FoCaLiZe: Inside an F-IDE

For years, Integrated Development Environments have demonstrated their usefulness in order to ease the development of software. High-level security or safety systems require proofs of compliance to standards, based on analyses such as code review and, increasingly nowadays, formal proofs of conformance to specifications. This implies mixing computational and logical aspects all along the development, which naturally raises the need for a notion of Formal IDE. This paper examines the FoCaLiZe environment and explores the implementation issues raised by the decision to provide a single language to express specification properties, source code and machine-checked proofs while allowing incremental development and code reusability. Such features create strong dependencies between functions, properties and proofs, and impose an particular compilation scheme, which is described here. The compilation results are runnable OCaml code and a checkable Coq term. All these points are illustrated through a running example.Comment: In Proceedings F-IDE 2014, arXiv:1404.578

“Seek the Light of Love”:Philip Lamantia’s “A Simple Answer to the Enemy”: Then and Now

During the 1940s the poet Philip Lamantia transitioned away from Surrealism to “naturalistic” poetry rooted in spirituality and the mysticism that exists in extraordinary experiences. Some of the subject matter became more sensuous and sociopolitical, and an underlying theme is contempt for government and the evil perpetrated in its name. One of his most overtly political poems, “A Simple Answer to the Enemy” remains applicable today. It makes a case for dissent by laying bare the corrupt agenda of a political order that dehumanizes the public and erodes liberties. Lamantia endorses a revolutionary mindset that rejects mechanistic thinking, aggression, and greed, and encourages us to embrace a philosophy of love and the spirit of compassion

Are Opinions Based on Science: Modelling Social Response to Scientific Facts

As scientists we like to think that modern societies and their members base their views, opinions and behaviour on scientific facts. This is not necessarily the case, even though we are all (over-) exposed to information flow through various channels of media, i.e. newspapers, television, radio, internet, and web. It is thought that this is mainly due to the conflicting information on the mass media and to the individual attitude (formed by cultural, educational and environmental factors), that is, one external factor and another personal factor. In this paper we will investigate the dynamical development of opinion in a small population of agents by means of a computational model of opinion formation in a co-evolving network of socially linked agents. The personal and external factors are taken into account by assigning an individual attitude parameter to each agent, and by subjecting all to an external but homogeneous field to simulate the effect of the media. We then adjust the field strength in the model by using actual data on scientific perception surveys carried out in two different populations, which allow us to compare two different societies. We interpret the model findings with the aid of simple mean field calculations. Our results suggest that scientifically sound concepts are more difficult to acquire than concepts not validated by science, since opposing individuals organize themselves in close communities that prevent opinion consensus.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figures. Submitted to PLoS ON

Distribution and Politics: A Brief History and Prospect

A brief, historical review of the study of the interdependency between politics and economic distribution is offered. While the impact of economic interests on politics has been acknowledged for thousands of years, and the impact of politics on distribution for hundreds, it is only in the last thirty years that formal models of the interdependency between economic distribution and politics have been formulated. A general model of political-economic equilibrium is proposed, in which political competition and economic distribution jointly determine each other. Several examples are given. The author proposes that political economy, conceived of as studying this process of joint determination, is in its infancy.Political-economic equilibrium

Value and Politics

A brief, historical review of the study of the interdependency between politics and economic distribution is offered. While the impact of economic interests on politics has been acknowledged for thousands of years, and the impact of politics on distribution for hundreds, it is only in the last thirty years that formal models of the interdependency between economic distribution and politics have been formulated. A general model of political-economic equilibrium is proposed, in which political competition and economic distribution jointly determine each other. Several examples are given. The author proposes that political economy, conceived of as studying this process of joint determination, is in its infancy.Political-economic equilibrium

U.S. Election Assistance Commission Urban-Rural Study: Final Report

In May, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission released a report comparing election administration in urban and rural jurisdictions. The survey uncovered more similarities than differences, in part because many small, urban jurisdictions have more in common with rural offices than with very large metropolitan ones. The size of the registered voter population seemed to influence administration more than did the degree of urbanization.The report was based on a national survey of local election administrators that focused on voter-outreach efforts and office personnel -- topics identified by a working group of election officials and researchers as likely to vary based on a jurisdiction's urbanization

A Decade of Experimental Research on Spatial Models of Elections and Committees

The Euclidean representation of political issues and alternative outcomes, and the associated representation of preferences as quasi-concave utility functions is by now a staple of formal models of committees and elections. This theoretical development, moreover, is accompanied by a considerable body of experimental research. We can view that research in two ways: as a test of the basic propositions about equilibria in specific institutional settings, and as an attempt to gain insights into those aspects of political processes that are poorly understood or imperfectly modeled, such as the robustness of theoretical results with respect to procedural details and bargaining environments. This essay reviews that research so that we can gain some sense of its overall import

Out of Sight, out of Mind: How Opportunity Cost Neglect Undermines Democracy

Every government program has an opportunity cost, which consists of the private and public goods that society must forgo to make the program possible. In evaluating government programs, rational voters would take opportunity costs into account. Unfortunately, opportunity costs are usually implicit, and psychologists have shown that decision makers tend to irrationally ignore implicit information while giving too much weight to salient situational elements. This Article presents evidence that the bias against implicit information causes voters to neglect the opportunity costs of government programs. The Article also explains for the first time the implications of opportunity cost neglect for democracy

Combining autocracy and majority voting: the canonical succession rules of the Latin Church

The autocratic turn of the Latin Church in the XI-XIII century, a reaction to the secular power interferences, concentrated the decision-making power in the hands of the top hierarchy, and finally in the hands of the pope. A fundamental step was the change and the constitutionalisation of the procedures for leadership replacement, which were open successions where the contest for power was governed by elections. The autocratic reform limited the active electorate to the clergy only and gradually substituted the episcopal elections by the pope’s direct appointment. Besides, the voting rules changed from unanimity to the dual principle of maioritas et sanioritas (where the majority was identified with the greater part by number and wisdom) and finally to the numerical rule of qualified majority. This evolution aimed at preserving the elections from external interferences and at eliminating the elements of arbitrariness. The most important succession, the papal election, was protected by institutionalising a selectorate and its decision-making rules. The selectorate and the elections did not insert accountability and representation mechanisms but only protected the quality of the autocratic leadership and its autonomy.Theocracies, Autocracy, Succession rules