Archive for January, 2008
Sunday, January 27th, 2008Ruth and I took advantage of the long weekend provided by Martin Luther King, Jr. day and drove up to visit her brother Leon, who is in the CS PhD program at Berkeley. In the process, I learned something incredible: there are parts of California which are really interesting an entertaining. Who knew?
While there, we saw pretty good sketch comedy at The Dark Room, toured Scharffen Berger (our favorite chocolate maker), ate outstanding tapas, walked around several used book stores, and generally made ourselves sad that we live in Orange County.
The best part, however, was the tour of Sonoma County wine country. More on that after the jump.
Why were Hillary and Bill so antagonistic to Obama this week? Obviously, asking this question is implying the answer Obama himself raised in news interviews: she’s actually feeling threatened. Which wouldn’t be unreasonable, with a fairly clear Obama victory in South Carolina looming on the horizon for tomorrow (barring any more tearful episodes from the New York Senator). All the same, Hillary was the projected front runner for months leading up to the Iowa caucus, and even Obama’s upset there only meant a 5-day period of doubt. Ever since New Hampshire, Hillary’s been back on top and heading towards significant wins on February 5th. So what gives?
One interesting answer – that I only stumbled across when responding to an election email from a friend earlier – is the underlying story told by the delegates. Todd’s earlier post noted the absurdities of the delegate system as told by Andrew Tanenbaum, which is certainly worth reading if you haven’t already. Anyone following the Democratic primary knows Hillary is leading Obama 210 to 123, with 2025 being the “magic number” to win the nomination (I’m informed by Tanenbaum’s site that these numbers can vary based on the source). Unsurprising, because Hillary won more states, no?
Actually, winning states is (somewhat) besides the point. Wikipedia has an excellent page on the Democratic primaries, with a good breakdown of the delegates, both pledged and “super” delegates. Pledged delegates are those delegates – either tied to a particular district or “at large” in a state – who are bound by the state primary to vote for a particular candidate. (Here’s a good breakdown of types of the types of delegates.) I actually came to the Wikipedia article above in trying to figure out how delegates were selected in Democratic primaries, and the answer is that all Democratic primaries are now proportional, with a require 15% threshold for receiving any delegates. What’s interesting is that it points out that Obama is actually leading the race for pledged delegates, 38 to Hillary’s 36.
So what does that mean? While superdelegates aren’t likely to change their vote spontaneously (although they could theoretically – they are free agents), it does show that Hillary’s lead isn’t really in her primary victories. After all, she had fairly narrow wins in New Hampshire and Nevada (Michigan is currently still not allowed to participate in the DNC, although this may change), and Obama picked up a lot of those votes as well as the largest victory by percentages (10%) in Iowa. I know fairly little about how superdelegates are acquired, but I’m guessing a combination of Bill and Hillary’s political contacts – not to mention two primary victories – have secured her a lot of those 210 votes. But that also means that this picture could change a lot after Saturday.
Obama is likely to pick up a handful of delegates in South Carolina. How many? I came across a message board where someone predicted Obama wins 25 delegates after Saturday. Percentage-wise that’s 55% of SC’s delegates, and at his highest Obama is polling at 45%. But only some of a state’s delegates are proportional, whereas the others are assigned by districts, so maybe a more fine-grained analysis supports those figures. This could potentially also mean an upset for Florida – after all, South Carolina was a lot closer (with Hillary leading Obama in many polls) until he won Iowa and became a seriously viable candidate. Also, Florida’s another state not allowed to participate in the Convention because they scheduled an early primary, so it may not even get that much coverage, meaning that the last major victory before Super Tuesday is South Carolina – and an Obama victory.
All this is just to say that the current Hillary-as-frontrunner story is about as true as it was before Iowa: she has an advantage, but a fragile one. If you’re at all interested – and like me, rooting for Obama – I urge you to check out the delegate figures and see what’s really at stake on February 5th. The top 3 states for delegates (pledged or no) on 2/5 are CA, NY, and IL, and while Hillary probably has the first two wrapped up, Obama is still going to make substantial gains in both those states, and win IL by a wide margin. Long story short, if you’re registered and hopeful, go out a week from Tuesday and voice your support for Obama – or for Hillary, for that matter – because this ain’t over yet.
Tony has reminded me that it’s once again time to follow electoral-vote.com, that page which four years ago we all relied upon so heavily. Remember when found out Andrew Tanenbaum was behind it? The good ol’ days!
Anyway, the Votemaster’s latest bit of news is required reading, as he explains the national convention process in more detail than you might like:
What if no candidate gets a majority (2025 delegates for the Democrats, 1191 for the much smaller Republican convention)? This is where “brokered convention” comes in. Actually, it is more like “All hell breaks loose.” All delegates are now up for grabs. All the candidates try to grab as many delegates as they can. Some state chairman may try to strongarm their delegates into obeying orders so as to give the state chairman more clout in negotiating with the candidates (“Romney offered us three dams, five bridges, and a national park. What’s your bid?)” But after the first ballot, the delegates are free agents don’t have to obey their chairman or anyone. Some might not care about dams and bridges but might trade their vote for a promise to insert a plank in the platform to [ban voting machines, build a 20' electrified fence on the Mexican border, declare the chicken to be the national fowl, you name it].
Throw in some booze and a good salsa, and you’ve got yourself a party. It gets better, though. If the none of the candidates manages to wrangle a majority of the delegates, it’s possible that the delegates could end up
nominating someone who was not a candidate heading into the convention:
In New York City [at the 1924 Democratic convention] a northern Catholic opposed to prohibition and the Ku Klux Klan, Al Smith, faced off against a southern Protestant who supported prohbition and refused to denounce the Klan, William McAdoo. On July 4th, 1924, 20,000 Klansmen showed up in full dress uniform to throw baseballs at an effigy of Smith and burn crosses. After 99 ballots, Smith and McAdoo, both exhausted, withdrew. Finally, on the 16th day of the convention, John Davis was nominated on the 103rd ballot. A nominee who wasn’t even a candidate coming into the convention is called a dark horse. (If both conventions are deadlocked this year and the candidates are ultimately Al Gore and Jeb Bush, we would have two dark horses.) Davis subequently lost the general election to Calvin Coolidge.
Jeb Bush and Al Gore! Sweet Jesus. It’s not gentlemanly to screw with people like that.
I’m sure you’re wondering how we got such an awesome system. Well, apparently, it’s better than the old way of choosing candidates:
Conventions like this were common in the 19th century, when party bosses in smoke-filled rooms determined the nominees. When no-smoking bans started to appear all over the place, the parties had to adapt, so the current primary/caucus system began to take shape.
Do go and read the rest.
I have a post-it on my desktop with half a dozen subjects for posts, which I hope to get to in the next week or so. A couple of them will be on the other blog, but content is content.
The first is just this picture, which I took after Ruth spotted the sign. We were in the process of boarding a flight from Orange County home.
Ruth looked up and said, “Caution, interpretive dance may occur.”
Maybe you had to be there?
There is a student in my department who is known for this tendency to derail lectures. He always has a lot of questions, and even more ideas. He has a few pet methods (hidden Markov models and neural networks, in particular), and he always thinks the problem at hand could be solved via their application — in fact, he’d usually like for the class to listen along as he thinks out loud, until he has figured out exactly how this is all going to work.
Take today, for example. The class is split equally among computer scientists and biologists. The professor explained a problem, which every computer scientist immediately realized is a pretty canonical example of the sort of problem to which the “expectation-maximization” technique is applied. Then he asked if anyone had any ideas as to how to solve it.
Most of the computer scientists in the room turned to the nearest biologist and whispered, “Yeah, you use EM,” because we are all assholes who like to show off. But no one wanted to waste everyone’s time trying to explain EM without the use of prepared slides, so we waited quietly for the professor to continue.
Which, of course, is precisely the kind of opening that The Guy With Ideas was looking for. He pounced, and started a two-minute exposition that no one followed, but which ended with, “It’s kind of like you start with a hidden Markov model, and use something sort of like EM.”
While I was trying to figure out some way to get those two minutes back, the professor said, “Why do you need an HMM?”
“Because they’re good at solving lots of problems.”
“But they’re not applicable because [... there's a good reason].”
“Yeah, but I think they are, because [... nonsense, we've already covered the reasons why you don't need that kind of machinery].”
“Anyway, you’re half right. We’re going to use EM, but not hidden Markov models.”
Then the professor began to lay the foundation for explaining EM. It’s a long story, and it will probably take the whole next lecture to complete. Five minutes in, The Guy With Ideas pipes back up.
“Wait, what if instead we set this variable to 60% and that one to 25%, and then we [... this went on for a while, and was impossible to follow]. Basically, it’s kind of like EM.”
He seriously said this like 1) he had just invented the ideas behind EM, and had to give us all an example, and 2) he hadn’t just had the same idea a few minutes ago, and 3) the professor hadn’t said that he was correct, way back then.
The professor, who, three meetings into the course, is clearly struggling to deal with the interruptions, just said, “You’re right. We’re going to use EM.”
The Guy With Ideas apparently couldn’t believe that one of his ideas was correct, because he said, “Wait, I’m right?” Then he turned to the girl beside him, pointed two fingers into her face, and yelled, “BOOM! You couldn’t figure it out, and I’m right.”
Score one for you, Guy With Ideas. You totally showed the girl next to you, and it only ate up a total of about ten minutes of class time. I’d say that’s a victory for the record books.