13,539 research outputs found
Fundraising and vote distribution: a non-equilibrium statistical approach
The number of votes correlates strongly with the money spent in a campaign,
but the relation between the two is not straightforward. Among other factors,
the output of a ballot depends on the number of candidates, voters, and
available resources. Here, we develop a conceptual framework based on Shannon
entropy maximization and Superstatistics to establish a relation between the
distributions of money spent by candidates and their votes. By establishing
such a relation, we provide a tool to predict the outcome of a ballot and to
alert for possible misconduct either in the report of fundraising and spending
of campaigns or on vote counting. As an example, we consider real data from a
proportional election with candidates, where a detailed data
verification is virtually impossible, and show that the number of potential
misconducting candidates to audit can be reduced to only nine
Gravitation and Duality Symmetry
By generalizing the Hodge dual operator to the case of soldered bundles, and
working in the context of the teleparallel equivalent of general relativity, an
analysis of the duality symmetry in gravitation is performed. Although the
basic conclusion is that, at least in the general case, gravitation is not dual
symmetric, there is a particular theory in which this symmetry shows up. It is
a self dual (or anti-self dual) teleparallel gravity in which, due to the fact
that it does not contribute to the interaction of fermions with gravitation,
the purely tensor part of torsion is assumed to vanish. The ensuing fermionic
gravitational interaction is found to be chiral. Since duality is intimately
related to renormalizability, this theory may eventually be more amenable to
renormalization than teleparallel gravity or general relativity.Comment: 7 pages, no figures. Version 2: minor presentation changes,
references added. Accepted for publication in Int. J. Mod. Phys.
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