I just set up a mock election on Selectricity, just to see what it could do, and was pleasantly surprised that they created a very simple interface for creating Schulze/Condorcet elections that pretty much anyone can use. I tried getting to this point a few years ago with Electowidget, but sadly didn’t get to a usable enough place (nor a maintainable enough site).
The writers strike has temporarily saved me from staring zombie-like from my slouched position on the couch, and instead has me typing zombie-like from a differently-slouched position on my couch. After seeing a couple of mildly amusing clips from on-strike writers (from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report), I was curious enough to poke around the writers’ website and see them make their case. Regardless of the merits of the strike, the writers are in a much better position to make their case than they were the last time they did this.
But I think it’s a lot worse than writers with extra YouTube posting time on their hands. There’s a piece in the L.A. Times about how non-Hollywood money is starting to find good writers (via pmarca)
(more…)
I like reading Paul Kedrosky’s Infectuous Greed blog, even if I think he occasionally says some things that are completely moronic. One reason I do, though, is the occasonal food for thought, like this post on inflated house prices.
Yale economist Bob Shiller says in the weekend issue of Barron’s that he’s still looking for 20-30% housing price declines over the next 5-10 years — including in untouchable cities like San Francisco and New York (and I’ll include Vancouver)
He goes on to quote the article, talking about the relocation that’s occurring. Some folks left comments that pointed out that there are always going to be people drawn to jobs in hot markets like New York or San Francisco, but I know of at least one San Francisco-based company that’s looking to hire outside of the city.
Apparently, Mayor Nickels plans to propose a parking tax for downtown Seattle to fund transportation. Fantastic! That means that the people who commute to downtown from Issaquah or wherever pay some for Seattle transportation (as they should) whereas those of us who live and work in Seattle aren’t getting disproportionately taxed.
I’m a big supporter of moving back to a 28 year maximum term on copyrights. I’ve been thinking about how to describe that, and I think I’ve come up with one way of doing it. Rupert Holmes would still be able to earn a living off of his 1979 hit “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)”, but Debby Boone would just now be asked to hop off of the “You Light Up My Life” gravy train that left the station in the fall of 1977. I think that that’s more than enough economic motivation society should provide to ensure the creation of such … (ahem) … classics.
It seems that whenever Bush or the Republicans trot out the phrase “playing politics”, they really mean “thinking critically”. Just visit the following links, and replace the phrase “playing politics” with “thinking critically” to see what I mean.
“But here’s the question. The question is, how do you respond to [the intelligence failures]? Do you respond to it by correcting the intelligence, or do you do what the Democrats are doing, which is [thinking critically] with it. And I think the president’s point was at this critical moment in this critical war, with this central front in the war on terror, [thinking critically] is not what we should be doing.” Chairman of the Republican Party, Ken Mehlman - Transcript for November 13 - Meet the Press, online at MSNBC - MSNBC.com
Some of our elected leaders have opposed this war all along. I disagreed with them, but I respect their willingness to take a consistent stand. Yet some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force are now rewriting the past. They are [thinking critically] with this issue and they are sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy. And that’s irresponsible. President Delivers Remarks at Elmendorf AFB on War on Terror
I’m sure there are other substitutions that can be made, for “sending mixed signals” and “rewriting the past”. In fact, I’m beginning to think it’s possible to translate Bush-speak into something intelligible. Heh…nevermind…I can’t believe I just said that.
technorati tags: playingpolitics, bush, bushspeak, meetthepress, mehlman
For the past couple of months, I’ve been working on Electowidget. Electowidget is a plugin for MediaWiki designed to make it possible to conduct Internet polls and elections using many different voting systems, including the Schulze method, Instant Runoff Voting, Approval voting, and even plain old Plurality.
Electowidget isn’t designed for secure public elections. Rather, it’s designed for the types of informal polls and elections that currently happen on wikis today. It’s also designed as a tool to help election theorists provide comparitive examples of how a given result will be tabulated comparing multiple different systems.
All data is stored on wiki pages, in JSON format, and some parts of the system currently require you to get your hands dirty editing JSON. My next step is to hide as much of the JSON away from the end user as possible, so that editing raw JSON
isn’t necessary. One nice bit about JSON is that it’s a very machine-friendly format, so I don’t anticipate that step being too tough to accomplish.
The ultimate goal is to make a library that can plugged into most any CMS or other PHP application. A lot of the functionality is already such that this is possible.
This work is seemingly unrelated to my work on Spectaclar (user management project), but there is a tie-in. I’ve done some initial work on a CMS-independence layer which can be helpful in porting plugins to different CMS systems. I haven’t decided yet just how far I’ll take this, but I keep this idea in the back of my mind whenever I’m in that part of the code.
Anyway, I hope people find this useful. I anticipate it’ll be useful for at least some of the things I’m doing, so I suppose that’s good enough for me.
If you want to get IRS tax statistics, looks like you better have a computer that supports .exe files (Microsoft Windows executable). SOI Tax Stats - Filing Season Statistics / Taxpayer Usage Study
There are so many things wrong with this, I’m not sure where to start…
It looks like Barack Obama has decided to start posting on Daily Kos
Of course, his first dispatch was “first p0st! LOL!”, but he’ll get the hang of it.
Metafilter pointed out a really good article: CBS News Makeover, by Four Kibitzers. Lizz Winstead, co-creator of “The Daily Show”, pointed out a bunch of really cool things that CBS could do, but that they won’t do, such as media commentary and podcasting. However, I’m not sure that we need to wait for CBS to do it….
Puget Sound Business Journal is reporting that there’s a hearing set for splitting Washington into two states. Even though it has a snowball’s chance in hell, I’ve always thought this would be a great way of highlighting just how much Western WA subsidizes Eastern WA.
(update: 9/20/2006 - This is an old post I made to the blog on electorama.com, which I’m shutting down)
There was a great show about Instant Runoff on KUOW, the NPR affiliate in Seattle today. The guests were Steven Hill from the Center for Voting and Democracy as well as the Republican Party official who wrote the opposing view on the San Francisco initiative that passed. The great part was that awareness of Condorcet methods is growing. They also have a blog to post your comments.
The last Debian Project Leader election was a very close one. Martin Michlmayr won a Condorcet-tallied election in a very close race between him, Bdale Garbee (the incumbent), and Branden Robinson. Doing analysis on these result yields some interesting observations. Among the most surprising is that Branden Robinson would have won had San Francisco’s rules for Instant Runoff Voting been used. I can’t say I’m very close to the Debian development process. I used to use a Debian box as my primary home desktop, I wrote one of the scripts that are used to tally the elections, and Electorama is run from a Debian-based ISP. However, I can’t say I’m very familiar with the individual candidates and the differences in their platforms. The conclusions I draw below are drawn from the data itself, and not from any insight (or lack thereof) in any external factors.
Powered by WordPress