Comments | andrewducker: Interesting Links for 12-06-2014

andrewducker

Interesting Links for 12-06-2014

Jun 12, 2014 12:00

It's Really Hard to Be a Good Guy With a Gun
(tags: guns usa )
Using "hero rats" to save lives by finding mines. (And the rats don't get hurt!)
(tags: rats minesweeper )
An Open Letter To J.K. Rowling
(tags: jkrowling Scotland independence )
No more IPv4 addresses in Latin America and the Caribbean
(tags: internet ipv6 ipv4 )
Response by Ray ( Read more... )

slavery, india, alanturing, independence, rape, charity, scotland, women, phones, hbo, movies, transparency, usa, ipv4, raykurzweil, humans, london, bodies, rome, austerity, nuclearweapons, transport, military, self-defence, taxi, research, minesweeper, links, drugs, history, uk, europe, ai, funny, firefox, guns, davidcameron, censorship, neilgaiman, maps, internet, tv, gameofthrones, jkrowling, rats, viajamesnicoll, fish, ipv6, evolution, warnerbrothers, amazon, politics

Comments 46

India, Indonesia to Get $25 Firefox Smartphones apostle_of_eris June 12 2014, 18:00:33 UTC

Remember “the digital divide”?
AHH-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha

Re: India, Indonesia to Get $25 Firefox Smartphones andrewducker June 12 2014, 20:10:10 UTC

Getting smaller every day!

But even having "dumb" mobile phones was really useful to people in poorer countries. Tracking weather, or which markets had the highest prices has been a boon.

steer June 12 2014, 20:28:08 UTC

Going to put this here before I forget: Election in ExampleVille D'Hondt method with no modifications, 10 regions, 4 parties (ABCD), 4 seats a region 600 voters a region -- numbers chosen to make the example simple but doesn't depend on numbers, You can construct a similar result with 10 seats a region and 100,000 voters -- differences in voting will be less startling ( ... )

danieldwilliam June 13 2014, 09:15:15 UTC

Are you sure about d'Hondt not favouring large (in the electoral region) parties. If I put exactly the same votes into a Sainte-Lange it comes out with 10 seats each. My observation of comparing D'hondt and S-L is that S-L tends to see smaller parties just winning one extra seat and larger parties just losing that final seat.

danieldwilliam June 13 2014, 09:41:26 UTC

I think any non-preferential system with regional constitutencies is going to be prone to this sort of effect. You get proportionality within the region, not necessarily across the whole chamber ( ... )

steer June 13 2014, 10:20:00 UTC

Yes, it is an arbitrary example finely balanced to show De Hondt favouring small parties. I think dh minimises the mean error between proportion of seats and proportion of votes. Got a long plane trip so might try to prove it. Can't remember the circumstances under which that is true, I think it is more obvious in Jefferson's formulation. Dh is pretty much what I would come up with I think. All systems have their flaws and any regional system you could come up with similar crazy.

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