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Are Maps Killing Your Vote?Every ten years, in a process that profoundly impacts American politics, the legislative districts are redrawn to determine who votes where. But because of a practice called gerrymandering “we, the people” are not necessarily deciding who represents us.The EvidenceThe United States Constitution requires that a population count, the decennial Census, serve as the basis for redistricting. Congressional districts are then reapportioned among the states and each state is divided into districts of equal population. State legislatures and many local governments work the same way. Since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the redrawing of state and congressional lines must also maximize any clear opportunity for minorities to elect candidates of their choosing.Who Dunnit? The Representative with the Map Book in the Drawing RoomIn all but 13 states, legislators redraw state and congressional districts. As you can imagine, the highly charged and competitive political environment has resulted in less than ideal boundary changes, even when legislators obey the letter of the law.And if the outcome of a lawmaker’s next election is effectively pre-determined by how they draw a map (the process known as gerrymandering), then they are less likely to listen to voters. If a lawmaker is corrupt or failing on their campaign promises, voters have less power to hold them accountable and minority neighborhoods may have their voting power diluted.The minority vote protections in the Voting Rights Act resulted in a situation where the party that elected minorities also controlled the House of Representatives. Democrats championed the process, redrawing districts to maintain minority populations. Due to this, Democrats largely controlled Congress for 40 years, from 1955 to 1995. Now this "clumping" is hurting Democrats. Democrats are increasingly winning the majority of the votes in small geographic, mostly urban, areas. These urban districts are very hard to gerrymander. This is because most local governments want House districts that respect local boundaries and that local politicians can defend in the polls, while Democratic city governments can influence Democratic state legislators who might otherwise be tempted to gerrymander.GOP drawn boundaries have been seen to overcrowd districts created by Democrats with disproportionate amounts of minority populations. By increasing numbers in a safe Democratic district, Republicans reduce the influence of the liberal voting bloc in both state politics and congressional elections. Republicans controlled the US House from 1995 until 2006. However, the party retained its power in state legislatures, and redrew favorable maps after the 2010 Census.The Murder Weapon?What is the cause of this situation? The lack of impartial redistricters or tools that make it too easy to redistrict?The widespread use of redistricting software has made the drawing of redistricting plans easier from a technical perspective. But the software is simply a tool and when put in the wrong hands can be used outside of the original intent of the application. The Maptitude mapping software is the dominant product used to redistrict (www.redistricting.com), and is regularly mentioned in the mainstream press and has been covered in Rolling Stone, Dallas Morning News, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Atlantic Cities, The New York Times, and many other media outlets. However, it is often a reference in regards to how Republicans use Maptitude to redistrict. This is despite Maptitude being used by a supermajority of the state legislatures, political parties, and public interest groups of both political parties.So is it the redistricters fault? Several states already use independent, nonpartisan redistricting commissions, and are having great success. In 2011 for example, California established a citizens redistricting commission that used Maptitude to successfully redraw the maps. In another example, in Oakland, anyone could propose a district map by using Maptitude: http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2013/09/18/oakland-redistricting/ .An Isolated Case?In the rest of the world, systems like California’s are closer to the norm. Indeed, in Canada, Australia and many other Western countries, politicians aren’t allowed anywhere near the district maps. But politics can still impact redistricting. In Saskatoon, Canada, the 2002 independent boundary commission had wanted to change the rural-urban boundaries into urban districts to better represent the character of the areas. But this was opposed by the party that would lose seats, and the proposed changes had to wait until 2012.In the UK, changes to the boundaries and number of constituencies are being proposed to save money and because the average size of the electorate in a Labour party seat is 68,487 compared to 72,418 in Conservative party seats and 69,440 in Liberal Democrat party seats. The UK does not have a history of legal challenges to redistricting plans, and these challenges may cause judicial review of specific boundary commission decisions as well as to variations in the overall national redistricting plan. While the Electoral Commission has been effective in creating equal seats, the process has introduced biased redistricting that has gone unchallenged. Availability of US-style redistricting software (of which Maptitude is the best-of-breed) will enable serious partisan and non-partisan (interest group, local group, etc.) opposition to be mounted, while enabling boundary commissions to objectively defend new delineations.The VerdictShould people be involved in the process at all? While there have been attempts to completely automate the creation of districts using non-partisan computer algorithms, it has been argued ( http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1026&context=djclpp ) that with only a small handful of variables the redistricting problem becomes incredibly complex very quickly, so complex that it is "probably impossible to create a computer program that [automatically] solves these problems optimally and reliably except in very small or limited cases."Human intervention in the process is currently the best way to redistrict, and Maptitude supports the production of defensible, reproducible, and consistent plans, based on a rigorous software implementation that adheres to the standards and data required by the plan creation process.Maptitude cannot prevent intentional biases that may be introduced into plans, but does enable serious non-partisan opposition to be mounted to proposed districts, while enabling redistricting bodies to robustly defend new delineations. Simply put, a fully transparent and open process is required to produce boundaries worthy of a democratic process.

In the very beginning of WW2, the Soviets were allies of Hitler, and their tanks invaded along side of German ones. They were a ‘situational’ allie in that they had boots on the ground fighting a common cause. They didn’t honor their pledge (Pottsdam?) in putting/allowing Democracy in the 13 countries that Russia occupied during the War, and their Stalinist actions there were obvious early on. Further, although Russia was among the ‘allies,’ they did not lift one finger to help China, nor help the U.S. in the defeat of Japan. They were quick to be present regarding air support against the U.S. in North Korea, as they had designs on that penninsula as well if the opportunity arose.It was creeping Stalinism, which China supports to this day, and Russia gives a nod to, that was the concerns of an ignorantly led MacCarthy period. One thing about fear mongering is that it is most successful when the ‘enemy’ is ill-defined, such that the audience is left to imagine… what ever. THAT was the McCarthy era, and to speak against this ‘boogyman’ would be grounds for being a sympathizer. You’d think we are smarter now…It’s actually worse. YOU, if a U.S. citizen, have your e-mails, your e-mail boxes, your phone calls, and your views on websites are spied upon, and back room opinions made, such that your freedoms are actually illusionary.I for example, I am on a FBI-HomeLand Security watch-list such that every time I come back into the U.S. I’m dragged aside and questioned as to ‘who did talk to;, who do you work for? And anyone unfortunately enough to raise their hand as travelling with me will be asked years later (when they come back in the U.S.) … So how do you know Cary McDonald?” Mail to me (in California) frequently tracks to the East Coast first, and arrives here about 2–3 weeks late, and the envelopes opened, and not even resealed, they just tuck the flaps back in. Letters of complaint over the past 4–years just get form letter responses that state (with Chapter and Verse) that they really don’t have to tell me. (They have quietly told me that anywhere in the U.S. within 100 miles of a border, the HomeLand Security laws allow them to take me, and hold me without charge for as long as they see fit.Have I ever done ANYTHING to deserve such treatment? No… nothing, other than be a former employee of a DOD, DOE site that designs and tests nuclear weapons (LLNL). Is that really the reason? Who the F**k knows; they won’t tell me. I have been told that the more cages I rattle in the Government about it, the more lists I’ll be put on.The McCarthy era has nothing on Today’s ‘HomeLand Security’! liThe very same crappola that went on during the McCarthy trials go on today, only in secret, in large buildings in Utah, and medium buildings in Oakland California.

People who are both deaf and blind can experience extreme social and informational isolation due to their inability to converse easily with others. To communicate, many of these individuals employ a tactile version of fingerspelling and/or sign language, gesture systems representing letters or words, respectively. These methods are far from ideal, however, as they permit interaction only with others who are in physical proximity, knowledgeable in sign language or fingerspelling, and willing to engage in one of these "hands-on-hands" communication techniques. The problem is further exacerbated by the fatigue of the fingers, hands, and arms during prolonged conversations.Mechanical hands that fingerspell may offer a solution to this communication situation. These devices can translate messages typed at a keyboard in person-to-person communication, receive TDD (Telecommunication Devices for the Deaf) telephone calls, and gain access to local and remote computers and the information they contain.Introduction:Communication is such a natural and integral part of one's daily activities that it is taken for granted. Today instantaneous international communication is an affordable reality. For example, it is not uncommon for a person with access to the Information Superhighway (Internet) to retrieve information and post messages from/to a dozen different countries during a single on-line session. Cellular telephones and telephones in airplanes are the latest advances in mobile communication technology. These systems, which permit communication with anyone, at any time, and from any location, suggest that being without communication is unnatural and personally limiting. Yet there are many people for whom interpersonal isolation is a way of life. These are the estimated fifteen thousand deaf-blind men, women, and children in this country who cannot even communicate with another person on the opposite side of the same room, let alone with someone on the other side of the world.Usher's Syndrome:The majority of adults who live with the dual sensory loss of deafness and blindness have a disease called Usher's syndrome. It manifests itself as deafness at birth, followed by a gradual loss of vision commencing in the late teens or early twenties. Although Usher's syndrome accounts for 15 percent of congenital deafness, it is usually not diagnosed until the onset of the visual impairment, or even later. Unaware that special education preparatory to visual loss may be in order, these children are usually enrolled in programs for the deaf where they learn fingerspelling and sign language (and/or lip reading and speech) in addition to reading print. Because they are identified as deaf, Braille skills are not taught.When loss of vision is superimposed on deafness (as happens with Usher's syndrome), a major channel of receptive communication is lost, usually resulting in an enormous social and informational void.Alternate methods of communication:Braille is a potential tool for relieving some of this isolation. In addition to providing a system for reading, a mechanical representation of braille has been incorporated in electronic aids such as the Telebraille (a TDD with a 20-character mechanical braille display), to enable deaf-blind individuals to receive information in both face-to-face and remote communication situations. Learning Braille as an adult, however, is difficult. The very act of learning to read Braille may be considered a final admission of blindness.Many deaf people use sign language which incorporates more global movements and configurations of the hands and arms, as well as facial expressions, to represent words and phrases. They supplement sign language with "fingerspelling", a gesture system in which there is a specific hand and finger orientation for each letter of the alphabet, to communicate words for which there is no signed equivalent (such as proper names).Tactile fingerspelling and sign language:A common communication technique used with and among deaf-blind people is simply a hands-on version of fingerspelling and/or sign language. Instead of receiving communication visually as deaf people do, the deaf-blind person's hand (or hands) remain in contact with the hand (or hands) of the person who is fingerspelling or signing. The full richness of the motions present in sign language can not be conveyed in the tactile mode required by a deaf- blind individual. Instead, each word of a message is typically spelled out, one letter at a time with the fingerspelling technique. (Although many Usher's Syndrome patients can speak intelligibly or use sign language, others use fingerspelling for expressive communication as well.)While such tactile reception works fairly well for many deaf-blind people, it does have significant drawbacks. Since very few people are skilled in these manual communication techniques, there are very few people with whom to "talk". The need for interpreters poses still other problems: locating, procuring, and paying for the interpreter service. A problem unique to deaf- blind individuals is that many interpreters are accustomed to being "read" visually by deaf clients and may not be comfortable with the physical restrictions involved in signing while another person's hands are touching theirs. In addition, the rapid fatigue resulting from these tactile methods often requires two interpreters so that a break may be taken from continuous fingerspelling or signing . The need for an interpreter may also intrude on the deaf-blind individual's privacy and place him/her in an extremely dependent situation due to the complete reliance on an interpreter for any communication.Method: The first robotic fingerspelling handIn an attempt to alleviate these problems, the SouthWest Research Institute (SWRI) in San Antonio, conceived and developed a mechanical fingerspelling hand in 1977 [1]. This early device demonstrated the feasibility of transmitting linguistic information to deaf-blind people by typing messages on a keyboard connected through electrical logic circuitry to the mechanical hand. The hand responded by forming the corresponding letters of the one- hand manual alphabet. To receive the information, the deaf-blind user placed his/her hand over the mechanical one to feel the finger positions, just as he/she would with a human fingerspelling interpreter. This system finally enabled deaf-blind people to receive communications from more than a few select individuals; anyone who could use a keyboard could express themself to the deaf-blind person through the mechanical fingerspelling hand.Result: The first robotic fingerspelling handWhile the SWRI system demonstrated the concept's feasibility, it had many technical shortcomings: not all of the letters could be properly formed, it operated slower than a human interpreter, and the fluidity of motion which seemed to greatly enhance the intelligibility of receptive tactile fingerspelling was lacking. In addition, any changes in timing or how the hand formed the letters had to be achieved through mechanical alterations of the hardware. This limited the device's flexibility as a research tool.In 1985, the Rehabilitation Engineering Center of The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Foundation sponsored a class project conducted by four graduate students in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University to design and fabricate an improved state-of-the-art fingerspelling hand [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Its major goal was to develop a system with improved timing and easily modifiable finger positions. These qualities were realized in a new robotic fingerspelling hand named "Dexter."Dexter looked like a mechanical version of a rather large human hand projecting vertically out of a box. The four machined aluminum fingers and a thumb were joined together at its palm. All digits operated independently of each other and had a range of motion comparable to human fingers. The thumb was jointed so as to allow it to both sweep across the palm as well as move in a plane perpendicular to it. A pneumatic rotary actuator allowed the palm to pivot in a rotary fashion around a vertical steel rod much the way a human hand can pivot from the wrist - except that a full 180 degrees could be achieved by Dexter.All Dexter's finger and thumb motions were actuated by drive cables. Pneumatic cylinders pulled these cables which flexed the individual fingers and thumb, while spring-driven return cables extended the fingers. The cylinders, in turn, were activated by air pressure controlled by electrically operated valves. These valves were controlled by a microcomputer system. The actuating equipment and valves were housed in two separate assemblies below the hand.Dexter's computer hardware:The original student design was based on an Intel 8085 STD-bus "target system" used in ME218 (Smart Product Design Course) at Stanford. It consisted of the 8085 microcomputer, Forth programming language, memory, and counter/timer support. The timer generated the signals that determined the rate of hand motion and how long each finger position was to be held. The additional circuitry needed to control Dexter was fabricated on an STD card which plugged into the target system card cage. A single external 12 volt power supply activated the 22 valves under computer control. Digital output port latches received data from the CPU, while Darlington power transistors provided sufficient current to activate the electrically controlled valves. Letters to be displayed on the hand were entered on an IBM-PC computer's keyboard which was connected by a serial link to the target hardware.Dexter's hardware was subsequently revised at the Rehabilitation Research and Development Center (RR&D) to consist of a Z80 microprocessor card, two medium-power driver cards, and a high-current DC power supply all housed in an STD bus card cage. The CPU card itself contained counter-timers, memory, and serial interfaces. Commercial medium-power DC driver cards replaced the student-built wire-wrapped version and the power supply for operating the pneumatic valves was included within the STD chassis. An Epson HX-20 laptop computer's keyboard and display were employed to communicate user messages over a serial link to the self-contained target system.Dexter's software:The Forth programming language was chosen because: 1) its design cycle is approximately eight times shorter than assembly language, 2) it is an interactive and compact high-level language that can employ assembly language for critical timing and interrupt service routines, 3) it uses a standard host computer connected by a serial port to the target hardware for development, and 4) the application program can be stored in non-volatile memory after it is fully tested.The student-designed Forth software was substantially updated by RR&D to 1) execute from non-volatile memory, 2) accommodate menu-driven alteration of critical parameters such as timing variables, 3) allow new characters typed on the keyboard to be accepted while previous ones were being fingerspelled, and 4) incorporate both modem and serial input of characters.Dexter's operation:The microcomputer and its associated software controlled the opening and closing of the bank of valves which directed air pressure to specific pneumatic cylinders which pulled on the drive cables which were the "tendons" of the fingers. As a message was typed on a keyboard, each letter's ASCII value was used by the software as a pointer into an array of stored valve control values. The states (open or closed) of all 22 valves were specified by three bytes. Two to six valve operations, each separated by a programmed pause, were needed to specify the finger movements corresponding to a single letter. The hand could produce approximately two letters per second, each starting from and returning to a partially flexed neutral position.An additional bit in the valve control byte triad was used by the software to determine whether the current finger position was an intermediate or final letter position. Different programmed pause times were associated with each of these two situations.Although the mechanical hand could not exactly mimic the human hand in fingerspelling all the letters (such as the special wrist and arm motions required in J and Z), the fact that Dexter always produced the same motions for a given letter was an important factor influencing its intelligibility. The inter-letter neutral position was another unnatural feature of the design that did not accurately reflect human fingerspelling and limited the speed of letter presentation. Despite these shortcomings, users of Dexter had little difficulty in accommodating to it.Result: Testing DexterDeaf-blind clients of Lions Blind Center (Oakland, CA) served as subjects for the initial testing of Dexter. They were able to identify most of the letters presented by the robotic hand without any instructions, and in less than an hour were correctly interpreting sentences. Equally important was their positive emotional reaction to the hand. They seemed to really enjoy using it and seemed to be intrigued by its novelty. There were no negative comments made concerning its mechanical nature or any other aspect of the system.Method: Dexter-IIDexter-II was built by a second Stanford student team in 1988 as a second- generation computer-operated electro-mechanical fingerspelling hand [8, 9]. This device, like its predecessor, translated incoming serial ASCII (a computer code representing the letters and numbers) text into movements of a mechanical hand. Dexter-II's finger movements were felt by the deaf-blind user and interpreted as the fingerspelling equivalents of the letters that comprise a message.Dexter-II was approximately one-tenth the volume of the original Dexter mechanical system. It was designed by three Stanford graduate mechanical engineering students and employed DC servo motors to pull the drive cables of a redesigned hand, thereby eliminating the need for a supply of compressed gas. A speed of approximately four letters per second, double that of the original design, could be achieved with the improved design.Mechanically, the hand (a right hand the size of a 10 year old) was oriented vertically on top of a enclosure housing the motors. Each finger could flex independently. In addition, the first finger could move away from the other three fingers in the plane of the hand (abduction). The thumb could move out of the plane of the palm (opposition). Finally, the wrist could flex. Each hand motion was driven by its own servo motor connected to a pulley. Wire cables anchored at the hand's fingertips and wound around pulleys served as the finger's "tendons". As the motor shafts were powered, they turned the pulleys, pulling the cables, to flex the fingers. Torsion springs at the "knuckles" separating the Delrin finger segments provided the force to straighten the fingers when the motors released tension on the cables.Dexter-II's computer used the STD-bus enclosure, Z80 microprocessor card, and Epson HX-20 computer from Dexter. Two commercial counter timer cards replaced the medium-power driver cards and were used to produce the pulse- width modulated waveforms required to control the DC servo motors. In operation, a message was typed on a keyboard (the Epson HX-20) by an able- bodied person. Each letter's ASCII value was used by Dexter-II's computer software to access a memory array of stored control values. This data stream programmed the pulse-width modulation chips to operate the eight servos and flex the fingers. The resulting coordinated finger movements and hand positions were felt by the deaf-blind communicator and interpreted as letters of a message.