The Southern California Twin Register was initiated in 1984 at the University of Southern California, and continues to grow. This article provides an update of the register since it was described in the 2002 special issue of this journal. The register has expanded considerably in the past 4 years, primarily as a result of recent access to Los Angeles County birth records and voter registration ...

Quantum dot cellular automata is an emerging nanoelectronic computational architecture which has the potential of faster speed, smaller size and minimum power consumption compared to transistor-based technology. In QCA, binary information are encoded as electronic charge configuration of a cell. Fundamental unit in building of QCA circuit is a QCA cell. A QCA cell is an elementary building bloc...

A median of a k-tuple =(x1; : : : ; xk) of elements of a 0nite metric space (X; d) is an element x for which ∑k i=1 d(x; xi) is minimum. The function m with domain the set of all k-tuples with k ¿ 0 and de0ned by m( ) = {x: x is a median of } is called the median function on X . Continuing with the program of characterizing m on various metric spaces, this paper presents a characterization of t...

Clark and Lauderdale develop a novel approach for orienting Supreme Court opinions in unidimensional policy space. They argue that the most important portion of a Court’s opinion is not its judgment in favor of one party or another, but its reasoning, for it is this reasoning that becomes binding law and shapes the path of American legal development. The authors thus measure the policy orientat...

Using a spatial model, we compare different rules for aggregating preferences across confederated districts, under the assumption that voters have private information and face uncertainty about the distribution of preferences of other voters. Our model includes, as special cases, systems of local representation in national assemblies and parliaments and international legislatures with rep­ rese...

This article starts by introducing a new theoretical framework to model spatial systems which is obtained from the framework of interacting particle systems by replacing the traditional graphical structure that defines the network of interactions with a structure of hypergraph. This new perspective is more appropriate to define stochastic spatial processes in which large blocks of vertices may ...

We study sequential voting with two alternatives, in a setting with utility externalities: as usual, each voter has a private preference over the candidates and likes her favorite candidate to win, but additionally, a voter values voting for the chosen winner (which is determined by the majority or super-majority of votes). This model aims to capture voting behavior (”likes”) in social networks...

Redundancy techniques are commonly used to design dependable systems to ensure high reliability, availability and data integrity. Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) is a widely used redundancy technique that masks faults. In a TMR system, we have three implementations of the same logic function and their outputs are voted using a voter circuit. In this paper, we present a new voter design called t...