On The Margins

Wednesday September 08, 2004

[ Philosophy ] Why bits bore

Every software and hardware engineer wants to know that there's something great behind (or at least beyond) the bits and bytes they are working on. The tendency to despair with bits agrees with the fact that we're dynamic, not digital, beings.

Chess is a digital game. Our lives are not.

Chess moves are known. Life moves rarely work out the way we plan them. In chess, you move from one well-defined state to the next. There is no real ambiguity about the state of the board. Life, on the contrary, is full of ambiguities.

Here's another example. Soccer is not a digital game. It's a dynamic game. One may argue that digital (or pseudo-digital) events exist in soccer, too, such as pentalty kicks at the end of a long and exciting game. Well, these are the most boring parts of the game of soccer (or English football).

Some would even argue that football, I mean the American variety of it, although quite "dynamic" in some very paticular moves, has more on the "digital" side of the scale than soccer does. There are many, many more interruptions and cuts into the game, and many more intendedly "digital" measurements on the field.

Nevertheless, sports as played on the field will always have more dynamism than digital-ness. No wonder . . . Even the octogenarian seem to enjoy watching their favorite sport.

2004-09-08 19:18:55.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Web ] Children Should Vote, Too, in Ranked-Choice Elections !

Here, I'd like to discuss a proposal for a possible java.net forum project on a voting system that could be made available to school children to experiment with voting which includes a certain degree of formality and complexity. It will not only introduce them to voting on the web but also to some of the less-than-apparent issues in our current voting system.

We're approaching a national election in November, and a number of people have been writing about voting systems on blogs.sun.com and elsewhere, including at planetsun.org.

For example, Professor Lawrence Lessig has pointed to ranked-choice voting in San Francisco this November.

SeongBae ("Bits and pieces") has written about the use of SunRay machines as voting tools. Azeem Jiva has echoed SeongBae's idea.

On my part, I've been writing about ranked-choice voting and the mathematics of elections and like SeongBae and Azeem Jiva have been thinking about possible ways to host a project for bringing Sun technology into the voting foray.

My suggestion is slightly different from Azeema Jiva's and SeongBae's but I think it can complement theirs.

Basically, what I'd like to do is to help some people to start a java.net forum project that would focus on bringing Condercet or Ranked-Choice voting to schools across the nation, as a Web Service which can host both pre-configured and configurable elections.

[The pre-configured one would, for example, be a national election, say a presidential election. The configurable ones are minor elections held for various purposes. More on this below.]

In other words, this is an almost-real voting system that allows school children to participate in all national votes and educates them regarding ranked-choice and Condercet voting.

What is interesting about this project is that some server-side computation will be required to resolve voting result ambiguities.

On the client side, we could use Java Card, we could distribute voting numbers to each school principle who requests it, we could use SunRays or whatever else to make it practical. The most practical approach may be the distribution to school administrators of unique voting numbers and "ballots" which could be entered by teachers or students who own them through the web.

This could be a very exciting project because it brings together a great deal of ready-to-go technology, allows for a twist on the voting system by its inclusion of ranked-choice / Condercet and has a great deal of social value which could motivate contributors. Finally, multiple people from various companies can collobrate, to implement and host the web service system on the server-side, possibly in different geos if it involves competing companies.

I think the first version of the application could be decently implemented by two to three engineers in less than three months.

Furthermore, the Web Service which will be hosting this voting system, will be available for people to configure or create votes of their own upon registration. It could even host a voting service for mobile devices. (Even silly votes, for example on who should lead a soccer team or be the captain, etc., could be hosted and carried out through any web-ready device.)

Finally, I'd be surprised if such a system doesn't already exist! If it doesn't, it should be started as a java.net forum project.

2004-09-08 14:42:04.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Web ] Return on Weblog Investments ( ROwI ? )

Sharij asks whether the economic returns on (company) Weblogs are justified by the required investment to produce them. In other words, is the bang worth the buck when it comes to weblogs?

Not everything done by employees or a company is for direct purposes of making a sale although almost everything that a company and its employees do will have some effect on its sales and revenues. The key phrase here is "market perception" and the key concept is the role business entities play in influencing the way market perceives them.

Furthermore, the improtant thing about Weblogs is the fact that they enable human beings (hopefully, with some expertise, interest or concern) to participate in the formation and digestion of (mostly random) information.

So, while there has been a lot of hype about search, nothing can replace a good dose of reality. For example, see a recent weblog by Colm Smyth who has written on bridges to and from RSS. No amount of search would have enabled me to have access to the type of information Colm has put together in a simple paragraph. This is the irreplaceable, human-factor part of weblogs.

The effect of company weblogs on sales is subtle, unpredictable and uninformative at best.

2004-09-08 00:46:51.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Society ] Ranked-Choice Voting in San Francisco

I'd written earlier about the mathematics of elections, with particular attention to Condercet or ranked-choice voting. Now, Professor Lawrence Lessig has pointed his readers to a demo for San Francisco's upcoming ranked-choice voting experience. I wonder whether a reduction in the number of available rankings (say from the number of candidates for an office to only three choices, as has been done in San Francisco) diminishes the probability of cyclic ambiguities. San Francisco's ranked-choice voting system was passed as proposition A in March 2002, and the first ranked-choice vote for local offices will be held during the November 2nd, 2004 election. It will be a great time to look and see how Condercet voting does in practice in Northern California.

In the text version of the official San Francisco ranked-choice voting demo, we read:

The Department of Elections cannot predict the date on which it will begin the process of elimination and transfer. The Department will do so as soon as possible, after all provisional and absentee ballots are processed. The Department intends to report final election results no later than 28 days after election day.

The "28 days" of waiting for election results seems awefully long. It could be that old counting machines are used for a physical implementation of the various elimination algorithms. As I wrote earlier, some computing power and already-implemented algorithms could help with the counting and the elimination process in ranked-choice voting in cases of result ambiguities.

2004-09-08 00:35:25.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.