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Tuesday October 2, 2018 vol. CXLII no. 78
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ACADEMICS
Gerrymandering Project paper wins Common Cause award
ON CAMPUS
REBECCA HAN :: THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN
Lecturer Rick Barton (l.) addresses questions from the audience, moderated by Caitlin Quinn GS.
SINSI co-director Barton discusses communal approaches to global peace By Rebecca Han Contributor
By Isabel Ting Associate News Editor
Neuroscience professor Samuel S. Wang uses his mathematical skills and legal passions to help ensure voters choose their politicians, not the other way around. His team’s paper, “An Antidote for Gobbledygook: Organizing the Judge’s Partisan Gerrymandering Toolkit into a Two-Part Framework,” won a top prize at a gerrymandering competition last week. The paper was part of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, which analyzes individual states’ courts, polling data, and legislative data from every state, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico. Through the project’s work, Wang’s team strove to craft a legal theory that can be used by advocates across the United States to target its most gerrymandered districts. “I got very interested in applying math skills to try to fix what I thought was a problem in U.S. democracy,” said Wang, who founded the Princeton Gerrymandering Project in 2016. “We were trying to take extreme math knowledge and repackage it in a way that didn’t lose math rigors but [is] more palatable to a judge,” said Ben Williams, a legal analyst who worked on the paper with Wang.
“Gerr y mandering takes the ways that people live and vote and uses that information against people,” Williams said. He added that the gerrymanderer “weaponizes” it to enhance the power of the ruling party, with lasting implications. Williams said he’s inspired to fight for accurate democratic representation and the ability for people to exercise their voices at the ballot boxes. Suzanne Almeida, Redistricting and Representation Counsel at Common Cause, the organization that sponsored the research competition, praised the paper as a “Swiss Army knife” paper that combines different academic approaches to solve a complex national problem. There were 11 entries to the contest and five finalists. Judges for the contest included UC Irvine Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, Office of Congressional Ethics Board of Directors member Allison Hayward, Brennan Center for Justice Senior Counsel Michael Li, and Tufts University associate professor of mathematics Moon Duchin. Brian Remlinger, who worked with Wang and Williams on the paper, was not available for comment at the time of publication. Wang hopes to release the data project by the end of 2020.
sistance that we have,” this assistance is not conducted on a personal level, Barton said. On the other hand, connections through personal diplomacy in Nigeria led to the creation of a reality television show about peaceful problem solving, productively combating a national notion of violence being profitable. “People actually started to ref lect on this quality of their own society which we could not have drilled into them,” Barton said. See PEACE page 3
ON CAMPUS
Architect Shimada discusses homes shaped to environment
MARIE-ROSE SHEINERMAN :: THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN
Yo Shimada spoke on challenging the viewer’s perception of buildings.
By Marie-Rose Sheinerman Contributor
In a lecture hosted by the School of Architecture on Monday, renowned architect Yo Shimada stressed the importance of considering a project’s natural environment. He also advocated for building to match society’s needs. Many of Shimada’s own designs have been shaped by the strictness of Japan’s earthquake damage protection laws. And because
he pays close attention to the particular natural surroundings where he builds, Shimada said the houses he designs have very little in common with each other. One house built in a city will look very different from one built in the mountains. For example, Shimada designed his “House in Toyonaka” in 2015, a building whose natural light comes in only from a transparent roof, rather than from horizontal windows.
In Opinion
Today on Campus
Senior columist Ryan Born makes a case for reparations, while columnist Siyang Liu endorses name games — and spirit kitchen utensils — as effective tools for better precepts, and guest contributor Krupa Jani advocates for a more pro-science Congress. PAGE 4
7 p.m.: The women’s soccer team takes on Bucknell. Roberts Stadium
His Japanese background also has a strong inf luence on his work. Some of his projects include creating storage spaces made for Japan’s small living spaces, using, for instance, a single box to serve as a closet, a dresser, and store laundry. In his work, Shimada said he wants to challenge the way we see ordinary buildings. He designed one of his homes to look like a shed from the outside, for example. “I want to create architecture that changes its appearance depending on the point of view so that it can tend to new discoveries every day,” Shimada said. “By placing something new in a place, we are also changing how we see the landscape. For that reason it is important to think how we can improve what we see. A house should not discriminate against its surroundings. I want houses to project, to be a part of the place.” With no formal training in architecture, Shimada founded an architecture company in his mountainous hometown of Kobe after graduating from the Kyoto City University of Art in 1997.
WEATHER
IMAGE COURTESY OF THE WANG LAB
Professor Sam Wang of the neuroscience department spearheaded the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.
Former U.S. diplomat and current Wilson School lecturer Rick Barton discussed his book “Peace Works: America’s Unifying Role in a Turbulent World,” as well as the United States’ role creating sustainable peace in a book talk on Monday. Barton, the co-director of Princeton’s Scholars in the Nation’s Service Initiative, stressed the need for more community-focused diplomacy. Barton argued
that meaningful action requires being “grounded in the reality of the local people.” “If we don’t know [at least] 100 people in a place, don’t send a U.S. soldier,” he said. “That would have kept us out of about, most of the really heavy [conf licts] we’ve done recently.” Such people-focused groundwork was essential in many of the international examples he discussed, including one about Pakistan. Though the United States has given Pakistan “every form of as-
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