Normalized Range Voting Broadly Resists Control

We study the behavior of Range Voting and Normalized Range Voting with respect to electoral control. Electoral control encompasses attempts from an election chair to alter the structure of an election in order to change the outcome. We show that a voting system resists a case of control by proving that performing that case of control is computationally infeasible. Range Voting is a natural extension of approval voting, and Normalized Range Voting is a simple variant which alters each vote to maximize the potential impact of each voter. We show that Normalized Range Voting has among the largest number of control resistances among natural voting systems

Bicycle patrols: an underutilized resource

Foundational research on police use of bicycles for patrol. A participant/observation research design was used. A five-city, 32-shift study on the output of police bicycle patrols was conducted. Same and similar ride-alongs were conducted with bicycle and automobile patrols. All contacts (n1/4 1,105) with the public were recorded and coded. These data included: number of people, tenor, seriousness and origination for each contact

Irish Results of the BIS Foreign Exchange and Over-the-Counter Derivatives Survey 2007

The survey results for Ireland show a large increase in turnover in foreign exchange instruments, driven mostly by growth in foreign exchange swaps.

Manipulation and Control Complexity of Schulze Voting

Schulze voting is a recently introduced voting system enjoying unusual popularity and a high degree of real-world use, with users including the Wikimedia foundation, several branches of the Pirate Party, and MTV. It is a Condorcet voting system that determines the winners of an election using information about paths in a graph representation of the election. We resolve the complexity of many electoral control cases for Schulze voting. We find that it falls short of the best known voting systems in terms of control resistance, demonstrating vulnerabilities of concern to some prospective users of the system

Migration and forests in the Peruvian Amazon: a review

This paper reviews the literature on the links between migration and forests in the Peruvian Amazon. It highlights not only the complexity of the migrant–forest interface in Peru but also the relative lack of research on these dynamics. Historically, official narratives point to migrants as both the culprits of, and solutions to, the Amazon’s problems. At times, the government has promoted colonization of the Amazon as a means to integrate the region into the country as well as to encourage agricultural expansion and alleviate pressure on limited land in the Andes. In other periods, migrants are blamed for deforestation and environmental degradation in the region. These discourses oversimplify the complexity of the reality facing migrants to the Amazon and the factors that ‘push’ them away from their birthplaces and/or ‘pull’ them to the Amazon. They also treat migrants as a homogenous group, underestimating: the role of migration within the Amazon, the cyclical nature of migration, processes of urbanization and multi-site households, and the diversity of livelihoods migrants pursue upon arrival. A more detailed understanding of migrants, migration and the related conditions and processes driving human mobility in the Amazon should provide a more effective foundation for defining public policy in the region, for example, for the identification of strategies to mitigate the impacts of road construction or to support sustainable models of production in areas occupied by smallholder farm families. This review is intended as a step toward a fuller understanding of these processes by compiling existing information as a point of departure

Residential Mortgages - Borrowing for Investment

Irish household debt has risen sharply in recent years, driven by strong demand for residential mortgages.

Schulze and Ranked-Pairs Voting are Fixed-Parameter Tractable to Bribe, Manipulate, and Control

Schulze and ranked-pairs elections have received much attention recently, and the former has quickly become a quite widely used election system. For many cases these systems have been proven resistant to bribery, control, or manipulation, with ranked pairs being particularly praised for being NP-hard for all three of those. Nonetheless, the present paper shows that with respect to the number of candidates, Schulze and ranked-pairs elections are fixed-parameter tractable to bribe, control, and manipulate: we obtain uniform, polynomial-time algorithms whose degree does not depend on the number of candidates. We also provide such algorithms for some weighted variants of these problems

Rethinking fuelwood: people, policy and the anatomy of a charcoal supply chain in a decentralizing Peru

In Peru, as in many developing countries, charcoal is an important source of fuel. We examine the commercial charcoal commodity chain from its production in Ucayali, in the Peruvian Amazon, to its sale in the national market. Using a mixed-methods approach, we look at the actors involved in the commodity chain and their relationships, including the distribution of benefits along the chain. We outline the obstacles and opportunities for a more equitable charcoal supply chain within a multi-level governance context. The results show that charcoal provides an important livelihood for most of the actors along the supply chain, including rural poor and women. We find that the decentralisation process in Peru has implications for the formalisation of charcoal supply chains, a traditionally informal, particularly related to multi-level institutional obstacles to equitable commerce. This results in inequity in the supply chain, which persecutes the poorest participants and supports the most powerful actors