In biomolecular programming, the properties of biomolecules such as proteins and nucleic acids are harnessed for computational purposes. The field has gained considerable attention due to the possibility of exploiting the massive parallelism that is inherent in natural systems to solve computational problems. DNA has already been used to build complex molecular circuits, where the basic buildin...

Novel digital technologies always lead to high density and very low power consumption. One of these concepts is Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA), which is one of the new emerging nanotechnology-based on Coulomb repulsion. This article presents three architectures of logical “XOR” gate, a novel structure of two inputs “XOR” gate, which is used as a module to implement four inputs “XOR” gate a...

We study an extension to the standard voter model, in which voters have an individual inertia to change their state. We assume that this inertia increases with the time a voter has been in its current state. Increasing the level of inertia in the system decelerates the microscopic dynamics. Counter-intuitively, we find that the time to reach a macroscopic ordered state can be accelerated for in...

Throughout the years, many cryptographically verifiable voting systems have been proposed with a whole spectrum of features and security assumptions. Where the voter casts an in-person (and possibly paper) ballot and leaves, as is common in a governmental election, the majority of the proposals fall in the category of providing unconditional integrity and computational privacy. A minority of pa...

We present a theory of voting that predicts that elections are more likely to be close, and voter turnout is more likely to be high when citizens possess better public information about the composition of the electorate. These findings suggest that providing more information to potential voters about aggregate political preferences (e.g., through pre-election polls or expert forecasts) may unde...

In this paper we investigate the relationship between inequality and the environment in a growing economy from a political economy perspective. We consider an endogenous growth economy, where growth generates pollution and a deterioration of the environment. Public expenditures may either be devoted to supporting growth or abating pollution. The decision over the public programs is done in a di...

Building on the literature that investigates citizen and voter trust in government, we analyze the topic of voter confidence in the American electoral process. Our data comes from two national telephone surveys where voters were asked the confidence they have that their vote for president in the 2004 election was recorded as intended. We present preliminary evidence that suggests confidence in ...

We study the effect of latency on binary-choice opinion formation models. Latency is introduced into the models as an additional dynamic rule: after a voter changes its opinion, it enters a waiting period of stochastic length where no further changes take place. We first focus on the voter model and show that as a result of introducing latency, the average magnetization is not conserved, and th...

Using insights from social choice theory, particularly Black’s concept of single-peaked preferences and Downs’s median-voter model, the authors previously investigated the theoretical impact of the alternative vote system (AV) on the success of moderate parties in an ethnically bipolar society. Focusing on the simplest case, that with one moderate and one extremist ethnic party associated with ...

For the voter model, we study the effect of a memory-dependent transition rate. We assume that the transition of a spin into the opposite state decreases with the time it has been in its current state. Counterintuitively, we find that the time to reach a macroscopically ordered state can be accelerated by slowing down the microscopic dynamics in this way. This holds for different network topolo...