lets you pack more cars into parking lots.
I'm thinking of buying a 1200 sq ft house in an established area, tearing it down, and building a 6000 sq ft house in its place. Most of that square footage would be underground, but still. I'd have flat roofs for decks or gardens or water heating on top, not really to be green, but just because with a 60'x90' lot and a 50'x60' house, where else would I put the back yard? Trial floor plans here. I'd tear down an old house and build a new because there are no vacant lots left in Silicon Valley.
My current 1400 sq ft townhouse (3 adults 3 small children, really 900 sq ft you can walk on) is cramped. People sleep in the living room. There's more stuff than storage. There's no space for a workshop or a kid-free home office. Reading a newspaper is challenging. I can imagine moving into an 800 sq ft house, but I'd probably have to give up my computer and guitar to do it.
What's the disadvantage to having a large house other than heating? Making houses tiny is a much more intrusive way to address heating costs than using insulation, solar water heating, and glazed windows.
My first guess was that it was advertising a cosmetic procedure that was so powerful it would make a pig look sexy. And they showed a picture of the pig to prove it. Unfortunately, it just looks like a pig wearing sunglasses and a scarf, which doesn't give much support to that claim.
I read through the first ten questions. I was surprised -- Bush was aware of the issues and gave pretty good answers. However, his answers contradict what his actions have been. Kerry, on the other hand, often avoided answering the question. For example, the question about whether Americans should consume less, he answered that we should be diligent about avoiding pollution. I prefer Kerry's approach -- if he's bothering to weasel, that probably means what he says has some bearing on what he'll do.
I'm impressed by just how many topics they manage to be aware of and have an opinion on.
Oh. My strategy was to google for "consecutive digits of e prime". Google told me the answer, that the site pointed to another site, and that it was in the end an ad for Google engineers. I mighta switched to Teoma once I saw Google was involved, I don't remember.
What I want to know is the point behind that other billboard on 101, the one that says "Applications extreme makeovers TENFOLD HOTTER THAN HELL" and has a picture of a hairy pig wearing sunglasses and a scarf. I was guessing it was associated with the digits-of-e billboard, because both so completely fail to communicate anything useful to the passing motorist.
I haven't seen many elderly people using handhelds, but I've seen quite a few using cameras. They have trouble looking through viewfinders or watching tiny LCD displays. Bigger and/or brighter displays (with the same battery consumption) would make them use digital cameras more often, which of course would cause more pictures of grandchildren to come into existence than we have today.
I think the ultimate technology here would be a digital paper display that covers the whole back of the camera. It would be dimmer than LCDs or OLEDs, but it would require power only when you're changing the image, which allows a huge display plus better battery life than we have today. When the image isn't changing, the picture is still displayed but with no power. It would still be displayed after the camera has sat on a shelf for months.
I take it back. The database of phone calls probably already exists. The obvious application for these chips is to record every conversation in every public place in the US and store it, indexed, in a classified database.
I'm not so much against the database, as against access to it being classified. I think I'd be happy if the people could do what the government could do.
Why are they talking about querying online databases for 911 calls as the national security app? It's obvious the national security app is to translate every single phone call to text and store them (indexed) in a classified database. I've attempted to believe the US wouldn't do this because it's illegal, but I can't manage to suspend disbelief. The only way to avoid this is if phone calls are encrypted and the US doesn't have the keys.
There was Philip K. Dick story where a bunch of people fell through the beam of the Belmont Bevatron, they woke up, and they were in a world run where a religion (one of their religions) actually was correct. One character swore, then a bee materialized so it could sting him in retribution. They got cigarettes from a vending machine, got curious, opened it up, and it turned out the machine generated cigarette packages out of thin air. God Almighty gave the sermons on TV on Sunday mornings. Once they knocked the guy out, they went on to a world governed by another one of them's internal models, and so forth.
The article says we have a lot of defective components (brain cells) from the get-go. Being extra careful in very early development (taking folic acid) can prevent a lot of those defective components (folic acid in the first month of pregnancy reduces the chance of neural tube defects).
Autism is marked excess brain cells and low blood flow in the connections between brain cells. Perhaps the excess brain cells just take up too much room, so the connections are either cramped or not there.
Evolution takes into account that a large portion of our initial brain cells won't work. Perhaps folic acid makes too many work, leading to too many brain cells, not enough connections, and autism? Folic acid was recommended to pregnant women in 1992 and made an additive to wheat in 1998. Autism rose exponentially then. It was rising exponentially for a decade before that, too, though. Autism now affects 1 in 150 children (detectable at age 2), while neural tube defects affect 1 in 5000 (detectable when 3 months pregnant) (they were 32% more common before folic acid was added to wheat).
So, a theory. Fodder for future research. If this theory happens to be true, supplementing wheat with folic acid should be stopped.
This is a patent on identifying files by their hash. Checking Google, I see Lamport using cryptographic checksums (which are hashes used to identify files) in 1981. +20 years = 2001. The patent's either invalid, or it isn't as simple as identifying files by a hash.
No helium or tritium ... have they checked for (... pause while I google for what deuterium plus palladium form ...) silver?
You misunderstand. You do need the middle characters, you just don't need them in the correct order.
Can a book be read faster (on average) in Chinese or English?
Just looking at the fovea and eye movements, I'd expect that the easiest text to read (once you're trained) would be to do a 2d gray mapping of the text to the page. Words would grow in 2d, not just 1d as in English, so their parts could be recognized in parallel faster. Also the eye would not have to do long jumps at the end of the line.
Where would the US be today if Gore were president rather than Bush? Gore would have much preferred to concentrate on broadband than on terrorism.
I saw a snippet of it on TV one Sunday afternoon, marvelled at how bad it was, and found a book to read.
Oh, I get it now. Absolutely nothing in his vision of the future 10 years from now (that is different from things as they are today) will be correct. It's all stuff people talk about today, but none of it will really take off. I'm not sure why he didn't include flying cars, cheap electricity from fusion, omnipresent fuel cells, and a space elevator. His full-wall TV prediction was risky; that might actually happen.
That's the opposite of how I'd prefer patents to work. I'm willing to grant someone a monopoly on x if they're vigorously making x available to the world (at a price or no). I want to take the monopoly away when they have exclusive rights to x and sit on it.