Deadly Lesson

<正>The MERS virus surge in South Korea raises treatment questions and dredges up bad memories of SARS A South Korean couple’s wedding photo caused quite a stir across the country’s social networking sites.The picture,which shows the couple posing with family and friends,is distinctive in that everyone is wearing white surgical masks.     

Resurrected From the Past

<正>China has a new spot on the UNESCO World Heritage ListThree sites of the Tusi heritage—areas resided in by ethnic minorities in southwest and central China from the 13th century to the mid-20th century—were added to the list of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites in July,increasing the number of the country’s World Heritage Sites to 48,the second largest in the world following Italy.The three sites are Laosicheng Fortress in central China’s Hunan Province,Tangya Fortress in central China’s Hubei Province     

Shanghai:A New Hi-Tech Center

<正>Shanghai aims to become a center for scientific and technological innovation ‘It is a magnificent city that can make any dream come true!"Tim Cook,CEO of Apple Inc.,commented while visiting Shanghai on May 14.After making efforts for more than a decade to construct the city into an international center of economy,finance,trade and shipping,     

The Alternative Vote and Coombs Rule versus First-Past-the-Post: a social choice analysis of simulated data based on English elections, 1992–2010

This paper presents a social choice analysis, using simulated data based on English general elections from 1992 through 2010, of the properties of three voting rules: First-Past-the-Post, the Alternative Vote, and the Coombs Rule. More specifically, the paper examines (1) the plurality, anti-plurality, and Condorcet status of candidates in each election and the interrelationships among these statuses, (2) the effects of strict and partial single-peakedness of voter preferences, and (3) the identity of winners, Condorcet efficiency, and the relationship between votes and seats under the three voting rules. The analysis considers only the case of three candidates and, in the manner of basic social choice theory, the set of candidates and voter preferences over them are taken to be fixed.     

Conspiracy Endorsement as Motivated Reasoning: The Moderating Roles of Political Knowledge and Trust

Given the potential political and social significance of conspiracy beliefs, a substantial and growing body of work examines the individual‐level correlates of belief in conspiracy theories and general conspiratorial predispositions. However, although we know much about the psychological antecedents of conspiracy endorsement, we know less about the individual‐level political causes of these prevalent and consequential beliefs. Our work draws from the extant literature to posit that endorsement of conspiracy theories is a motivated process that serves both ideological and psychological needs. In doing so, we develop a theory that identifies a particular type of person—one who is both highly knowledgeable about politics and lacking in trust—who is most susceptible to ideologically motivated conspiracy endorsement. Further, we demonstrate that the moderators of belief in conspiracy theories are strikingly different for conservatives and liberals.     

Make Them Laugh

<正>The arising group of young comedians in China A deceivingly common situation appeared on the TV program Post 80s Generation Talk Show on May 30:a wedding ceremony with a bride and two grooms.In this case,however,the host of the show Wang Zijian was the bride and two representatives of the audience—one man and one woman—served as the grooms,     

Closeness matters: monotonicity failure in IRV elections with three candidates

A striking attribute of instant runoff voting (IRV) is that it is subject to monotonicity failure—that is, getting more (first-preference) votes may result in defeat for a candidate who would otherwise have won and getting fewer votes may result in victory for a candidate who otherwise would have lost. Proponents of IRV have argued that monotonicity failure, while a mathematical possibility, is highly unlikely to occur in practice. This paper specifies the precise conditions under which this phenomenon arises in three-candidate elections and applies them to a number of large simulated data sets in order to get a sense of the likelihood of IRV’s monotonicity problem in varying circumstances. The basic finding is that the problem is significant in many circumstances and very substantial when IRV elections are closely contested by three candidates.