As the 2000 election so vividly showed, it is Electoral College standings rather than national popular votes that determine who becomes President. But current pre-election polls focus almost exclusively on the popular vote. Here we present a method by which pollsters can achieve both point estimates and margins of error for a presidential candidate’s electoral-vote total. We use data from both ...

With the growth of broadband networks, the Video-on-Demand (VoD) becomes realistic. Many significant broadcasting schemes are proposed to reduce the bandwidth requirements for stored popular videos, but they cannot be used to support live video broadcast perfectly. Herein, we propose a new broadcasting scheme, called Adaptive Live Broadcasting (ALB) scheme, which supports live video broadcastin...

We introduce and study Maker/Breaker-type positional games on random graphs. Our main concern is to determine the threshold probability pF for the existence of Maker’s strategy to claim a member of F in the unbiased game played on the edges of random graph G(n, p), for various target families F of winning sets. More generally, for each probability above this threshold we study the smallest bias...

Salience, Risky Choices and Gender Risk theories typically assume individuals make risky choices using probability weights that differ from objective probabilities. Recent theories suggest that probability weights vary depending on which portion of a risky environment is made salient. Using experimental data we show that salience affects young men and women differently, even after controlling f...

The third World Baseball Classic (WBC) was held in March 2013. In this tournament, 16 teams play in Round 1 under a round-robin (RR) format and 8 teams which advanced to Round 2 play under a modified double-elimination (MDE) format. This 2013 WBC format is compared with the formats such as the past two WBCs held in 2006 and 2009, from the aspect of the probability of winning the tournament and ...

The Parrondo's paradox is a counterintuitive phenomenon where individually-losing strategies can be combined in producing a winning expectation. In this paper, the issues surrounding the Parrondo's paradox are investigated. The focus is lying on testifying whether the same paradoxical effect can be reproduced by using a simple capital dependent game. The paradoxical effect generated by the Parr...

In battles, opponents exhibit positive illusions in both believing they can win. With great costs of failure and uncertain success, this represents extreme risk-taking behaviour. Conflict may be expected if one side is cornered, a sacrificial pawn in an overall war strategy, or demanded into action by politicians. However, in many cases even patently weaker forces fight despite nonviolent optio...

Unemployment has almost always been traumatic for its victims. In earlier times, it threatened extreme privation, if not starvation. Still today, dramatically decreases victims’ standard of living, human capital, social standing, and self-respect. It is associated with poorer health, family dissolution, suicide. also entails considerable costs to society such as lost output, increased crime, de...