SOME GUESSES ABOUT YANKEE DOODLE

Doodle Poll Games

In Doodle polls, each voter may approve a subset of the available alternatives according to his preferences. While such polls can be captured by the standard models of Approval voting, Zou et al. [17] analyse reallife Doodle poll data and conclude that poll participants’ behaviour seems to be affected by considerations other than their intrinsic preferences over the alternatives. In particular,...

Sam Harvey Yankee Surgeon—Philosopher

Genital Evolution: Cock-a-Doodle-Don’t

Losing the penis in species with internal fertilization may seem paradoxical, but birds have managed to do it multiple times. A new study addresses one developmental mechanism responsible for penis reduction in birds, and opens the door to further examination of this little understood evolutionary phenomenon.

How Well Do Doodle Polls Do?

Web-based Doodle polls, where respondents indicate their availability for a collection of times provided by the poll initiator, are an increasingly common way of selecting a time for an event or meeting. Yet group dynamics can markedly influence an individual’s response, and thus the overall solution quality. Via theoretical worst-case analysis, we analyze certain common behaviors of Doodle pol...

Approval Voting Behavior in Doodle Polls

Doodle is a simple and popular online system for scheduling events. It is an implementation of the approval voting mechanism, where candidates are the time slots and each responder approves a subset of the slots. We analyze all the Doodle polls created in the US from JulySeptember 2011 (over 340,000 polls), consisting of both hidden polls (where you cannot see other people’s votes) and open pol...