[EM] Interesting use of Borda count

[Forest Simmons]

On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, Steve Barney wrote:

> 
> There are quite a few liberal arts math textbooks which include chapters on
> Arrow's Theorem and alternative voting methods, weighted voting and
> proportional representation. For example, the first 4 chapters, which make up
> the first section of Tannenbaum and Arnold's _Excursions in Modern
> Mathematics_, are on those topics.
> 
>   Excursions in Modern Mathematics
>   Fourth Edition 
>   by Peter Tannenbaum and Robert Arnold
>   California State University, Fresno 
>   http://cwx.prenhall.com/bookbind/pubbooks/tannenbaum/
> 
> 
> This seems to be quite a popular textbook, and there are many similar ones. It
> is used for the math 102 course at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh, for
> instance, and some high schools use it too.

I tried to get Portland Community College (Portland, Oregon, where I
teach) to adopt this text or a similar one for the liberal arts math
course.  Instead they opted for teaching standard topics from algebra to
the liberal arts students. 

Texts with voting methods in them are never used outside liberal arts
courses at the undergraduate college level, so most students in most
majors never have a chance of seeing them. 

When the college doesn't even adopt these texts for liberal arts math,
then nobody in the whole college gets any exposure. 

Forest