The effect of the secret ballot on voter turnout rates

Secrecy in the voting process eliminated an important motivation for voting. No longer able to verify the voters' choices, political parties stopped offering payments in return for votes. Within the rational voter framework, it will be shown that these payments were a prime impetus for people to vote. Without a vote market to cover their voting costs, many voters were rational to stay away from the polls. This hypothesis is supported through a series of empirical tests culminating in a multivariate legislative regression. When other electoral laws are controlled for, the secret ballot accounts for 7 percentage points lower Gubernatorial turnout.     

小中见大——烟画艺术

烟画不仅是一种商业促销手段,也是各类文化大众化传播的一种途径。烟画的作用如下:引进西方文明直观形象认识世界,推广科普教育提高人们的文化知识,商业广告宣传作用。     

Life beyond big data: governing with little analytics

Abstract

The twenty-first-century rise of big data marks a significant break with statistical notions of what is of interest or concern. The vast expansion of digital data has been closely intertwined with the development of advanced analytical algorithms with which to make sense of the data. The advent of techniques of knowledge discovery affords some capacity for the analytics to derive the object or subject of interest from clusters and patterns in large volumes of data, otherwise imperceptible to human reading. Thus, the scale of the big in big data is of less significance to contemporary forms of knowing and governing than what we will call the little analytics. Following Henri Bergson's analysis of forms of perception which ‘cut out’ a series of figures detached from the whole, we propose that analytical algorithms are instruments of perception without which the extensity of big data would not be comprehensible. The technologies of analytics focus human attention and decision on particular persons and things of interest, whilst annulling or discarding much of the material context from which they are extracted. Following the algorithmic processes of ingestion, partitioning and memory, we illuminate how the use of analytics engines has transformed the nature of analysis and knowledge and, thus, the nature of the governing of economic, social and political life.