Temperatures have actually be above freezing during the daytime for the past couple here in my little corner of the Upper Midwest. I’m a fan, personally; winter was great, I loved all the snowstorms that I didn’t have to drive through, but it’s about time for it to be over IMO. On the other hand, I was chatting with some folks the other night who were hoping that spring would hold off for another n weeks so that they could get their skiing / skating / gloating about going somewhere warm in. So by that token, I should probably be hoping for at least a mild case of winter to continue until mid-March.
Still excited about planning my Mathematics of Electoral Politics course for the summer. I’m still trying to narrow down the discussion topics to a manageable list. Here’s what I’m considering so far:
- Descriptive statistics (this includes some basic probability)
- Voting systems (types, properties, a discussion of Arrow and maybe Gibbard-Satterthwaite)
- Power indices in weighted voting systems
- Fair division methods (where “fair” can mean “equal” — cake-cutting problems and such — or “proportional” — like the apportionment of representatives in a congress)
- Maybe some basic game theory?
- Critical thinking, logical fallacies
- The principles of cryptography, with application to electronic voting
It’s the last three topics on that list that I’m a bit dubious about. Game theory’s interesting, but I’m not entirely sure how to tie it into the main theme of the course. Critical thinking would be damned useful, and mesh well with the statistics and the crypto, but I’d probably need to find another textbook for it. And I’m afraid that the crypto might just be a little too esoteric for a non-technical audience.
The other thing is that I’ve got twenty-four two-hour session to work with here, which probably includes the final exam. Ambition is well and good, but there’s a finite amount of material that I’ll be capable of cramming in to such a timeframe.