Opinion polls, political elites and party competition in postcommunist Bulgaria

Opinion polls have taken a high-profile role in political affairs in East European countries over the course of the past decade. Policy-makers, politicians and political parties made much use of polls in the early years of democratic transition, although for various reasons they were received with significant scepticism by each of these users and by citizens alike. In the post-communist era, as revealed in recent studies and interviews conducted among the Bulgarian elite, significant use of opinion polls has been made by political parties anxious to bolster their own position and undermine that of their rivals. Sometimes there has been real collusion between parties, pollsters and journalists, implying that the public is correct to be sceptical. Polls therefore perform the role of enhancing the position of politicians, as identified by Schumpeter, rather than contributing to the empowerment of the population, as envisaged by Gallup

Duality between Wilson Loops and Scattering Amplitudes

We summarise the status of an intriguing new duality between planar maximally helicity violating scattering amplitudes and light-like Wilson loops in N=4 super Yang-Mills. In particular, we focus on the role played by (dual) conformal symmetry, which is made predictive by deriving anomalous conformal Ward identities for the Wilson loops. Assuming the duality, the conformal symmetry of the dual Wilson loops becomes an unexpected new symmetry of scattering amplitudes in N=4 SYM.Comment: 10 pages; Presented at the 48th Cracow School of Theoretical Physics "Aspects of Duality"; Acknowledgement adde

Opinion polling in Central and Eastern Europe under communism

Whilst political opinion polling occupies a well-entrenched position within contemporary capitalist political systems, the same cannot be said for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. This article focuses primarily on the development of political opinion polling in these countries in the period prior to the collapse of communist regimes at the end of 1989. Polling was a feature of these communist-led societies, although it was limited in terms of its activities, the scope of issue coverage, and its ability to measure public opinion effectively. The major focus of the discussion concentrates on the methodological issues and problems confronting opinion pollsters in these societies during this time

Algorithms for On-line Order Batching in an Order-Picking Warehouse

In manual order picking systems, order pickers walk or ride through a distribution warehouse in order to collect items required by (internal or external) customers. Order batching consists of combining these – indivisible – customer orders into picking orders. With respect to order batching, two problem types can be distinguished: In off-line (static) batching all customer orders are known in advance. In on-line (dynamic) batching customer orders become available dynamically over time. This report considers an on-line order batching problem in which the total completion time of all customer orders arriving within a certain time period has to be minimized. The author shows how heuristic approaches for the off-line order batching can be modified in order to deal with the on-line situation. A competitive analysis shows that every on-line algorithm for this problem is at least 2-competitive. Moreover, this bound is tight if an optimal batching algorithm is used. The proposed algorithms are evaluated in a series of extensive numerical experiments. It is demonstrated that the choice of an appropriate batching method can lead to a substantial reduction of the completion time of a set of customer orders.Warehouse Management, Order Picking, Order Batching, On-line Optimization

Politically alienated or apathetic: young people's attitudes towards party politics in Britain

Following the outcome of the 2001 General Election, when the numbers of abstainers outweighed the numbers of Labour voters, much attention has been focussed upon the state of British democracy, and how to enthuse the electorate - and in particular young people, of whom 61 percent chose to stay away from the polling stations. While the government is exploring ways to make the whole process of voting easier (with ideas such as voting over the telephone and the Internet) it may be failing to tackle the real problem. The main challenge is that many young people appear to find the business of politics uninviting and irrelevant to their everyday lives. This paper examines data derived from a nationwide survey of 705 attainers – young people who are eligible to vote for the first-time and who have only limited experience of formal politics. The findings from the study reveal that these young people are not as apathetic when it comes to “Politics” as conventional wisdom would have us believe. Instead a picture is emerging of a British youth keen to play a more active role in the political process, but who appear to be sceptical of the way the British political system is organised and led, and are turned off by politicians and the political parties