When Politics Is Not Pivotal: Supermajority Debate Rules in State Legislatures

Richmond Award acceptance speech.

Steady Habits in the Constitution State: Connecticut's Inequitable System of Representation, 1639–1965

Influencing Your Government

In this paper we propose an ontology model to describe the domain of searching over multiple data sources (SND). The ultimate goal of the model is to bridge the heterogeneity and to solve the distribution of the multiple networked data sources. Based on the model a query reconstruction algorithm is proposed to translate the initial query into different local queries suitable for individual data sources. And the result processing module defines grammar rules to extract the useful data returned by the individual data source, consolidates the retrieved data into one unified result, and presents the results in the web browser. In the ontology model two constraint rules are defined to evaluate the performance of SND and experiment results show that the federated retrieval offers a reliable and efficient reproduction with the retrieved results from the independent data sources. Moreover, the figures indicate the time comparisons among multiple data sources and give the contribution of each data source by the returned searching results based on the same query set.

Forecasting stock price movements with multiple data sources: Evidence from stock market in China

It is challenging to identify meaningful gene networks because biological interactions are often condition-specific and confounded with external factors. It is necessary to integrate multiple sources of genomic data to facilitate network inference. For example, one can jointly model expression datasets measured from multiple tissues with molecular marker data in so-called genetical genomic studies. In this paper, we propose a joint conditional Gaussian graphical model (JCGGM) that aims for modeling biological processes based on multiple sources of data. This approach is able to integrate multiple sources of information by adopting conditional models combined with joint sparsity regularization. We apply our approach to a real dataset measuring gene expression in four tissues (kidney, liver, heart, and fat) from recombinant inbred rats. Our approach reveals that the liver tissue has the highest level of tissue-specific gene regulations among genes involved in insulin responsive facilitative sugar transporter mediated glucose transport pathway, followed by heart and fat tissues, and this finding can only be attained from our JCGGM approach.

Aspects of an entrenched constitution that were essential parts of founding compromises, and justified as necessary when a constitution was first adopted, may become less justifiable over time. Is this the case with respect to the structure of the United States Senate? The US Senate is hardwired in the Constitution to consist of an equal number of Senators from each state—the smallest of which currently has about 585,000 residents, and the largest of which has about 39.29 million. As this essay explains, over time, as population inequalities among states have grown larger, so too has the disproportionate voting power of smaller-population states in the national Senate. As a result of the ‘one-person, one-vote’ decisions of the 1960s that applied to both houses of state legislatures, each state legislature now is arguably more representative of its state population than the US Congress is of the US population. The ‘democratic deficit’ of the Senate, compared to state legislative bodies, also affects presidential (as compared to gubernatorial) elections. When founding compromises deeply entrenched in a constitution develop harder-to-justify consequences, should constitutional interpretation change responsively? Possible implications of the ‘democratic’ difference between the national and the state legislatures for US federalism doctrine are explored, especially with respect to the ‘pre-emption’ doctrine. Finally, the essay briefly considers the possibilities of federalism for addressing longer term issues of representation, polarisation and sustaining a single nation.

John C. Calhoun was a life-long politician who was also a profound political philosopher. Within 10 years of being orphaned as a teenager he had become a Yale graduate, a lawyer, a former state legislator and a congressman-elect prepared to help James Madison lead America into the war of 1812. In 1824, he was easily elected vice-president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson and in the 1830s and 1840s was a dominant presence in the Senate of the United States. In this biography, Irving Bartlett explains the cultural and psychological forces that shaped Calhoun's political career.

Selection of genes that are differentially expressed and critical to a particular biological process has been a major challenge in post-array analysis. Recent development in bioinformatics has made various data sources available such as mRNA and miRNA expression profiles, biological pathway and gene annotation, etc. Efficient and effective integration of multiple data sources helps enrich our knowledge about the involved samples and genes for selecting genes bearing significant biological relevance. In this work, we studied a novel problem of multi-source gene selection: given multiple heterogeneous data sources (or data sets), select genes from expression profiles by integrating information from various data sources. We investigated how to effectively employ information contained in multiple data sources to extract an intrinsic global geometric pattern and use it in covariance analysis for gene selection. We designed and conducted experiments to systematically compare the proposed approach with representative methods in terms of statistical and biological significance, and showed the efficacy and potential of the proposed approach with promising findings.

An increasing number and variety of platforms are now capable of collecting remote sensing data over a particular scene. For many applications, the information available from any individual sensor may be incomplete, inconsistent or imprecise. However, other sources may provide complementary and/or additional data. Thus, for an application such as image feature extraction or classification, it may be that fusing the mulitple data sources can lead to more consistent and reliable results. Unfortunately, with the increased complexity of the fused data, the search space of feature-extraction or classification algorithms also greatly increases. With a single data source, the determination of a suitable algorithm may be a significant challenge for an image analyst. With the fused data, the search for suitable algorithms can go far beyond the capabilities of a human in a realistic time frame, and becomes the realm of machine learning, where the computational power of modern computers can be harnessed to the task at hand. We describe experiments in which we investigate the ability of a suite of automated feature extraction tools developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory to make use of multiple data sources for various feature extraction tasks. We compare and contrast this software's capabilities on 1) individual data sets from different data sources 2) fused data sets from multiple data sources and 3) fusion of results from multiple individual data sources.

Some research on the population in a European country, referred to as the target population, may not provide a sufficient sample size and require pooling multiple national data sources. The researcher can access multiple national data sources one at a time but cannot access them simultaneously at an individual patient level, because of regulation requirements on data sharing. We propose a strategy that enables the combination of information from multiple data sources when IPD are not simultaneously accessible to researchers. This strategy starts with a protocol for extracting information consistently from all data sources. It uses the matching adjusted indirect comparison (MAIC) approach to derive the weights to align the means of the identified covariates of each data source to those of a target study population. The final analysis will be a meta-analysis on the weight adjusted estimates of treatment effect from individual data sources.

Election Fundamentals and Polls Favor the Republicans

With the rapid development of database technologies, multiple data sources may be available for a given learning task (e.g. collaborative filtering). However, the data sources may contain different types of features. For example, users' profiles can be used to build recommendation systems. In addition, a model can also use users' historical behaviors and social networks to infer users' interests on related products. We argue that it is desirable to collectively use any available multiple heterogeneous data sources in order to build effective learning models. We call this framework heterogeneous learning. In our proposed setting, data sources can include (i) nonoverlapping features, (ii) nonoverlapping instances, and (iii) multiple networks (i.e. graphs) that connect instances. In this paper, we propose a general optimization framework for heterogeneous learning, and devise a corresponding learning model from gradient boosting. The idea is to minimize the empirical loss with two constraints: (1) there should be consensus among the predictions of overlapping instances (if any) from different data sources; (2) connected instances in graph datasets may have similar predictions. The objective function is solved by stochastic gradient boosting trees. Furthermore, a weighting strategy is designed to emphasize informative data sources, and deemphasize the noisy ones. We formally prove that the proposed strategy leads to a tighter error bound. This approach consistently outperforms a standard concatenation of data sources on movie rating prediction, number recognition, and terrorist attack detection tasks. Furthermore, the approach is evaluated on AT&T's distributed database with over 500 000 instances, 91 different data sources, and over 45 000 000 joined features. We observe that the proposed model can improve out-of-sample error rate substantially.

Senator Paul Spyros Sarbanes is the senior Democrat on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. He was chairman of the committee when Sarbanes-Oxley was enacted. Senator Sarbanes is the longest-serving U.S. senator in Maryland history, having won his fifth term in 2000. He also serves on the Foreign Relations, the Budget and the Joint Economic Committees. He was born in Salisbury, Maryland, holds an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a law degree from Harvard. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship that brought him to Oxford, England. After law school, he clerked for Federal Judge Morris A. Soper before going into private practice with two Baltimore City law firms. In 1966, Sarbanes ran for the Maryland House of Delegates in Baltimore City and won. During his four years as a State Legislator in Annapolis he served on the Judiciary and the Ways and Means Committees. In 1970 he was elected to the United States House of Representatives, the first of three terms. While in the House, from 1971-76, Sarbanes served on the House Judiciary Committee, the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, and the Select Committee on House Reorganization. It was during his service in the House, in August 1974, that Sarbanes was selected by his Democratic colleagues on the House Watergate Committee to introduce the first Article of Impeachment, for obstruction of justice, against President Richard Nixon. On November 2, 1976, Sarbanes was elected to the United States Senate. He was re-elected in 1982, 1988, 1994, and 2000. Throughout his public service, Senator Sarbanes has worked hard to provide the citizens of Maryland with dedicated, independent representation; representation based upon intelligence and integrity; representation which gives people the confidence that elected officials are there to serve the public interest. Paul Sarbanes was born in Salisbury, on Maryland's Eastern Shore on February 3, 1933. He is the son of Greek immigrants from Laconia, Greece -- Spyros (deceased 1957) and Matina Sarbanes (deceased 2001) who owned the Mayflower Restaurant on Salisbury's Main Street. The principles Senator Sarbanes learned growing up in Salisbury that have guided his public life are opportunity and fairness - principles that he strongly believes are fundamental to a decent and just society.

Reviewed by: Reluctant Reformer: Nathan Sanford in the Era of the Early Republic by Ann Sandford Matthew Mason (bio) Reluctant Reformer: Nathan Sanford in the Era of the Early Republic. By Ann Sandford. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018. Pp. xii 204. Cloth, $29.95.) Seemingly inadvertently, independent scholar Ann Sandford has produced in this biography of her relative Nathan Sanford a portrait of the frustrations of life as a truly second-rate American politician. Sanford pursued his ambitions across decades via the law and politics, but even according to the evidence compiled by this biographer eager to prove that Sanford “deserves recognition and our attention,” he never acquired the prominence or influence he hoped for (3). Sanford was born on Long Island in 1777, and his long public career stretched from New York City to the state capital in Albany to the nation’s capital. The intensity of his ambition as a young man was revealed when he “dropped the first ‘d’ in his surname”—originally [End Page 348] Sandford—“to save time” (18). His rising legal practice and Jeffersonian loyalties led to an appointment in 1803 as United States Attorney for New York. This launched a political life that lasted until 1831 and included service as a state legislator, two non-consecutive terms as a United States senator from New York, delegate to New York’s state constitutional convention in 1821, and Chancellor of New York. Sandford’s biography very closely follows Sanford’s interests at the various stages of his career. It is based on careful research in archival sources and local histories. As a result, the book offers extensive discussions of property law, the ins and outs of local and state-level New York politics, political economy, the politics of race and slavery, white manhood suffrage, and so forth. But the book’s angle of vision rarely rises much beyond that provided by Sanford’s papers. A chapter on the Missouri Crisis, for instance, exemplifies the book’s scope when it tells us about Sanford’s role in and reaction to that crisis but nothing new about the crisis itself. Throughout, carefully researched passages ultimately illuminate Sanford’s life rather than something larger. Another result of this narrow focus is that this book makes no deliberate historiographical contributions. For all the depth of her primary source research, Sandford draws unsystematically on secondary sources for supplementary information rather than engaging with their interpretations. While legal historians or historians of political economy may well learn some things from this book given Sandford’s detailed research on such themes, the book makes no attempt to add anything other than detail to any historiography. As such this biography neither uses Sanford’s life to shed light on his times, nor a broad view of those times to shed light on his life. That said, this volume offers a poignant story in its way, albeit one the author does not seem to have meant to tell. The human story that emerges is one of an ambitious man who never achieved the public influence or personal success he desired. A representative episode arises during the New York state constitutional convention of 1821, where Sanford took decided stands on the fraught intersection of race and the franchise. Those stands emerged in his votes rather than his speeches because his longtime lung ailment rendered him “inaudible” when he addressed the assembly (90). Physical limitations, therefore, placed Sanford among the lesser lights in “keeping their views, but not their votes, on race to themselves” (100). Moreover, his framework for reforming New York’s suffrage rules went down in defeat as the likes of Martin Van [End Page 349] Buren moved the votes in another direction. Only when Sanford accepted that direction as a compromise with his own did he vote for it. I suspect Sandford did not mean to tell a tale of frustration because she ends her lengthy discussion of the constitutional convention by emphasizing Sanford’s “contributions” to its outcome (107). She repeats her insistence on Sanford’s influence on other issues on which he took an ineffectual stand throughout his career. Yet “Would-Be Reformer” might have been a better...