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Gerrymandering and Compactness: Implementation Flexibility and Abuse
The shape of an electoral district may suggest whether it was drawn with
political motivations, or gerrymandered. For this reason, quantifying the shape
of districts, in particular their compactness, is a key task in politics and
civil rights. A growing body of literature suggests and analyzes compactness
measures mathematically, but little consideration has been given to how these
scores should be calculated in practice. Here, we consider the effects of a
number of decisions that must be made in interpreting and implementing a set of
popular compactness scores. We show that the choices made in quantifying
compactness may themselves become political tools, with seemingly innocuous
decisions leading to disparate scores. We show that when the full range of
implementation flexibility is used, it can be abused to make clearly
gerrymandered districts appear quantitatively reasonable. This complicates
using compactness as a legislative or judicial standard to counteract unfair
redistricting practices. This paper accompanies the release of packages in C++,
Python, and R which correctly, efficiently, and reproducibly calculate a
variety of compactness scores.Comment: 10 pages, 17 figures, 1 tabl
Introduction
Publication within the project “The V4 towards migration challenges in Europe. An analysis and recommendations” is financed by Visegrad Fund
Counting and Enumerating Crossing-free Geometric Graphs
We describe a framework for counting and enumerating various types of
crossing-free geometric graphs on a planar point set. The framework generalizes
ideas of Alvarez and Seidel, who used them to count triangulations in time
where is the number of points. The main idea is to reduce the
problem of counting geometric graphs to counting source-sink paths in a
directed acyclic graph.
The following new results will emerge. The number of all crossing-free
geometric graphs can be computed in time for some .
The number of crossing-free convex partitions can be computed in time
. The number of crossing-free perfect matchings can be computed in
time . The number of convex subdivisions can be computed in time
. The number of crossing-free spanning trees can be computed in time
for some . The number of crossing-free spanning cycles
can be computed in time for some .
With the same bounds on the running time we can construct data structures
which allow fast enumeration of the respective classes. For example, after
time of preprocessing we can enumerate the set of all crossing-free
perfect matchings using polynomial time per enumerated object. For
crossing-free perfect matchings and convex partitions we further obtain
enumeration algorithms where the time delay for each (in particular, the first)
output is bounded by a polynomial in .
All described algorithms are comparatively simple, both in terms of their
analysis and implementation
Introduction: Commercial Diplomacy and International Business.
International business has always been intimately linked to the politics of the global economy. Expansion and investment strategies of business play a key role in de?ning the architecture of the global economy. The shifting dynamic of the global economy such as the emergence of fast growing economies in, for example, India, China, South Africa and Brazil can be partly explained by the emergence of new market players such as the India transnational car manufacturer Tata, as well as the adaptation of established international businesses in the West to the new market opportunities in the South and the East. Equally, the recent (and in places ongoing) economic crises of the West owes as much to the failures of international business — notably the banking and investment industry — as it does to the failures of government policy.
At the same time the international political dimension to the global economy explains the regulatory forces which also determine the architecture of the global economy. The far reaching policy liberalization of international trade through international (namely the World Trade Organisation) and regional treaties and rule- making, and the global deregulation of the investment and ?nancial services sector of the global economy driven by the neoliberal policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have created economic risks and opportunities for international business by opening up and creating new markets. The strategies of nation states and international business determine the architecture of the global economy and create both economic crises and dynamic growth at one and the same time in the contemporary global economy. So it is that for much of the ?rst decade or so of the new century the West has endured an age of austerity brought on by sustained economic decline and high indebtedness. The once market dominant economies of the United States and West European economies are now struggling to reverse negative economic growth. By contrast large previously peripheral under- developed economies in Africa and Asia are enjoying remarkable and sustained growth rates and their exports and investments now fuel an overall growth in the global economy
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