Examining collusion and voting biases between countries during the Eurovision song contest since 1957

The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is an annual event which attracts millions of viewers. It is an interesting activity to examine since the participants of the competition represent a particular country's musical performance that will be awarded a set of scores from other participating countries based upon a quality assessment of a performance. There is a question of whether the countries will vote exclusively according to the artistic merit of the song, or if the vote will be a public signal of national support for another country. Since the competition aims to bring people together, any consistent biases in the awarding of scores would defeat the purpose of the celebration of expression and this has attracted researchers to investigate the supporting evidence for biases. This paper builds upon an approach which produces a set of random samples from an unbiased distribution of score allocation, and extends the methodology to use the full set of years of the competition's life span which has seen fundamental changes to the voting schemes adopted. By building up networks from statistically significant edge sets of vote allocations during a set of years, the results display a plausible network for the origins of the culture anchors for the preferences of the awarded votes. With 60 years of data, the results support the hypothesis of regional collusion and biases arising from proximity, culture and other irrelevant factors in regards to the music which that alone is intended to affect the judgment of the contest.Comment: to be published in JASS

The Transition Town Network: a review of current evolutions and renaissance

The Transition Network started as a movement with Transition Totnes (Devon, UK) in late 2005, with Rob Hopkins as its founder. To date it has grown to encompass 313 official Transition Network initiatives spread across the world from the UK (with roughly 50% of all initiatives) to the USA, Canada, Italy, Japan, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Chile, the Netherlands, Brazil and so on (Transition Network, 2010a). For any social movement, this could most certainly be described as something of a success and warrants a closer examination. Indeed, the aim of this profile is to explore the movement's aims and modus operandi, the problematics it has faced and how it is now evolving. The profile draws on my auto-ethnographic encounters with the movement in Transition Nottingham and at the recent Transition Network Conference 2010, whilst also being grounded in the material made publically available on the Transition Network and Transition Culture websites (see Transition Network, 2010b and Transition Culture, 2010a)

Root system chip-firing II: Central-firing

Jim Propp recently proposed a labeled version of chip-firing on a line and conjectured that this process is confluent from some initial configurations. This was proved by Hopkins-McConville-Propp. We reinterpret Propp's labeled chip-firing moves in terms of root systems: a "central-firing" move consists of replacing a weight $\lambda$ by $\lambda+\alpha$ for any positive root $\alpha$ that is orthogonal to $\lambda$. We show that central-firing is always confluent from any initial weight after modding out by the Weyl group, giving a generalization of unlabeled chip-firing on a line to other types. For simply-laced root systems we describe this unlabeled chip-firing as a number game on the Dynkin diagram. We also offer a conjectural classification of when central-firing is confluent from the origin or a fundamental weight.Comment: 30 pages, 6 figures, 1 table; v2, v3: minor revision

Root system chip-firing I: Interval-firing

Jim Propp recently introduced a variant of chip-firing on a line where the chips are given distinct integer labels. Hopkins, McConville, and Propp showed that this process is confluent from some (but not all) initial configurations of chips. We recast their set-up in terms of root systems: labeled chip-firing can be seen as a root-firing process which allows the moves $\lambda \to \lambda + \alpha$ for $\alpha\in \Phi^{+}$ whenever $\langle\lambda,\alpha^\vee\rangle = 0$, where $\Phi^{+}$ is the set of positive roots of a root system of Type A and $\lambda$ is a weight of this root system. We are thus motivated to study the exact same root-firing process for an arbitrary root system. Actually, this central root-firing process is the subject of a sequel to this paper. In the present paper, we instead study the interval root-firing processes determined by $\lambda \to \lambda + \alpha$ for $\alpha\in \Phi^{+}$ whenever $\langle\lambda,\alpha^\vee\rangle \in [-k-1,k-1]$ or $\langle\lambda,\alpha^\vee\rangle \in [-k,k-1]$, for any $k \geq 0$. We prove that these interval-firing processes are always confluent, from any initial weight. We also show that there is a natural way to consistently label the stable points of these interval-firing processes across all values of $k$ so that the number of weights with given stabilization is a polynomial in $k$. We conjecture that these Ehrhart-like polynomials have nonnegative integer coefficients.Comment: 54 pages, 12 figures, 2 tables; v2: major revisions to improve exposition; v3: to appear in Mathematische Zeitschrift (Math. Z.

In Knead of Interpretation: Reimagining Marie Clements’ post-dramatic play Burning Vision through the interpretive signpost of bread.

Zed Alexander Hopkins ‘20 submitted this paper in Fall 2016 for Professor James Taylor’s ID1 course, Our Troubled World Imagined: Theatre and the Environment. It is one of the three papers that received honorable mention from that semester

Circular dichroism induced by Fano resonances in planar chiral oligomers

We present a general theory of circular dichroism in planar chiral nanostructures with rotational symmetry. It is demonstrated, analytically, that the handedness of the incident field's polarization can control whether a nanostructure induces either absorption or scattering losses, even when the total optical loss (extinction) is polarization-independent. We show that this effect is a consequence of modal interference so that strong circular dichroism in absorption and scattering can be engineered by combining Fano resonances with planar chiral nanoparticle clusters.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure

On the qq-Enumeration of Barely Set-Valued Tableaux and Plane Partitions

Barely set-valued tableaux are a variant of Young tableaux in which one box contains two numbers as its entry. It has recently been discovered that there are product formulas enumerating certain classes of barely set-valued tableaux. We give some q-analogs of these product formulas by introducing a version of major index for these tableaux. We also give product formulas and q-analogs for barely set-valued plane partitions. The proofs use several probability distributions on the set of order ideals of a poset, depending on the real parameter q > 0, which we think could be of independent interest.Comment: 38 pages, 6 tables, 3 figure

Variations in the Stellar IMF: from Bottom to Top

We use a recently-developed analytic model for the ISM structure from scales of GMCs through star-forming cores to explore how the pre-stellar core mass function (CMF) and, by extrapolation, stellar initial mass function (IMF) should depend on both local and galactic properties. If the ISM is supersonically turbulent, the statistical properties of the density field follow from the turbulent velocity spectrum, and the excursion set formalism can be applied to analytically calculate the mass function of collapsing cores on the smallest scales on which they are self-gravitating (non-fragmenting). Two parameters determine the model: the disk-scale Mach number M_h (which sets the shape of the CMF), and the absolute velocity (to assign an absolute scale). For 'normal' variation in disk properties and core gas temperatures in the MW and local galaxies, there is almost no variation in the predicted high-mass behavior of the CMF/IMF. The slope is always close to Salpeter down to <1 M_sun. We predict modest variation in the sub-solar regime, mostly from variation in M_h, but within the observed scatter in sub-solar IMFs in local regions. For fixed galaxy properties, there is little variation in shape or 'upper mass limit' with parent GMC mass. However, in extreme starbursts (e.g. ULIRGs) we predict a bottom-heavy CMF. This agrees with the IMF inferred for the centers of Virgo ellipticals, believed to form in such a nuclear starburst. The CMF is bottom heavy despite the gas temperature being an order of magnitude larger, because M_h is also much larger. Larger M_h values make the 'parent' cloud mass (turbulent Jeans mass) larger, but promote fragmentation to smaller scales; this steepens the slope of the low-mass CMF and shifts the turnover mass. The model may predict a top-heavy CMF for the sub-pc disks around Sgr A*, but the relevant input parameters are uncertain.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, MNRAS accepted (revised to match published version

The Formation of High Redshift Submillimeter Galaxies

We describe a model for the formation of \zsim 2 Submillimeter Galaxies (SMGs) which simultaneously accounts for both average and bright SMGs while providing a reasonable match to their mean observed spectral energy distributions (SEDs). By coupling hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy mergers with the high resolution 3D polychromatic radiative transfer code Sunrise, we find that a mass sequence of merger models which use observational constraints as physical input naturally yield objects which exhibit black hole, bulge, and H2 gas masses similar to those observed in SMGs. The dominant drivers behind the 850 micron flux are the masses of the merging galaxies and the stellar birthcloud covering fraction. The most luminous (S850 ~ 15 mJy) sources are recovered by ~10^13 Msun 1:1 major mergers with a birthcloud covering fraction close to unity, whereas more average SMGs ~5-7 mJy) may be formed in lower mass halos ~5x10^12 Msun. These models demonstrate the need for high spatial resolution hydrodynamic and radiative transfer simulations in matching both the most luminous sources as well as the full SEDs of SMGs. While these models suggest a natural formation mechanism for SMGs, they do not attempt to match cosmological statistics of galaxy populations; future efforts along this line will help ascertain the robustness of these models.Comment: MNRAS Accepted; Revised version includes expanded discussion of simulated radio properties of SMG