Scientists Design a More Efficient Democratic Voting System
The main problem with plurality voting is that by having one vote, voters can only indicate their preferred alternative, without being able to provide more information regarding what they think of the other alternatives. Sometimes this causes people to not vote for their favorite choice because they think they do not have a chance to win, while in other cases, it may occur that when their choice loses, a certain amount of resentment is created by suspicions that the minority losing is more important than the gains of the victorious majority.
From the economic theory point of view, these voting results are not efficient in that they do not maximize social well-being. That is what these researchers are trying to avoid in their voting system by standardized bidding, recently published by Robert F. Veszteg, of the UC3M, together with the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid professor, Agnes Pintér, in the academic review, European Journal of Political Economy.
The voting system by standardized bidding which they have developed is a method allowing voters to order alternatives according to their preferences, scoring them along a numeric scale. “What is important is that they say a number for each alternative which is higher for their top choice or those for which they wish to assign more importance”, stated Professor Róbert F. Veszteg, from the UC3M Economics Department. He then illustrated this with the following example: If a group of friends wants to decide whether to see a romantic movie, a comedy or a horror film, each one of the friends would have to say three numbers (one for each movie). (more…)
The Geopolitics of Cyberspace
by Blake Harris
My initial article on Internet culture published in Infobahn magazine.
Even many of those who have never read William Gibson now
know that he was first to coin the word “cyberspace” in his
science fiction story Burning Chrome and again in his novel
Neuromancer. Originally, cyberspace referred to a
hallucinatory virtual reality generated by a dense matrix of
computer networks. Mercenary hackers jacked their nervous
systems directly into “the net” so they could overcome complex,
and sometimes lethal security measures to break into computer
installations across the planet. (more…)
Loading... 
