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Comparative Democracy
2007-01-18 @ 9:51 am — rc
Originally, I was playing with the idea that representatives should have to pass an exam to become eligable to run for political office. While listening to C-SPAN broadcasts of Congress committees, or members of Congress giving interviews to NPR, where on some shows they are allowed more speaking time than the 20 or 30 seconds, I am too often shocked by the lack of depth and the absence of fact in their statements. Sometimes, representatives will even simply confess they only know what they read in the newspaper, and honestly, I think for many this is all they read I am afraid. Of course, many representatives have expensive and learned advisers, but the judge of their advise will still be lead by nothing but their own framework of reference. In the best situation, the representative will blindly trust his advisers, in the worst, he or she will view themselves as the better qualified of judgment, as a Moses guided by an inner voice.
The notion of requiring a threshold of qualification for representatives holds of course incredible dangers within it of bias and favoritism, undermining the very idea of democracy. On the other hand, the opinion of the masses easily allows to be manipulated by the rise of mass media and the degrading of higher education under the influence of popularization or democratization of educational institutions. But the thought experiment would be worth while the effort.
But secondly, a thought inspired by this notion of a representation bar somewhat, I concluded that I do not know much about the different democratic systems in the world in comparitive overview. The direct association from above thought leading to this, was the comparison with the Iranian democracy, where a High Council of Theologians approves candidates for elections. Now, as a nihilist atheist with rarely a romantic notion of ethics, I would obviously approve of such a standard, but within a system where religious of ethic values are determined or arbitrarily defined to be main concern for future social development, versus my own concerns of an educational, scientific or factual values, such a Theologian body of judgment would not be a totally absurd idea. Of course, this idea does not fit within the Western thought of Enlightenment in which the state and church are separated and the Trias Politica is firmly established, but then most non-Western countries depend on completely different socio-economic conditions and ideological traditions.
So here is my thesis: Collect information for all (formal) forms of democratic government, established by law and elected by popular vote, in the world and group these into 5 basic forms. Define the main differences, with a special eye for the selection of representatives.
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Litarary Word Comparison
2006-12-26 @ 4:56 am — rc
Introduction
This is one of the small research projects that I am currently conducting. I am not pretending to offer or accomplish any scientific added value to the research community in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) but humbly submit my efforts to gain further personal learning. While the research remains unfinished and until I publish it formally, I will keep this post as a mini-post. As a Universal Man, a Humanist, a Renaissance Man each individual man has an obligation to question and further his or her knowledge and understanding, as it lies within our capacities. Learning is a tool to humble our heart, and most of all we should mistrust brave hearts.
Matt Ridley in his book Nature via Nurture says (says Richard Dawkins in his The Ancestor’s Tale in The Mouse Tale chapter) that “the list of words in David Copperfield is almost the same as the list of words in The Catcher in the Rye.” Springing from this saying, I concluded that it would be an interesting project to create a plotter diagram in which the major works in literature (written, translated or edited into modern English for reasons of ease of comparison) are set out as number of total words versus the number of different words used and another network graph that displays the relative closeness of literary works by words used. The first diagram is the easiest to create of course, so I will start with this first, then moving on to the next network diagram.
In the network diagram, several pieces of information can weigh into the closeness of one to another point. Number of words, wordlength, number of long words versus number of short words etcetera. I will create a list of possible factors to include in the calculation of closeness, extending the application from a simple calculation to grow more complex in time, based on the feedback of more educated specialists.
But in principle I will treat the texts without semantical intepretation, but as blind data, as numbers, not as complex thoughts that erupted from a spur of genius.
Planning:
- Background Reading
- Write thesis and project description
- Evaluate planning
- Write simple parser, separating words from a text, eliminating grammar marks
- Evaluate Planning
- Use third party tool or compare similar projects
Texts:
Resources:
Lexical Data:
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other
