Quick Count Research Articles

Forecasts From Nonrandom Samples

The 1990s was not the best of decades for electoral polls, with striking errors occurring in, among others, the British, French, and Spanish elections, including election night, when errors are more evident. This article proposes a model for predicting final election outcomes based on the consistency that polling stations show between elections. Using both past and incoming polling station vote proportions, the model produces continuously revised predictions. The method is validated predicting the 1995 Corts Valencianes (Valencia regional parliament) elections and displaying the real-time experience of the 1999 Corts Valencianes election night. The case study is completed by demonstrating the technique's efficacy in three additional elections. The results confirm that the procedure generates quick, highly reliable, and accurate forecasts. In fact, only a few minutes after starting the scrutiny, the proposal permits one to approximate the final results with great precision, even with only a small percentage of votes polled. The great flexibility of the procedure makes it possible to use the method under a wide variety of circumstances and electoral systems. Furthermore, this procedure has additional advantages, including robustness and lower cost, over other methods which can also be implemented during election night with the objective of forecasting final outcomes, like exit polls or quick counts of a meaningful sample of polling stations.

Certificate of added qualification for hepatology: Vindication not vanity

Certificate of added qualification for hepatology: Vindication not vanity

Comment on Whither Roman Archaeology?

As one of a group of Institute of Archaeology (IoA) graduates taught by Mark who now hold academic posts in Britain, it is perhaps not surprising that I share some of his sentiments. I agree that Roman archaeology fulfils a key role in any understanding of European culture, and that we cannot ignore it because we might disapprove of imperialism. The IoA has a strong record of success in the research and teaching of Roman archaeology (at a quick count there are currently four professors and six lecturer/senior lecturer/readers in post in the subject who began their careers at the IoA). Mark is too modest to note that this success is partly a result of his inspired teaching (together with that of Richard Reece and John Wilkes). With Mark’s retirement, we are indeed seeing the end of an era.

Bayes estimation of binary time series

This paper will develop Bayesian estimation for first order stationary autoregressive model for binary time series. Posterior distributions and Bayes estimates were derived under conjugate priors based on quick counting of the number of 1 runs. Numerical results by simulation demonstrate the Bayesian estimation.

Whither Guns, Goons, and Gold? The Decline of Factional Election Violence in the Philippines

Introduction As long as terrorism and fraud - or guns, goons, and gold - intrude on Philippine elections, democratization will be incomplete. This article seeks to uncover and explain patterns of violence in Filipino elections between 1965 and 1998. The first section will describe election violence in 1998, and will show that non-ideological factional violence has declined since the 1960s. The second section will show that the factors responsible for violence - a decentralized political structure, social disorder, and a confrontational political subculture - have not changed enough to account for this decline. In the third section, it will be argued that the emergence of the military and church is the biggest change in political structure since martial law, and must bear responsibility for the decline in violence. The article concludes that church participation is necessary for democratic consolidation because it institutionalizes non-violent, mass participation. Election Violence in 1998 Election Violence in 1998 The 11 May 1998 elections witnessed over 63,000 candidates contesting 17,500 positions, including president and vice president, 12 of 24 senators, 204 elected House seats, 78 provincial governors and vice governors, over 1,600 mayors and vice mayors, and 14,000 councillors.(1) In 1998, 27 million people, representing an 80 per cent turnout, voted in 174,000 precincts.(2) A count of reports in the Philippine Daily inquirer of pre-election violence in 1998 totalled 71 incidents and 39 fatalities, including 13 dead in Luzon, 16 in Mindanao and the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), 1 in Manila, and 9 elsewhere. Incidents included 30 attacks on officials, politicians, or supporters, 17 attacks on rallies, offices, or homes, 5 clashes of supporters, 4 kidnappings, 4 incidents over posters, and threats, weapons violations, and arson.(3) The Inquirer reported 37 election day disturbances, with 14 dead in Luzon, 10 in Mindanao and the ARMM. Incidents included blockades of polling centres, intimidation and threats on voters or officials, ballot snatching, and blackouts to disrupt canvassing.(4) Post-election events included arson that destroyed canvassing results.(5) Many incidents were motivated by real or suspected fraud. To understand the prevalence of fraud, consider a typical election. At 7:00 a.m., voters go to the precincts (usually classrooms), write in more than 30 names, and drop the ballots into metal boxes. At 3:00 p.m., election inspectors, usually teachers, start manual canvassing. Inside the precinct, watchers from parties monitor the recording while volunteers from the National Citizens Movement For Free Elections (Namfrel) and Parish Pastoral Council For Responsible Voting (PPCRV) keep a watch on possible cheating or intimidation. Outside, the general public watches through precinct windows. Inspectors work all night to deliver the ballot boxes to police stations by the next day. Ballot boxes are then brought to regional capitals and Manila for canvassing, which takes weeks or months to complete. This procedure invites intimidation, fraud, and human error. The Commission on Elections (Comelec), the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), and the Philippine National Police (PNP), formerly the Philippine Constabulary (PC), handle security. Namfrel, using carbon copies of tally sheets, and national media, using exit polls, publish quick counts to hinder fraudulent canvassing. Patterns of Election Violence, 1965-98 Table 1 is a list of pre-election violent incidents from 1965 to 1998. Given the absence of large-scale insurgency in the 1960s, most casualties in 1965-71 resulted from fighting between non-ideological factions. Pre-election deaths peaked at 905 in November 1971, a year before President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in September 1972. Beginning in 1978, the regime renewed elections. After the repeal of martial law in January 1981, apertura generated new poll violence by factions and insurgents. …

Cached Sufficient Statistics for Efficient Machine Learning with Large Datasets

This paper introduces new algorithms and data structures for quick counting for machine learning datasets. We focus on the counting task of constructing contingency tables, but our approach is also applicable to counting the number of records in a dataset that match conjunctive queries. Subject to certain assumptions, the costs of these operations can be shown to be independent of the number of records in the dataset and loglinear in the number of non-zero entries in the contingency table. We provide a very sparse data structure, the ADtree, to minimize memory use. We provide analytical worst-case bounds for this structure for several models of data distribution. We empirically demonstrate that tractably-sized data structures can be produced for large real-world datasets by (a) using a sparse tree structure that never allocates memory for counts of zero, (b) never allocating memory for counts that can be deduced from other counts, and (c) not bothering to expand the tree fully near its leaves. We show how the ADtree can be used to accelerate Bayes net structure finding algorithms, rule learning algorithms, and feature selection algorithms, and we provide a number of empirical results comparing ADtree methods against traditional direct counting approaches. We also discuss the possible uses of ADtrees in other machine learning methods, and discuss the merits of ADtrees in comparison with alternative representations such as kd-trees, R-trees and Frequent Sets.

Cached sufficient statistics for efficient machine learning with large datasets

This paper introduces new algorithms and data structures for quick counting for machine learning datasets. We focus on the counting task of constructing contingency tables, but our approach is also...

The Rise of Election Monitoring: The Role of Domestic Observers

The Rise of Election MonitoringThe Role of Domestic Observers Neil Nevitte (bio) and Santiago A. Canton (bio) The 1980s and 1990s will be remembered as remarkable decades of political change. Citizens in country after country have turned their backs on oppressive regimes and embraced more open governments and more transparent electoral processes. Free and fair elections are important benchmarks in the democratic life of a country. Thus elections in transitional democracies attract international attention for a combination of good reasons: they not only constitute a litmus test of a regime’s devotion to a variety of democratic values and procedural norms, but also provide critical opportunities for voters to weaken or break the grip of authoritarian governments. Indeed, such international organizations as the United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS) have long-standing traditions of active involvement in such elections— mounting observer missions, supplying and training observers, providing technical and logistical support, and rendering judgment as to whether a particular election qualifies as “free, fair, and transparent.” 1 The last decade or so has seen at least two important developments in election monitoring. First, election observations have become far more sophisticated, and their scope has expanded to encompass a far wider array of activities than before. The roles of the media, political parties, and election commissions are coming under closer and more systematic scrutiny. Increasing attention is being paid to the accuracy of voter-registration lists, and audits of electoral registries have become the norm rather than the exception. Electoral laws as well as campaign rules are now evaluated in far greater detail than ever before. [End Page 47] As in the past, the presence of observers at polling stations remains the centerpiece of most observation efforts. But there have been significant changes in how observers are deployed, in what they are asked to do, in what they report, and in how those reports are analyzed. These shifts reflect both a greater appreciation of the importance of environmental factors in shaping electoral competition and a keener understanding of the need for more systematic evaluation of the quality of the electoral process. The establishment of benchmarks has improved observers’ ability to evaluate the adequacy of a host of election-day activities, including the opening and closing of polling stations, the performance of polling-station officials and party agents, procedures for securing ballot boxes, voter-identification protocols, the management of unregistered voters, and the counting and reporting of votes. Greater precision in the documentation of violations and the development of more sensitive indicators for evaluating the electoral climate surrounding polling stations have been accompanied by refinements in the quantitative tools available to monitors. Parallel vote tabulations, or “quick counts,” have become faster and more accurate as a result of more finely honed statistical-sampling procedures, better technology, improvements in observer training, and refinements in analytical approach. Such counts are now routine. 2 Thus election monitors now have at their disposal observation instruments that are more wide-ranging and more discriminating than ever before—and hence more powerful. And as election monitoring has become more systematic, observers have become increasingly adept at developing and deploying multiple strategies for detecting, and deterring, the subtler efforts at electoral manipulation and theft. 3 The second important development has been the shift in the identity of the key agents who organize election-monitoring activities. Election observation was once almost the exclusive domain of international and interregional organizations. In the last ten years, however, there has been a surge of interest among domestic groups in mounting observation efforts in their own countries. Internationally driven election observations, such as those undertaken by the UN and the OAS, rely primarily on the resources, personnel, and accumulated expertise of the international community. In the increasingly popular “domestically driven” observation efforts, typically mounted by civic organizations or networks of domestic nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), domestic groups provide the organizational infrastructure and logistical support for the observation; recruit and train observers; and gather, communicate, and analyze the qualitative and quantitative data essential to the systematic evaluation of transitional elections. Perhaps most important, domestic groups themselves make the final determination as to whether an election is “free and fair” and then relay...

Measurement approaches to the sense of humor: Introduction and overview

There has been a renaissance of research interest in the of in recent years, partly as an attempt to define the concept but more strenuously to provide Instruments for its measurement. A quick count of recent publications shows an average of two to three new sense of humor- instruments per year — or one every four to six months. This intensity of research is unparalleled in the history of humor research and contrasts sharply with 25 years ago when the renewal of interest in humor feil into a period where cognitive approaches dominated the Zeitgeist in psychology, and the long tradition of personality research in humor was at a point of Stagnation. As an indicator, the classic anthologies Psychology of Humor (1972, edited by Jeffrey Goldstein and Paul McGhee) and Humor and Laughter (1976, edited by Tony Chapman and Hugh Foot) contained no chapter on personality and humor. Perhaps even more striking, of did not appear among the index terms in the former. In the latter, the index guides the reader to Lawrence LaFave's suspicion that the sense of humor is merely a myopic illusion (LaFave, Haddad, and Maesen 1976: 79).

A Mexican Milestone

A Mexican Milestone Sergio Aguayo Quezada (bio) In March 1994, seven Mexican nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that had spent years working to promote democracy and free and fair elections organized a national coalition to conduct a comprehensive observation of the August 21 presidential election. Known as the Civic Alliance, the coalition quickly grew to embrace hundreds of NGOs, labor unions, and social movements, and mobilized nearly 20,000 citizens throughout the country. The observation carried out by the Alliance, which provided an accurate picture of the electoral process that resulted in the victory of Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León, marked a milestone in the history of citizen movements in Mexico. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 gave rise to a regime that was presidentialist, authoritarian, centralized, and closed to the world. Beginning in the 1960s, the failure of the regime’s favored economic model forced the country to come out of its isolation, and authoritarianism began to wane; simultaneously, the number and the [End Page 157] importance of social movements and NGOs increased, and the links among them grew stronger. Most of these independent organizations, while supporting democracy and human rights, viewed the electoral process with indifference or even suspicion. In general, elections were seen as a meaningless ritual whereby the ruling party gave a gloss of legitimacy to its reshufflings of personnel. This began to change during the 1980s, when elections became more competitive. Epitomizing the shift was the presidential contest of 1988. Although Carlos Salinas de Gortari was the official winner, there was enough evidence to substantiate the claim that his victory had been the result of fraudulent practices. There thus began a reassessment of elections, which eventually came to be seen as a tool that could help put an end to the authoritarianism that still suffocates Mexican society. As part of that process of reevaluation, various NGOs began to give more emphasis to the promotion of democracy and of free and fair elections. It was by chance that their attention was drawn to election monitoring. In 1990, I was invited by the Council of Freely Elected Heads of Government, a group chaired by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and composed of former and current heads of state from throughout the Western Hemisphere, to join a delegation of international observers about to set off for Haiti. Monitoring by outside observers seemed to me an effective way to promote fair elections, but I found that exercise expensive, and not enough in any case to consolidate a culture of democracy. The logical alternative for Mexico was electoral observation by the country’s own citizens. Following that reasoning, the Mexican Academy of Human Rights and the Potosino Center for Human Rights mobilized three hundred Mexicans to observe the 18 August 1991 gubernatorial election in San Luis Potosí. That same day, the Arturo Rosenblueth Foundation and the Council for Democracy organized a “quick count” for the Federal District election in Mexico City. Deploying hundreds of volunteers, they managed to project the results the very night of the election. The San Luis Potosí and Federal District experiments were critical to the development of a civic movement in Mexico. Both experiences revealed the enormous complexity of elections geared in many ways to favor the candidates of the PRI. It became evident that participation in public affairs held great interest for Mexicans, and that there was considerable receptiveness to the idea that political rights are human rights. The events of August 1991 also revealed the difficulty of detecting all the mechanisms that had been created to distort the will of the citizens. The most important lesson was the inadequacy of limiting observation to election day itself; in order to construct an accurate picture of what went on, it was necessary to monitor events before, during, and after the day on which the ballots were cast. Hence the proposal that the observation of the 1994 presidential election be [End Page 158] “comprehensive.” Also in 1991, the two pillars of the Mexican civic movement emerged: NGOs and groups of prominent citizens. The cooperative interaction of activists and academics would become one of the most distinctive features of the Civic Alliance. Finally, 1991...

ADA leaders: A powerful resource for today's students

Visionary. Innovative. Experienced. Influential. Creative. Enthusiastic. These are just a few of the characteristics of the many leaders in The American Dietetic Association. The numbers are impressive when one considers all elected and appointed officers from the district level to the state level; national organized units; committees at each level; and special groups, such as legislative network coordinators (LNCs), legislative leaders, ambassadors, state media representatives, state SPRCs, and state or regional dietetic practice group (DPG) leaders. A quick count in my state of Alabama indicated that at least 25% of our membership holds a dietetics leadership position, not counting all the members who serve on committees. If this very conservative estimate is applied to our total membership of more than 63,000 members, there are more than 15,700 leaders or more than 25 leaders for every dietetics education program in the nation!

Sampling Mononychellus tanajoa (Acari: Tetranychidae) on cassava in Africa

AbstractDensity-specific sampling plans were developed under African conditions for the exotic spider mite, Mononychellus tanajoa (Bondar), a serious pest of cassava, Manihot esculenta. The within-plant distribution of Mononychellus tanajoa was found to favour new foliage, regardless of time of planting or plant age. Consequently, the first developed leaf near the top of the foliage was selected as the sampling unit and related to whole plant populations of M. tanajoa. The relationship between the mite population's variance and mean as measured by Taylor's Power Law proved to be stable over a range of planting dates, seasons and locations. Two binomial sampling plans, one based on Taylor's dispersion parameters and another based on direct field observations, were developed and compared. Binomial sampling, appropriate only for densities below 30 mites per leaf, was replaced by an enumerative procedure based on a ‘quick count’ protocol at higher mite densities.

Social Choice Versus Populism? An Interpretation of Riker's Political Theory

William Riker is one of the most influential political scientists at present writing on the theory and practice of democracy. A quick count on my part of the Social Science Citation Index, normally a Siva of academic reputations, revealed nearly one thousand entries under Riker's name between 1971 and the beginning of 1982. Not only is his work frequently cited, it is read long after it is originally published. The Theory of Political Coalitions, probably his best known work, was published in 1962, and is still seriously discussed by those engaged in the empirical study of political coalitions. Moreover, Riker has always been anxious to show the relevance of technical work in political science to the political philosophy of democracy. His work therefore represents not simply an impressive scholarly and academic achievement, but also an important contribution to the more wide-ranging public debate about the nature and value of democracy.

Bestimmung von radioaktivem Kohlenstoff und Wasserstoff in biologischem Material

A simple apparatus is described with which any 14C and/or 3H-containing material up to 350 mg can be combusted and accurately counted. Through the use of nitrogen as flushing gas and the elimination of troublesome elements in the combustion tube, only carbon dioxide and water get absorbed. Thus a quick, constant and reproducible count is made possible with a constant quenching effect, even with low-active products. Inorganic residues are accessible after the combustion and can thus also be analytically determined. Duration of analysis: 12 min. Precision: ±2.5%. Counting yield of 14carbon: 83%, for tritium: 36%.

Letters to the Editor

We've been troubled about abbreviations too. As a result, a neat box of them is soon to appear in the lower corner of the first page of each article containing any letters more baffling than kg or I-V, where it is hoped the abstract reader can consult them by vertical nystagmus. Incidentally, a quick count shows that L.O.L. and H.B. saved themselves the writing (and our printers the type-setting) of about 400 words by their not over liberal use of abbreviations.

Current Pediatric Therapy

For the amount of talent that editors Gellis and Kagan have assembled between its covers, this guide to therapy is a good buy. A quick count indicates that almost 250 individuals have contributed to the text; most of them are recognized authorities in their subspecialty fields. The editorial selection of topics to be covered, as well as of the appropriate individual for each topic, is predictably excellent, since Dr. Gellis has for some years edited The Year Book of Pediatrics.It is assumed by the authors that physicians using this guide have fundamental diagnostic matters well under control and are seeking primarily an expert's present thinking on treatment. Diagnostic discussions are therefore sharply limited. Current Pediatric Therapy does not replace a standard pediatric text; rather, it expands the text's section on treatment into a large compendium of therapy. The book is “perishable” by its nature since treatment is continuously evolving.