Category Archives: First Principles

The Art of Gerrymandering – Part I

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The Original Gerry Mander

The Constitution tasks the House of Representatives with setting the number of U. S. citizens that its members may represent. The Apportionment Act of 1792 fixed the House of Representatives for the Third Congress at 105 members, one Representative for 33,000 constituents. The Census of 1790, first of its kind, found the young nation numbering around 3,900,000 individuals. For purposes of computing the ratio of representatives to those represented, slaves constituted three-fifths of a free person.

112 years on, 1901, roughly midway between the Constitution’s ratification and the present day, each Representative of the 57th Congress fielded the concerns of 213,000 people and carried a six-fold increase in “representational load” over his 1792 counterpart. The House then had 357 members representing around 76 million. Had the House stayed with its 1792 ratio of one Representative to 33,000 constituents, it would have had 2,303 members in 1901, far more than what the seating in the south wing of the Capitol building could accommodate.

114 years on, the 114th Congress finds a House of 435 voting members, a number which has been fixed since the Apportionment Act of 1911. These worthies now represent about 309 million, or roughly 710,000 citizens per Representative, a four-fold increase over the 1901 representational load and a twenty-four fold increase over that of 1792. At the original ratio, the House would have almost 9,364 members, a number making for a mad house – though some think it is anyway.

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Inspiring aspirations – preamble of the founding charter of the United Nationa

We  – me, certainly – think of myself as relatively immune to surprise, by evil or good. People say that it’s in the New York City Charter, right next to the rule about not being nice to tourists, lest we lose our municipal reputation for poor manners and indifference. But the right words still can, and should, have the power to move us – and founding documents often contain evidence of the best and worst of society. The United States Constitution, for example, was structured around giving slave-holding states a disproportionate amount of power (because of the Three-Fifths Compromise, and the undemocratic Senate, in which representation is distinctly undemocratic. Within the slave states, of course, individual slave-owners were free to treat their slaves as they wished, extracting as much economic value as was possible. And so among slave owners the economic incentive was a “race to the bottom.” ((We had thought that the phrase originated with Adam Smith, but further research suggests that first use may have been by Justice Louis Brandeis in Ligget Co. v. Lee (288 U.S. 517, 558–559) (1933). )) Yet, other parts of the body of the Constitution and Bill of rights bespeak noble and compassionate aims. And the absence of even a single use of the words “slave” or “slavery” are testimony that at least some of the Framers were opposed to, ashamed of, slavery.

And so with the United Nations: we can all bring to mind easily events in which the United Nations’ conduct – and even more often, cowardly inaction and silence doesn’t mean its existence hasn’t affirmatively led to good outcomes, and by creating channels for communication and  temp0rizing – the latter being essential if the casus belli is in some part a politician with a bruised ego.

It is in this context that we present to you the Preamble of the founding Charter of the United Nations. It’s notable for many reasons but we think it worth pointing out that you can read this entire block of text from top to bottom, including the headings, or, you can read all the body copy as one statement, and read all of the headings, without reference to the text beneath each heading, as a separate complementary statement. Here it is:

PREAMBLE

WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED

  • to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and
  • to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and
  • to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and
  • to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

AND FOR THESE ENDS

  • to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and
  • to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and
  • to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and
  • to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples,

HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMS

Accordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations.

You can read the Preamble – and the nineteen chapters of the Charter – here on the site of the United Nations. And, if you think that world peace, social justice and economic fairness are worth discussing ((No sarcasm intended; thanere are people who believe, for instance, that we should let markets sort things for us, that collective efforts to improve things  will only make things worse; those aren’t unreasonable positions, even if we don’t share them. The latter proposition is merely an application of Murphy’s Law to global matters. )), consider the proposition that a global language would be an affirmative step. We think it’s worth considering, even if it’s a limited language, and we don’t think the discussion begins or ends with Esperanto, and in fact even a limited vocabulary in a signed language, spoken by even a small number – say 2% – of each country’s population.

Brett Zamir, the brilliant creator of, among other things, at least 11 Firefox extensions – is owed our thanks for inspiring this post, is an advocate of the universal-language premise and an advocate of Gestuno, also known as International Sign. Brett, with permission “from the World Federation of the Deaf, [has] put online an early book on Gestuno,”

 

And if you’ve now got an appetite for founding documents, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a must-read.

Paul Baran and the Origins of the Internet | RAND

This is part of a series dedicated to what we regard as “First Principles.” No set of principles, in our view, is more important than the notion that distributed networks are more robust than centralized networks, and that this applies to a military command-and-control network no more or less than it applies to a suburban neighborhood, rural community, or a city – any social network. Thanks to the RAND Corporation, much of the most important early work in network theory, written by the late Paul Baran, is readily available online for free. Math-averse readers should have no worries, Baran (and the uncredited authors at RAND) won’t require you to have any arithmetic, much less mathematical, background. Before you read the following excerpt introducing the RAND series, we’d like readers to think of themselves, their neighbors, and family and friends both near and far as members of, or “nodes” on, a social network.

In 1962, a nuclear confrontation seemed imminent. The United States (US) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) were embroiled in the Cuban missile crisis. Both the US and the USSR were in the process of building hair-trigger nuclear ballistic missile systems. Each country pondered post-nuclear attack scenarios.

 

Centralized Network

 

US authorities considered ways to communicate in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. How could any sort of “command and control network” survive? Paul Baran, a researcher at RAND, offered a solution: design a more robust communications network using “redundancy” and “digital” technology.

At the time, naysayers dismissed Baran’s idea as unfeasible. But working with colleagues at RAND, Baran persisted. This effort would eventually become the foundation for the World Wide Web.

centralized switching facilities

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distributed switching facilities

distributed

Baran was born in Poland in 1926. In 1928, his family moved to the US. He attended Drexel University where he earned a degree in electrical engineering. Afterward, Baran married and moved to Los Angeles where he worked for the Hughes Aircraft Company. Taking night classes at UCLA, he earned an engineering master’s degree in 1959–the same year he joined RAND.

At that time, RAND focused mostly on Cold War-related military issues. A looming concern was that neither the long-distance telephone plant, nor the basic military command and control network would survive a nuclear attack. Although most of the links would be undamaged, the centralized switching facilities would be destroyed by enemy weapons. Consequently, Baran conceived a system that had no centralized switches and could operate even if many of its links and switching nodes had been destroyed.

Baran envisioned a network of unmanned nodes that would act as switches, routing information from one node to another to their final destinations. The nodes would use a scheme Baran called “hot-potato routing” or distributed communications.

Baran also developed the concept of dividing information into “message blocks” before sending them out across the network. Each block would be sent separately and rejoined into a whole when they were received at their destination. A British man named Donald Davies independently devised a very similar system, but he called the message blocks “packets,” a term that was eventually adopted instead of Baran’s message blocks.

 

Distributed Network

 

This method of “packet switching” is a rapid store-and-forward design. When a node receives a packet it stores it, determines the best route to its destination, and sends it to the next node on that path. If there was a problem with a node (or if it had been destroyed) packets would simply be routed around it.

In a recent interview with Wired magazine, Baran discussed his vision of how the new technology might be used. “Around December 1966, I presented a paper at the American Marketing Association called ‘Marketing in the Year 2000.’ I described push-and-pull communications and how we’re going to do our shopping via a television set and a virtual department store. If you want to buy a drill, you click on Hardware and that shows Tools and you click on that and go deeper.”

In 1969, this “distributed” concept was given its first large-scale test, with the first node installed at UCLA and the seventh node at RAND in Santa Monica. Funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency and called ARPANET, it was intended for scientists and researchers who wanted to share one another’s computers remotely. Within two years, however, the network’s users had turned it into something unforeseen: a high-speed, electronic post office for exchanging everything from technical to personal information.

In 1983, the rapidly expanding network broke off from its military part, which became MILNET. The remainder became what was called ARPANET. In 1989, the ARPANET moniker was retired in favor the “Internet,” which had also been described as the “information superhighway.” These days, the Internet continues to expand, stringing together the World Wide Web, an all-encompassing, affordable, universal multimedia communications network (see related RAND Review article).

Today, RAND continues to conduct research in this area. CEO and President of RAND Jim Thomson recently recalled Baran’s contributions. “Our world is a better place for the technologies Paul Baran has invented and developed, and also because of his consistent concern with appropriate public policies for their use.”

via Paul Baran and the Origins of the Internet | RAND.