An enduring problem in electoral systems is that of "disproportionality," i.e., the mismatch between a party's percentage of the popular vote and its percentage of legislative seats. Such disproportionality is quite common and extreme cases are easy to find in the real word. To give just one example, the Liberal Party in Britain polled 13.8% of the national vote in 1979 but was rewarded with on...

This paper addresses a special problem with historical document images where handwritten characters from the reverse side appear as noise on the front side and even interfere with the front side characters. A novel method to extract clear textual images from interfering and overlapping areas of text is presented here. The proposed algorithm is interesting in that, with an observation that the e...

The Master of Liberal Arts provides the chance to practice the methods of interdisciplinary inquiry that are the hallmark of a rigorous liberal arts education. As a student in the program, one can explore questions of identity through art, literature, and religion; analyze the politics of race in fiction, historical documents, the visual arts, and music; debate ethical choices presented by fict...