Debating Democracy

Around the world, faith in democracy is falling. Partisanship and mutual distrust are increasing. What, if anything, should we do about these problems? In this accessible work, leading philosophers Jason Brennan and Hélène Landemore debate whether the solution lies in having less democracy or more. Brennan argues that democracy has systematic flaws, and that democracy does not and cannot work the way most of us commonly assume. He argues the best solution is to limit democracy’s scope and to experiment with certain voting systems that can overcome democracy’s problems. Landemore argues that democracy’s virtues, which stem, at an ideal level, from its inclusiveness and egalitarian distribution of power, are not properly manifested in the historical regime form that we call “representative democracy.” Whereas representative democracy centers on an oligarchic form of representation by elected officials, Landemore defends a more authentic paradigm of popular rule—open democracy—in which legislative power is open to all on an equal basis, including via lottery-based mechanisms.

Democracia popular, sem eleições nem políticos

LANDEMORE, Hélène. Open Democracy. Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2020.

Comparison on outlier detection methods using measured data from a long span tied-arch bridge

<p>As the demand for the detections of outliers in the structural health monitoring data-set increases, numerous approaches are presented for it. However, the characteristics of the existing methods dealing with different kinds of measured data are not yet clear enough for practical use. Therefore, this paper conducts a comparative study of several popular rule-based methods based on monitoring data of an arch-tied bridge in China. For measured data, outliers are not known in advance. In this way, this study evaluates and compares the detection performances rely on two indicators: the quantity of the detected outliers and the extreme value of the outliers deviating from the mean of the data. Conclusions on the features and applicable situations of involved methods are given. Additionally, combining the results of different methods proves to be beneficial. Finally, a software incorporating the research results is developed for outlier detection.</p>

The Crisis of Representative Democracy

This chapter discusses the crisis of democracy. While this crisis can be attributed in part to specific empirical corruptions, which are themselves likely the result of contingent external shocks, the crisis of democracy can also be traced, more fundamentally, to an original design flaw: the restriction of democratic representation to “electoral” representation. The main problem is that representative democracy was designed on the basis of electoral premises that prevent even its best, most democratized contemporary versions from reaching the full potential of genuine “popular rule,” that is, a rule that empowers all equally. The chapter then looks at the internal problems to a core principle of representative government: the principle of elections. It also addresses the “realists'” objections that there is no crisis of democracy since representative democracy is working as intended.

Conclusion: Open Democracy in a Global World

This concluding chapter highlights the need to expand the boundaries of the demos outward, beyond the nation-state and toward something like a global democracy, perhaps one rendered possible by digital technologies. At the same time, the need to decentralize decision-making to the level of relevantly affected interests suggests that the nation-state level should only retain historic and pragmatic as opposed to logical privilege. Something like a subsidiary principle should apply across the board, to diffuse and decentralize popular rule as needed as well. The chapter then tentatively puts forward two additional principles, which cannot be fully argued for but pave the way for more research, namely “dynamic inclusiveness” and “substantive equality.” These principles point in the direction of cosmopolitan democracy and workplace democracy, respectively. The chapter also considers the need to disseminate democratic principles to the local level while also creating the tools for running dematerialized, non-territorial democratic communities.

Agonistic Audiences: Comic Play in the Early National Theater

This essay considers how rowdy theater audiences contributed to a broader cultural understanding of democratic politics in the early United States, showing how raucous and occasionally riotous theater patrons enacted a form of popular rule that was predicated on the paying audience’s sovereign right to pleasure. Agonistic audiences thrived on the conflictual dynamics of disorder and dissidence, but their unruly practices only rarely devolved into mob violence, precisely because theatergoers largely understood themselves to be at play. I examine various accounts of theatrical disturbance, including Washington Irving’s famous depiction of a disorderly audience, to demonstrate how patrons cultivated a comic mode of sociality, one that foregrounded and maintained the essential playfulness of social contest. Such comic play acknowledged a horizon of popular enjoyment that stood in excess of rational-critical public discourse. The comic mode has long been undertheorized in literary and cultural studies of the early United States, yet it holds key insight into the practices of both early national theater and early national politics. By way of example, I offer a comic reading of Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787) that reveals the imprint of the agonistic audience on the repertoire of the period, shedding new light on nineteenth-century genealogies of performance.

DDAP: docking domain affinity and biosynthetic pathway prediction tool for type I polyketide synthases

Summary DDAP is a tool for predicting the biosynthetic pathways of the products of type I modular polyketide synthase (PKS) with the focus on providing a more accurate prediction of the ordering of proteins and substrates in the pathway. In this study, the module docking domain (DD) affinity prediction performance on a hold-out testing dataset reached 0.88 as measured by the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC); the Mean Reciprocal Ranking (MRR) of pathway prediction reached 0.67. DDAP has advantages compared to previous informatics tools in several aspects: (i) it does not rely on large databases, making it a high efficiency tool, (ii) the predicted DD affinity is represented by a probability (0–1), which is more intuitive than raw scores, (iii) its performance is competitive compared to the current popular rule-based algorithm. DDAP is so far the first machine learning based algorithm for type I PKS DD affinity and pathway prediction. We also established the first database of type I modular PKSs, featuring a comprehensive annotation of available docking domains information in bacterial biosynthetic pathways. Availability and implementation The DDAP database is available at https://tylii.github.io/ddap. The prediction algorithm DDAP is freely available on GitHub (https://github.com/tylii/ddap) and released under the MIT license. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.