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User:RobLa/Burlington2009: Difference between revisions
Wrote up a brief intro
(Posting an answer that Robert mailed me weeks ago.) |
(Wrote up a brief intro) |
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The questions below will be from me, and answers will be from Robert.
Below is an interview with Robert Bristow-Johnson, conducted via email. Robert has lived in Burlington for a number of years, working in a variety of roles as an audio engineer, having written "[http://shepazu.github.io/Audio-EQ-Cookbook/audio-eq-cookbook.html The Audio-EQ Cookbook]". Back in 2009, [[Wikipedia:VahallaDSP|VahallaDSP]] had this to say about him''<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://valhalladsp.com/2009/11/05/dsp-hero-robert-bristow-johnson/|title=DSP Hero: Robert Bristow-Johnson|last=Costello|first=Sean|date=2009|website=[[wikipedia:VahallaDSP{{!}}]]|url-status=live|archive-url=|archive-date=|access-date=}}</ref>'':<blockquote>''If you program audio DSP effects, you have undoubtedly heard of Robert Bristow-Johnson. If you haven’t heard of him, get yourself a copy of his Audio-EQ Cookbook. This is a succinct little document, that provides coefficient generation formulas for pretty much any second order filter building block you would ever need: lowpass, highpass, allpass, peak EQ, notch, shelving filters, etc. Today, I am implementing these formulas for my own code, but I know I’ve implemented them in at least 3 prior DSP environments. Really good stuff.''
''A quick Google search doesn’t turn up a ton on Robert Bristow-Johnson (or RBJ, as he is often abbreviated). He worked at Eventide, Fostex, Young Chang (Kurzweil), and Wave Mechanics. RBJ has a few AES papers as well, all of which are worth reading, covering topics ranging from PSOLA pitch shifting (made famous by AutoTune) to filter design to interpolation for oversampling.''</blockquote>Robert is a longtime citizen of Burlington, and has long been troubled by the persistent drive toward [[Instant-runoff voting|Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV)]] in Burlington. In 2014, he was invited to write [https://vtdigger.org/2014/11/11/robert-bristow-johnson-ways/ "Having it Both Ways"] for the local [https://vtdigger.org/about-vtdigger-2/ "VTDigger" publication from ''The Vermont Journalism Trust''], where he pointed out a strategic mistake (or two, or maybe more) that the Republicans in Vermont made. I'm grateful for the opportunity to interview Robert via email<ref>I also had the opportunity to have a "30 minute" conversation with Robert that became an enjoyable two hours for both of us, but that part was off-the-record.</ref>:
==== Question #1: introduction ====▼
'''Q: (Rob) - It's my understanding that you were living in Burlington back in 2009, when this election took place. Is that correct? If so, can you tell me what it was like?'''▼
▲'''Q: (
'''A: (Robert)''' - My family and I moved to Burlington in 2000 and it was always my permanent address and voting address since 2000. I've voted in nearly every election there in the 21st century and have served as an election official in Ward 7 for three years. Ward 7 is where Bernie and Jane Sanders live. There's a photo of Bernie voting in Super Tuesday 2016 and me standing in the room that someone snapped offa the TV screen. I've done some other activism affecting Burlington elections in that I drew the map that was eventually adopted in defining Burlington's 8 wards.
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When I found out (from the news) that Andy was the pairwise champion, I obtained the same ballot data myself from the city clerk's office and wrote my own computer program to scan the ballot rankings and tally the election using Condorcet rules and confirmed the results although my numerical results are slightly different than either Warren Smith's or Brian Olson's numerical results. But the qualitative results, who beats whom, are exactly the same. The ballots I counted were exactly consistent with those counted in the IRV tally so my subtotals agree exactly with the official round-by-round tallies of the IRV election.
'''Q: (
'''A: (Robert) ''' Well, it was because the local news reported, within a week or two, that in some sense Andy really won the election. How was that? And I knew that the only sense it could be was that Andy was the '''Condorcet winner''' (CW) and I knew that if the CW gets to the IRV final round, the CW will beat anyone there and win the IRV election. I knew who was, locally in Burlington, responsible for introducing IRV to Burlington, ''Terry Bouricius'', who is, I believe, a member of the EM Mailing List because it was he that suggested that I join it. There were dueling commentaries in the local papers between Terry and UVM Prof. Anthony Gierzynski about whether something actually screwed up in the IRV election. It wasn't until I actually got on the EM list that I figured out who Warren Smith is and that it was Warren who was in command of the technical details and was actually the fact source behind Prof. Gierzynski. I didn't see Warren's page at https://www.rangevoting.org/Burlington.html until later but somehow found out that there was raw ballot data available from the Burlington City Clerk voting website burlingtonvotes.org .
'''Q: (
'''A: (Robert) - '''
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== References and footnotes ==
<references />
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