Electoral Malapportionment: Partisanship, Rhetoric and Reform in the Shadow of the Agrarian Strongman

This article revisits the zonal malapportionment and ‘Johrymander’ endemic in Queensland’s electoral system before the Fitzgerald Inquiry and examines how reform was won. Fitzgerald spent little time justifying his intuition that an unfair electoral system eroded accountability, and devolved to the Electoral and Administrative Review Commission (EARC) the task of rewriting Queensland electoral law. It did so by adopting precepts well established in other Australian jurisdictions; the process was one of liberalising, but not groundbreaking, catch-up. The Queensland example is intriguing for the paradoxes it presented. Bjelke-Petersen’s electoral manipulations merged pretence with openness. The concept of zonal weighting was given historical and policy justifications and cloaked behind the work of putatively independent commissions, yet its inherent partisanship was a notorious fact. More curious still, the manipulations were unnecessary either as a means of maintaining the conservatives in office or as a legal subterfuge evading constitutional constraints. Rather, Bjelke-Petersen’s pointed rejection of democratic pluralism married with the projection of an image of leadership by right. Viewing Queensland’s zonal system in the larger perspective of manipulation of electoral maps, this article compares populist strongmen in South Australia (Playford) and Québec (Duplessis), who employed similar rhetoric to entrench themselves in power. Ultimately, as others had, Queensland’s government constructed a long-running but brittle form of agrarian chauvinism, in which the signalling of anti-democratic values inherent in the zonal system was an important rhetorical component. Bjelke-Petersen was proud to govern over, rather than through, democracy

Deliberative or Performative? Constitutional Reform and the Politics of Public Engagement in New Zealand

A key assumption that shapes debates over deliberative constitutionalism is the idea that ‘deliberation’ versus the wielding political power based upon partisan influence somehow represent different poles of the constitutional-deliberative coin. This dualism is problematic. While the term ‘deliberation’ means careful consideration and purposeful and dispassionate decision-making, its adjectival form ‘deliberate’ may also imply ‘calculated’, ‘premeditated’ and ‘controlled’. How democracies deliberate is arguably an empirical and political question rather than a theoretical or normative one. This paper sets out to explore these themes in the context of New Zealand, a country that has had three major constitutional deliberations since 2005. Framed by government as ‘national conversations’ on ‘the future of New Zealand’, these include two initiatives aimed at engaging the public’s views on constitutional reform and a recent consultation over proposals to change the national flag. What is striking about these popular constitutional initiatives, however, is the lack of public engagement or serious government interest. We argue that these ‘non-event’ deliberations highlight one of the key challenges for deliberative constitutionalism: how to prevent instrumentalism and performativity from overshadowing the substantive. In developing our argument we draw on anthropological fieldwork on the role of the Crown in New Zealand and the Commonwealth. As we aim to show, the New Zealand case study highlights yet another problem for deliberative constitutionalism in practice: the difficulties of creating a meaningful public consultation when the main terms of reference (‘Crown’ and ‘Constitution’) are so ambiguous, amorphous and poorly understood

VideoAgent: Long-form Video Understanding with Large Language Model as Agent

Long-form video understanding represents a significant challenge within computer vision, demanding a model capable of reasoning over long multi-modal sequences. Motivated by the human cognitive process for long-form video understanding, we emphasize interactive reasoning and planning over the ability to process lengthy visual inputs. We introduce a novel agent-based system, VideoAgent, that employs a large language model as a central agent to iteratively identify and compile crucial information to answer a question, with vision-language foundation models serving as tools to translate and retrieve visual information. Evaluated on the challenging EgoSchema and NExT-QA benchmarks, VideoAgent achieves 54.1% and 71.3% zero-shot accuracy with only 8.4 and 8.2 frames used on average. These results demonstrate superior effectiveness and efficiency of our method over the current state-of-the-art methods, highlighting the potential of agent-based approaches in advancing long-form video understanding

A complexity perspective on the geographical location of companies: How distance reduce trade between firms

Geometrical distance is an important constraining factor underpinning the emergence of social and economic interactions of complex systems. Yet, agent-based studies supported by granular analysis of distances are limited. Here, we develop a complexity method that places the real physical world, represented by the actual geographical location of individual firms in Japan, at the epicentre of our research. By combining methods derived from network science (to evaluate the emerging properties of the agents) together with information theory measures (to capture the strength of interaction among these agents), we can systematically analyse a comprehensive dataset of Japanese inter-firm business transactions network and evaluate the effects of spatial features on the structural patterns of the economy. We find that the normalised probability distributions of distances between interacting firms show a power law like decay concomitant to the sizes of firms and regions, with slower decays in major cities. Furthermore, small firms would reach large distances to become a customer of large firms while trading between either only small firms, or only large firms, tends to be at smaller distances. However, a time evolution analysis suggests that a level of market optimisation occurs over time as a reduction in the overall average trading distances in last 20 years can be observed. Lastly, our analysis concerning the trading dynamics among prefectures indicate that the preference to trade with neighbouring prefectures tends to be more pronounced at rural regions as opposed to the larger central conurbations, leading to the formation of three distinct types of regional geographical clusters

Unveiling the nature of interaction between semantics and phonology in lexical access based on multilayer networks

An essential aspect of human communication is the ability to access and retrieve information from ones’ ‘mental lexicon’. This lexical access activates phonological and semantic components of concepts, yet the question whether and how these two components relate to each other remains widely debated. We harness tools from network science to construct a large-scale linguistic multilayer network comprising of phonological and semantic layers. We find that the links in the two layers are highly similar to each other and that adding information from one layer to the other increases efficiency by decreasing the network overall distances, but specifically affecting shorter distances. Finally, we show how a multilayer architecture demonstrates the highest efficiency, and how this efficiency relates to weak semantic relations between cue words in the network. Thus, investigating the interaction between the layers and the unique benefit of a linguistic multilayer architecture allows us to quantify theoretical cognitive models of lexical access

Civic Health Report 2013

This report is an initial attempt to assess the Civic Health of The College at Brockport. By “Civic Health” we mean the civic, social and political strength of a community. Civic strength is characterized by the level of community involvement and the capacity of a community to work together to resolve collective problems. Social strength captures the social ties, networks, level of trust, and shared understanding in a community. Political strength gauges the extent of citizens’ engagement with government. In this first Civic Health Report we present data addressing most, but not all, aspects of Civic Health. We focus on the College at Brockport student body. In future years we plan to expand the range of indicators we assess and extend the project to include faculty and staff ‐ clearly two important constituencies in the college community

Gene regulatory interactions limit the gene expression diversity

The diversity of expressed genes plays a critical role in cellular specialization, adaptation to environmental changes, and overall cell functionality. This diversity varies dramatically across cell types and is orchestrated by intricate, dynamic, and cell type-specific gene regulatory networks (GRNs). Despite extensive research on GRNs, their governing principles, as well as the underlying forces that have shaped them, remain largely unknown. Here, we investigated whether there is a tradeoff between the diversity of expressed genes and the intensity of GRN interactions. We have developed a computational framework that evaluates GRN interaction intensity from scRNA-seq data and used it to analyze simulated and real scRNA-seq data collected from different tissues in humans, mice, fruit flies, and C. elegans. We find a significant tradeoff between diversity and interaction intensity, driven by stability constraints, where the GRN could be stable up to a critical level of complexity - a product of gene expression diversity and interaction intensity. Furthermore, we analyzed hematopoietic stem cell differentiation data and find that the overall complexity of unstable transition states cells is higher than that of stem cells and fully differentiated cells. Our results suggest that GRNs are shaped by stability constraints which limit the diversity of gene expression

Continuous extension of a densely parameterized semigroup

Let S be a dense sub-semigroup of the positive real numbers, and let X be a separable, reflexive Banach space. This note contains a proof that every weakly continuous contractive semigroup of operators on X over S can be extended to a weakly continuous semigroup over the positive real numbers. We obtain similar results for non-linear, non-expansive semigroups as well. As a corollary we characterize all densely parametrized semigroups which are extendable to semigroups over the positive real numbers.Comment: 8 pages, minor modification