Projects are 5-page papers (or commensurate work in another form) that you can choose as an alternative to Midterm 2. They are due Friday April 27 at the latest– this is a hard deadline.
Project ideas:
- Impossibility theorems: read about Arrow’s theorem in the book, read his original paper, and discuss.
- Benford’s Law: how an observation about digit frequencies helps detect vote fraud and embezzlement.
- Weird shapes and district histories: choose two funny-looking districts and research how they got their shape. At least one should have a legal history under the Voting Rights Act.
- GIS project: choose two states and learn to compute several of the popular shape metrics with GIS (I have a tutorial to help you learn to do this). Discuss what you learn by applying the shape metrics to the districts from your two states.
- Or choose your own!
If you choose a project, you must make a 5-minute appointment to come discuss it with me in office hours by Thursday April 5 at the latest. (We can brainstorm a topic together if you are unsure.)
If you choose to take Midterm 2 instead, it will be given out on Wednesday April 4 in class as a take-home and due on Friday April 6. It’s a closed-book, closed-notes exam and you should budget two hours to complete it. The exam will cover Chapters 6-10 as they have been covered in class.