The Role of Chance in Fencing Tournaments: an Agent-Based Approach

It is a widespread belief that success is mainly due to innate qualities, rather than to external forces.This is particularly true in sport competitions, where individual talent is usually considered the main, if not the only, ingredient in order to reach success. In this study, with the help of both real data and agent-based simulations, we explore the limits of this belief by quantifying the relative weight of talent and chance in fencing, a combat sport involving a weapon. Fencing competitions are structured as direct elimination tournaments, where randomness is explicitly present in some rules. Our dataset covers the last decade of international events and consists of both single competition results and annual rankings for male and female fencers under 20 years old (Junior category). Our model is calibrated on the dataset and parametrized by just one free variable 'a' describing the importance of talent - and, consequently, of chance - in competitions (a = 1 indicates the ideal scenario where only talent matters, a = 0 the complete random one). Our agent-based approach is able to reproduce the main stylized facts observed in real data, at the level of both single fencing tournaments and entire careers of a given community of fencers. We find that simulations approximate very well the real data for both Junior Men and Women when talent weights slightly less than chance, i.e. when 'a' is around 0.45. We conclude that the role of chance in fencing is unusually high and it probably represents an extreme case for individual sports. Our results shed light on the importance of external factors in both athletes' results in single tournaments and their entire career, making even more unfair the ``winner-takes-all'' disparities in remuneration which often occur among the winner and the other classified.

Peran Presiden di Era Pemilihan Langsung dalam Mengikis Politik Diametral

Pemilihan presiden secara langsung akan menyebabkan terbentuknya kondisi politik yang diametral di antara pemenang dan pihak yang kalah. Keadaan politik yang diametral itu disebabkan karena penerapan prinsip winner takes all dan separation of powers dalam origin dan survival antara pemegang kekuasaan pemerintahan serta pemegang kekuasaan legislatif. Prinsip-prinsip ini, yang menjadi cacat bawaan dalam sistem presidensial, merupakan penyebab utama terjadinya dead lock dalam pelaksanaan kekuasaan negara. Apakah ada solusi terhadap cacat bawaan tersebut? Guna menemukan solusi itu, fakta dan data pengalaman Indonesia dianalisis dengan menggunakan metode deskriptif kualitatif. Fakta dan data dalam penulisan ini bersumber dari data sekunder yang dipilah menggunakan purposive sampling. Melalui penggunaan kewenangan dan peran yang dimiliki presiden, kondisi politik diametral dapat diminimalisir ataupun dimitigasi. Khususnya, peran presiden sebagai chief of legislator dan arbiter dipastikan dapat mereduksi maupun memitigasi kondisi politik diametral tersebut.

The Internet Is Dead: Long Live the Internet

Social exclusion, data exploitation, surveillance, and economic inequality on the web are mainly technological problems. The current web of centralized social media clouds delivers by design a winner-takes-all digital economy that stifles innovation and exacerbates power asymmetries between citizens, governments, and technology oligopolies. To fix the digital economy, we need a new, decentralized web where citizens are empowered to own their data, participate in disintermediated peer-to-peer marketplaces, and influence policy-making decisions by means of innovative applications of participatory and deliberative democracy. By reimagining “web 3.0” as a cloud commonwealth of networked virtual machines leveraging blockchains and sharing code, it is possible to design new digital business models where all stakeholders and participants, including users, can share the bounty of the Fourth Industrial Revolution fairly.

Visuo-proprioceptive integration and recalibration with multiple visual stimuli

To organize the plethora of sensory signals from our environment into a coherent percept, our brain relies on the processes of multisensory integration and sensory recalibration. We here asked how visuo-proprioceptive integration and recalibration are shaped by the presence of more than one visual stimulus, hence paving the way to study multisensory perception under more naturalistic settings with multiple signals per sensory modality. We used a cursor-control task in which proprioceptive information on the endpoint of a reaching movement was complemented by two visual stimuli providing additional information on the movement endpoint. The visual stimuli were briefly shown, one synchronously with the hand reaching the movement endpoint, the other delayed. In Experiment 1, the judgments of hand movement endpoint revealed integration and recalibration biases oriented towards the position of the synchronous stimulus and away from the delayed one. In Experiment 2 we contrasted two alternative accounts: that only the temporally more proximal visual stimulus enters integration similar to a winner-takes-all process, or that the influences of both stimuli superpose. The proprioceptive biases revealed that integration—and likely also recalibration—are shaped by the superposed contributions of multiple stimuli rather than by only the most powerful individual one.

Of Parochial Partisanship and Education: Towards Civic Duty or Polarization?

This article explored parochial partisanship among university students amid growing concerns about political polarization in Ghana. The paper used mixed research methods to gather data with the aid of an interview guide and a questionnaire. It argued that university education inculcates in and endows young people with a sense of civic-minded duty to prioritize the collective good of society and subordinate parochial partisan preferences in an analysis of political policies. The novel finding is that university education in Ghana has enlightened many young people to decipher between the facts and the propagandistic view held by political activists because of parochial partisan interest. However, university education was found to be a necessary but not sufficient condition to wipe out parochial partisanship which is the bane behind the growing political polarization in Ghana. The paper recommends continuous seminars on the dangers associated with negative partisanship in all tertiary educational institutions. Further, the winner-takes-all politics should be reviewed.

Proportional Representation System Whether Significance for Bangladesh: An Analysis

The purpose of this article is to ensure free, fair and credible election by adopting electoral reformation, switch from `Winner Take All” (WTA) to Proportional Representation (PR) system. In Bangladesh the election process and election result both have been questioned. Nevertheless, election is one of the key components in ensuring democracy. Particularly the free, fair and credible election is one of the basic and crucial prerequisites and elements of democratic government and governance. Bangladesh, we found an under developed political culture, lack of democratic political organizations, institutions and practices in true sense. All these indicators have been almost failed to institutionalize democracy in Bangladesh. In this backdrop, this paper attempts to explain that, a switch from the current Winner Takes All (WTA) system to Proportional Representation (PR) system can reshape the election system by keeping consistency, because of the fact that the democracy means the rule of the majority but the minority can't be uprooted as well as Proportional Representation (PR) method can help stabilize democracy in Bangladesh.

Proportional Representation System Whether Significance for Bangladesh: An Analysis

The purpose of this article is to ensure free, fair and credible election by adopting electoral reformation, switch from `Winner Take All” (WTA) to Proportional Representation (PR) system. In Bangladesh the election process and election result both have been questioned. Nevertheless, election is one of the key components in ensuring democracy. Particularly the free, fair and credible election is one of the basic and crucial prerequisites and elements of democratic government and governance. Bangladesh, we found an under developed political culture, lack of democratic political organizations, institutions and practices in true sense. All these indicators have been almost failed to institutionalize democracy in Bangladesh. In this backdrop, this paper attempts to explain that, a switch from the current Winner Takes All (WTA) system to Proportional Representation (PR) system can reshape the election system by keeping consistency, because of the fact that the democracy means the rule of the majority but the minority can't be uprooted as well as Proportional Representation (PR) method can help stabilize democracy in Bangladesh.