maniacmartin

I am going to outline what I consider to be the British electoral voting system’s most fundamental flaw, and why I think it must be changed.

The current setup
The UK is divided into areas called constituencies. People can stand for election in a constituency, and represent their chosen party. Citizens then vote for a party within their constituency. In national elections, what they are really voting for is only the party.

Within each constituency, votes are totalled and the party with the most votes then represents that constituency. On a map, this area would be coloured with a colour to represent that party.

Then, nationally, they add up the number of constituencies represented by each party. The party with the highest number of constituencies coloured their colour wins, and this party gets to run the country.

What’s unfair about this system?
The major flaw of this system is that only the votes of the strongest party in the constituency get carried across to the national tallying stage. All other votes within the constituency effectively don’t count at all.

Consider this extreme example. A country has 3 major parties: A, B and C.
In every constituency, party A gets 40% of the votes.
In about half of the constituencies, party B gets 60% of the votes, and party C gets no votes
In the other half of the constituencies, party B gets no votes, and party C gets 60% of the votes.

Now, in every constituency, either party B or party C will win, since they have 60% of the votes.
On a map, about half of the constituencies will be coloured with B’s colour and about half with C’s colour. No constituencies “voted” B at all. In national counts, party B or C will get to run the government.

But let’s do a national summation of votes for all 3 parties:
Party A got 40% of votes in 100% of constituencies ….. = 40% of national votes
Party B got 60% of votes in 51% of constituencies …… = 30% of national votes
Party C got 60% of votes in 49% of constituencies ……. = 30% of national votes.

Here it is clear to see that the country should be ran by party A, but in fact party A got no seats at all since you only get a seat if you win within a constituency.

Clearly this is a very extreme example, but it does show massive flaws in our voting system at present. The system disadvantages smaller parties, or parties whose voters are spread out as opposed to voters who live in clusters thus in the same constituency.
It does make a difference however. According to The BBC
, in 2005, Labour got 35.3% of votes - slightly more than the Conservatives’ 32.3% (top right of page). Yet Labour got a whopping 356 seats - 158 more than the Conservatives’ 198. This is just one of many statistics that show just how unfair the current system is.

This is why I believe the only way is to count votes nationally, and use this to determine the leading party. Evidently, this new system poses problems itself - such as the leading party hardly holding any seats in Parliament in some cases, but I’m sure a fair system could be devised.

Quite a few times recently, Donov has managed to render thinky, an old IBM thinkpad, unable to login. At the KDM login screen, you type a username and password, and you get back to the login screen.

Investigations reveal that the cause of this is that running apt-get downloads .debs and leaves them in /var/cache/apt/archives . Thinky only has a 2GB hard drive, so it literally filled the whole partition before it errored out (not enough disk space). Thus, when anyone wants to log into KDE, there is no disk space to make any temporary files, so the login fails.

A quick fix is to add the following lines to /etc/rc.local, to clear apt’s cache on boot-up
rm -rf /var/cache/apt/*
mkdir /var/cache/apt/archives
mkdir /var/cache/apt/archives/partial

Edward Lyon of SCS Technology Solutions has kindly offered to donate a bigger hard drive to thinky to prevent this problem happenning in the future.

As predicted, this blog is being neglected, as DaveM pointed out to me recently. So, at the risk of boring you with useless news, I am posting an update:

Firstly, Andrew and I noticed a distinct lack of free “works-out-of-the-box” web hosting control panels recently. (Like Plesk, cPanel, DirectAdmin). We tried various free ones on a Debian Sarge box, with no great success.

web://cp wouldn’t even complete its install (and hasn’t been updated since 2005).

VHCS2 installed OK but broke Apache2’s config files whenever a change was made, and its interface only allows you to do the basics.

AlternC showed promise and installed, but then we were stuck and its documentation is in French.

(And no, webmin is not a web hosting control panel that fits our needs)

It surprises me that there is no easy-to-install, open-source package to do what is a very common problem. What would be nice is something where you can edit
/etc/apt/sources.list

and then type
apt-get install packagename
and it would pull in dependancies and set it up for you.

There is clearly a gap in the market for this.

In the real world, Ong’s lectures and still as boring as ever, but at least its Week 6. That came round fast. I still have some Linear Algebra to tidy up and then we’re on the home straight.

Update: ISPconfig - jsut check their online demo. The interface is eeeeugh. No way

Well its the start of another term here at Oxford. Calculus is nearly over, except for one last sheet of impossible Laplacian Equations.

Functional programming is also over, and although I can’t say I’ll miss programming in Haskell, Richard Bird’s witty lecture humour will be sadly missed.

Discrete Maths is now over too, but I don’t have anythign to say about it.

Unfortunately the noose that is linear algebra hasn’t loosened and we have it for another term, although with a new lecturer who has started off nice and gentle. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Newcomers to this term include Procedural Programming in Oberon with Mike Spivey, who so far seems like a good lecturer. Next year we will get to build the Oberon compiler that we are using this term to process the (relatively) simple Oberon syntax.

Another new topic is Data Structures and Algorithms, which is so far has been calculating Big O notation and efficiency. Not the most interesting of topics, but beats calculus hands down.

Finally, my tutor Joel Ouaknine (who I haven’t had any tutes off yet) is lecturing Logic and Proof. So far the logic part is familiar with truth tables and such. And his logic (AND/OR-based) sudoku solver looks quite ingenius, not to mention speedy.

Away from academia I have bought an old IBM Thinkpad T21 because I was bored, but neither me, ubuntuforums.org tutorials, andrew or anyone can mange to NAT bridge the connections. We managed to Xubuntu-ize it before the DVD-rom arrived by doing a hard drive transplant into another laptop (Andrew’s old Pacbell) using a cheese slicer to undo the minute screws.
Donor is moving house tomorrow and has painted over his pink room another colour (so he says). Hopefully ntl will connect his internet fast as we need IM to survive in this day in age.
David North has been elected Magdalen JCR computer officer just to discover the JCR Rooms database server is broken and the rooms ballot is approaching fast.

As you can tell I must be really bored because I’m really struggling to come up with enough news to talk about, just like the Market Rasen Mail.

Oh yes, I haver bought a fully Linux plug-n-play PCMCIA Belkin wifi card for the thinkpad but since my Broadcom chip doesn’t work in Green’s Cafe I might try the Belkin there.

That’s all folks

Now the best Windows antivirus program has a cool secret page:

http://www.eset.com/company/fun_stuff.php

the NOD32 song