Faulty assumptions: A comment on Blanton, Jaccard, Gonzales, and Christie (2006)

Faulty assumptions: A comment on Blanton, Jaccard, Gonzales, and Christie (2006).

Blanton, Jaccard, Gonzales, and Christie (BJGC, 2006) assert that the Implicit Association Test (IAT) imposes a model that portrays relative preferences as the additive difference between single attitudes. This assertion is misplaced because relative preferences do not necessarily reduce to component attitudes. BJGC also assume that the IAT conditions represent two indicators of the same constr...

Campaign Finance Regulation: Faulty Assumptions and Undemocratic Consequences

Efforts to limit political contributions and spending are extremely popular. Yet there is no serious evidence that campaign finance regulation has achieved or will achieve its goals of reducing the influence of money, opening up the political system, and lowering the cost of campaigns. Indeed, since the 1974 amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act, spending has risen sharply, the number...

Gonzales v. Carhart (2007)

In Gonzales v. Carhart (2007), the US Supreme Court held in a five-to-four decision that the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act [5] passed by the US Congress was constitutional. Although the Court previously ruled in Stenberg v. Carhart (2000) that a Nebraska law that prohibited partial-birth abortions [6] was unconstitutional, Gonzales reversed this decision. Gonzales created the precedent th...

Comment on “Constraining climate forecasts: The role of prior assumptions”

On Finding the Jaccard Center

We initiate the study of finding the Jaccard center of a given collection N of sets. For two sets X,Y , the Jaccard index is defined as |X ∩ Y |/|X ∪ Y | and the corresponding distance is 1− |X ∩Y |/|X ∪Y |. The Jaccard center is a set C minimizing the maximum distance to any set of N . We show that the problem is NP-hard to solve exactly, and that it admits a PTAS while no FPTAS can exist unle...