Word: natapoff
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...cases. For many convicts, cooperating is the best - and sometimes only - way to reduce a prison sentence. But the rise of informants has led to accusations that the government is outsourcing detective work to thugs. "The government's use of criminal informants is largely secretive, unregulated and unaccountable," Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School, told the House Judiciary Committee last July. "Informants breed fabrication...
...what is the effect of the Electoral College on the power of the people? Is an individual's vote more or less powerful in a straight popular election or an electoral college system? MIT physicist Alan Natapoff attempts to give us an answer. First he defines "vote power" as the probability that your vote will break a tie and directly cause one candidate to be elected over another. Ridiculous as this definition may seem, when you watch the election returns in November you will realize that unless the popular vote in your state is split right down the middle with...
...Natapoff developed a method to determine the best system given two inputs: First, one must know the number of voters. Second, one must know the probabilities of a random voter voting for each candidate (i.e. polling numbers). For example, a deadlock in the polls does not mean that exactly 50 percent of people will vote for one candidate and 50 percent for another, but rather that any random person's vote behaves like the flipping of a coin. So just as you would be surprised to get exactly 50 million heads out of 100 million tosses, you would be equally...
...some say that Natapoff's definition of voting power invalidates this whole analysis. With this definition, one easy way to generate a large vote-power would be to have everyone vote, shuffle the ballots and draw one ballot that decides the election. Thus in every election one person is guaranteed to have cast the deciding vote, and the vote-power for an individual is one divided by the number of voters, a number almost always larger than either the voting power of a straight popular election or an electoral system. But if this invalidates Natapoff's point (and people...
Barbara Norfleet's photographs are easy-to-read but enjoyable portraits of children "seen as people", she emphasizes. Michael Mazur and Flora" Natapoff justify their reputations as established Boston artists. But all that' can be seen of the works of any of these artists is a tiny fragment out of context...