Paradoxical Oddities in Two Multiwinner Elections from Scotland

Ranked-choice voting anomalies such as monotonicity paradoxes have been extensively studied through creating hypothetical examples and generating elections under various models of voter behavior. However, very few real-world examples of such voting paradoxes have been found and analyzed. We investigate two single-transferable vote elections from Scotland that demonstrate upward monotonicity, downward monotonicity, no-show, and committee size paradoxes. These paradoxes are rarely observed in real-world elections, and this article is the first case study of such paradoxes in multiwinner elections

A Mathematical Analysis of the 2022 Alaska Special Election for US House

The August 2022 Alaska Special Election for US House contained many interesting features from the perspective of social choice theory. This election used instant runoff voting (often referred to as ranked choice voting) to elect a winner, and many of the weaknesses of this voting method were on display in this election. For example, the Condorcet winner is different from the instant runoff winner, and the election demonstrated a monotonicity paradox. The election also demonstrated a no show paradox; as far as we are aware, this election represents the first document American ranked choice election to demonstrate this paradox

Monotonicity Anomalies in Scottish Local Government Elections

The single transferable vote (STV) voting method is used to elect multiple candidates in ranked-choice elections. One weakness of STV is that it fails multiple fairness criteria related to monotonicity and no-show paradoxes. We analyze 1,079 local government STV elections in Scotland to estimate the frequency of such monotonicity anomalies in real-world elections, and compare our results with prior empirical and theoretical research about the rates at which such anomalies occur. In 41 of the 1079 elections we found some kind of monotonicity anomaly. We generally find that the rates of anomalies are similar to prior empirical research and much lower than what most theoretical research has found. Most of the STV anomalies we find are the first of their kind to be documented in real-world elections.Comment: 30 page

"The Little Actor": Performing Childhood in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Lord Byron’s “To Ianthe,” Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim reinvent the portrayal of childhood. Didactic literature by authors such as John Newbery, Mary Wollstonecraft, Isaac Watts, John and Charles Wesley, and Hannah More, though it assumed that growing up meant the transformation of an essential inner identity, paradoxically represented childhood not as an essential quality, but as a prescribed role to be performed by the child. Children’s performance of morally or culturally approved roles was, in fact, the mechanism by which they were supposed to be transformed into successful adults. Didactic authors expected the child to imitate a single model: the moral, educated, well-mannered child. Byron, Carroll, James, and Kipling instead point to multiple models, multiple ideas of how children could behave. In their works, children can choose from different “scripts” of childhood and perform them to reinvent childhood and themselves: the children imitate models but choose which ones to emulate. James and Kipling go a step further, depicting children who use their performance of social roles to influence adults and pursue their own goals. Finally, Kipling questions (much like the late twentieth-century critic Judith Butler) whether his young protagonist even has an essential identity separate from the performance of social roles. The four authors imitate didactic literature’s idea of childhood-as-performance but transform it, asserting children’s agency against the adult authority of didactic literature. This study’s analysis of these authors’ works expands Marah Gubar’s focus on child agency (rather than passive vulnerability to adult influence) in children’s literature to depictions of children in the broader field of nineteenth-century British literature. Its argument also builds on Robin Bernstein’s notion of performed childhood innocence as a racial category (defined so as to exclude African-Americans); it describes the way Byron, Carroll, James, and Kipling use the different expectations for children of different cultures, classes, and genders—such as the expectations for Kim’s roles as both British spy and eastern Buddhist disciple in Kipling’s Kim—to generate multiple possibilities for childhood roles.Doctor of Philosoph

Modular Storage Key Management for Heterogeneous Hardware and Software

A server may be divided into one or more divisions, which each may include at least one processing device and one or more data sources. Each data source may include a media encryption key (MEK) that encrypts/decrypts the contents of the data source. The MEK may be encrypted. A processing device of a division may include a node secret seed (NSS) that the processing device may use with a key derivation function to generate an access key. The processing device can use the access key to decrypt the MEK of a data source. To secure the NSS, the processing device may encrypt the NSS, send the encrypted NSS to another processing device outside the division, and the other processing device can encrypt the already-encrypted NSS again and send the double wrapped NSS back to the first processing device. The server may have an access key emergency data recovery procedure

Association and liquid structure of pyridine-acetic acid mixtures determined from neutron scattering using a ‘free proton’ EPSR simulation model

Hydrogen-bonded molecular acetic acid chains are observed in acid–base mixtures from small angle neutron diffraction.</p

Pan-Cancer Analysis of lncRNA Regulation Supports Their Targeting of Cancer Genes in Each Tumor Context

Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are commonly dys-regulated in tumors, but only a handful are known toplay pathophysiological roles in cancer. We inferredlncRNAs that dysregulate cancer pathways, onco-genes, and tumor suppressors (cancer genes) bymodeling their effects on the activity of transcriptionfactors, RNA-binding proteins, and microRNAs in5,185 TCGA tumors and 1,019 ENCODE assays.Our predictions included hundreds of candidateonco- and tumor-suppressor lncRNAs (cancerlncRNAs) whose somatic alterations account for thedysregulation of dozens of cancer genes and path-ways in each of 14 tumor contexts. To demonstrateproof of concept, we showed that perturbations tar-geting OIP5-AS1 (an inferred tumor suppressor) andTUG1 and WT1-AS (inferred onco-lncRNAs) dysre-gulated cancer genes and altered proliferation ofbreast and gynecologic cancer cells. Our analysis in-dicates that, although most lncRNAs are dysregu-lated in a tumor-specific manner, some, includingOIP5-AS1, TUG1, NEAT1, MEG3, and TSIX, synergis-tically dysregulate cancer pathways in multiple tumorcontexts

Pan-cancer Alterations of the MYC Oncogene and Its Proximal Network across the Cancer Genome Atlas

Although theMYConcogene has been implicated incancer, a systematic assessment of alterations ofMYC, related transcription factors, and co-regulatoryproteins, forming the proximal MYC network (PMN),across human cancers is lacking. Using computa-tional approaches, we define genomic and proteo-mic features associated with MYC and the PMNacross the 33 cancers of The Cancer Genome Atlas.Pan-cancer, 28% of all samples had at least one ofthe MYC paralogs amplified. In contrast, the MYCantagonists MGA and MNT were the most frequentlymutated or deleted members, proposing a roleas tumor suppressors.MYCalterations were mutu-ally exclusive withPIK3CA,PTEN,APC,orBRAFalterations, suggesting that MYC is a distinct onco-genic driver. Expression analysis revealed MYC-associated pathways in tumor subtypes, such asimmune response and growth factor signaling; chro-matin, translation, and DNA replication/repair wereconserved pan-cancer. This analysis reveals insightsinto MYC biology and is a reference for biomarkersand therapeutics for cancers with alterations ofMYC or the PMN