A law of large numbers for weighted plurality

Consider an election between k candidates in which each voter votes randomly (but not necessarily independently) and suppose that there is a single candidate that every voter prefers (in the sense that each voter is more likely to vote for this special candidate than any other candidate). Suppose we have a voting rule that takes all of the votes and produces a single outcome and suppose that each individual voter has little effect on the outcome of the voting rule. If the voting rule is a weighted plurality, then we show that with high probability, the preferred candidate will win the election. Conversely, we show that this statement fails for all other reasonable voting rules. This result is an extension of H\"aggstr\"om, Kalai and Mossel, who proved the above in the case k=2

Film Review: The Business of America

[Excerpt] In the Business of America, the filmakers-at California Newsreel have once again demonstrated their ability to produce lively and substantive documentary on economic issues. In the late 1970s, they produced Controlling Interest, perhaps the most incisive film analysis of multinational corporations ever made. The Business of America turns out to be a worthy sequel

Bent Nose Row

A young man joins a boxing club and learns some hard lessons about the world. Articles, stories, and other compositions in this archive were written by participants in the Mighty Pen Project. The program, developed by author David L. Robbins, and in partnership with Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia War Memorial in Richmond, Virginia, offers veterans and their family members a customized twelve-week writing class, free of charge. The program encourages, supports, and assists participants in sharing their stories and experiences of military experience so both writer and audience may benefit

The norm of the non-self-adjoint harmonic oscillator semigroup

We identify the norm of the semigroup generated by the non-self-adjoint harmonic oscillator acting on $L^2(\Bbb{R})$, for all complex times where it is bounded. We relate this problem to embeddings between Gaussian-weighted spaces of holomorphic functions, and we show that the same technique applies, in any dimension, to the semigroup $e^{-tQ}$ generated by an elliptic quadratic operator acting on $L^2(\Bbb{R}^n)$. The method used --- identifying the exponents of sharp products of Mehler formulas --- is elementary and is inspired by more general works of L. H\"ormander, A. Melin, and J. Sj\"ostrand.Comment: 22 pages, 1 figure. Significant revision following referee's comments. To appear in Integral Equations and Operator Theory; published version may diffe