2 days before deadline and 3 days after I had asked for progress update, I was preparing to draw the line but, yet again, a convincing excuse from Alex. And then another. And then another. And then silence. I cannot attribute this to bad luck anymore. It is more likely that he has lost interest.
Found this article (below) about voting systems. I am interested in this because I suspect that the fairness of the application’s voting system will be key to its utility.
What can electoral systems learn from fine wine competitions and ITV’s Dancing on Ice? According to new research from the École Polytechnique in Paris, the answer is nothing less than the holy grail of democracy: a voting system that always picks the right candidates. It has long been axiomatic that there’s no such thing as an entirely fair voting system in a world where tactical voting means that the most popular candidates can still fail to win. According to professors Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki, however, the technique known as “majority voting”—as perfected by oenophile deliberations and sports with judging panels—offers a method for fairly picking the overall favourite every time.
The whole point of majority voting is that participants don’t vote in the old-fashioned sense: they simply evaluate candidates by grading them. For wine—a substance with remarkable analogies to politics—the seven gradations are Excellent, Very Good, Good, Passable, Inadequate, Mediocre and Bad. Every wine in a competition is rated by every voter, and its overall rank is then calculated. Had this system been applied to the 2000 US presidential elections, those voters who thought Ralph Nader was Very Good would still have been able to rate Gore as, say, Passable while dismissing Bush as Bad—and Gore would almost certainly have won. Who but the French could have worked out that wine and dancing are the keys to global justice?
The article was published by Prospect Magazine, Diary, April 2009. Article title: Dancing on Ice: the future of democracy. A related lecture on voting in London School of Economics (LSE) has been recorded as podcast on LSE website. I tracked down a short summary of how different voting systems work and the original paper (English version).