Another things I find _great_ about google that I haven't found on any other search site, is instead of showing you the first sentance of the page found, it shows you sentence where you search words are. Perhaps not always the most helpful method, but more often than not, I think it is.
The search engine this article points to also fails to show the complete URL, I find that rather annoying, someimtes its quite helpful..
I can't remember the source, I'll keep looking for it, but I thought this was a problem once posed in theoretical computer science, and as I remembered, the answer (and I belief with proof) was that you could not have, simultaneously, but complete anonymity (ie, it can never be revealed how an individual voted) and complete authenticity (security, being sure no one is voting twice, fraudulently, etc..)
Anyone else familiar with this problem?
Having followed this working group and report with some interest (familiar with the MIT side faculty involved), I find it extremely faulty.
They chose to focus on something that truly has very little to do with the problems they cite. Voting irregularies in the US, in general, have very little to do with the voting technologies themselves. Highly accurate and (long term) inexpensive technologies (ie, optical scanners) have been available for 20+ years. However, these technologies are not distributed equally. Further, the report cites that in fact 3 million (at least half) of the missing votes were due to problems in registration or on election day (ie, turned away at the polls). Florida had a fairly technologically advanced system of laptops and a centralized comptuer database in place. However, these resources were again not distributed equally. In fact, in both cases, these problems were concentrated in areas of high concentrations of people of color, people or low income and immigrants. This MIT/CalTech report had no information that voting rights advocates having been shouting for at least three decades. For a complete look at what made up the problems in Florida, see this report from the United States Commission on Civil Rights. I would of course add that any state, were its election procedures put under such intense scrutiny as Florida, would have such irregularies come up.
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Another things I find _great_ about google that I haven't found on any other search site, is instead of showing you the first sentance of the page found, it shows you sentence where you search words are. Perhaps not always the most helpful method, but more often than not, I think it is.
The search engine this article points to also fails to show the complete URL, I find that rather annoying, someimtes its quite helpful..
-jon
I can't remember the source, I'll keep looking for it, but I thought this was a problem once posed in theoretical computer science, and as I remembered, the answer (and I belief with proof) was that you could not have, simultaneously, but complete anonymity (ie, it can never be revealed how an individual voted) and complete authenticity (security, being sure no one is voting twice, fraudulently, etc..) Anyone else familiar with this problem?
Having followed this working group and report with some interest (familiar with the MIT side faculty involved), I find it extremely faulty. They chose to focus on something that truly has very little to do with the problems they cite. Voting irregularies in the US, in general, have very little to do with the voting technologies themselves. Highly accurate and (long term) inexpensive technologies (ie, optical scanners) have been available for 20+ years. However, these technologies are not distributed equally. Further, the report cites that in fact 3 million (at least half) of the missing votes were due to problems in registration or on election day (ie, turned away at the polls). Florida had a fairly technologically advanced system of laptops and a centralized comptuer database in place. However, these resources were again not distributed equally. In fact, in both cases, these problems were concentrated in areas of high concentrations of people of color, people or low income and immigrants. This MIT/CalTech report had no information that voting rights advocates having been shouting for at least three decades. For a complete look at what made up the problems in Florida, see this report from the United States Commission on Civil Rights. I would of course add that any state, were its election procedures put under such intense scrutiny as Florida, would have such irregularies come up.