22,013 research outputs found
California Voting and Suburbanization Patterns: Implications for Transit Policy, MTI Report 12-05
Public transit is an environmentally friendly transportation mode that usually focuses on transporting people within and to the city center. However, over the last 60 years, population and employment has been suburbanizing. As the median voter lives further from the city center, and thus enjoys fewer benefits from accessing public transit, does this reduce such a voterâs propensity to support public investment in public transit improvements? We analyze voting patterns on 20 transit-related ballot propositions from state-wide elections in California between 1990 and 2010. Controlling for demographic, socio-economic and political ideological factors, we focus on the role of suburbanization as a possible causal factor in determining public support for public transit investment. The results provide a rich picture of the attitudes towards transportation policy among California voters, and will help policy makers to better understand citizen preferences and to better predict how future trends will shift support towards or against transit. Finally, we suggest ways policy makers can use urban land markets to increase support for trans
Proof of a conjecture of N. Konno for the 1D contact process
Consider the one-dimensional contact process. About ten years ago, N. Konno
stated the conjecture that, for all positive integers , the upper
invariant measure has the following property: Conditioned on the event that
is infected, the events All sites are healthy and All
sites are healthy are negatively correlated. We prove (a stronger
version of) this conjecture, and explain that in some sense it is a dual
version of the planar case of one of our results in \citeBHK.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/074921706000000031 in the IMS
Lecture Notes--Monograph Series
(http://www.imstat.org/publications/lecnotes.htm) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
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When users control the algorithms: Values expressed in practices on the twitter platform
Recent interest in ethical AI has brought a slew of values, including fairness, into conversations about technology design. Research in the area of algorithmic fairness tends to be rooted in questions of distribution that can be subject to precise formalism and technical implementation. We seek to expand this conversation to include the experiences of people subject to algorithmic classification and decision-making. By examining tweets about the âTwitter algorithmâ we consider the wide range of concerns and desires Twitter users express. We find a concern with fairness (narrowly construed) is present, particularly in the ways users complain that the platform enacts a political bias against conservatives. However, we find another important category of concern, evident in attempts to exert control over the algorithm. Twitter users who seek control do so for a variety of reasons, many well justified. We argue for the need for better and clearer definitions of what constitutes legitimate and illegitimate control over algorithmic processes and to consider support for users who wish to enact their own collective choices
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