The concept of electoral competition plays a central role in many subfields of political science, but no consensus exists on how to measure it. One key challenge is how to conceptualize and measure electoral competitiveness at the district level across alternative electoral systems. Recent efforts to meet this challenge have introduced general measures of competitiveness which rest on explicit calculations about how votes translate into seats, but also implicit assumptions about how effort maps into votes (and how costly effort is). We investigate how assumptions about the effort-to-votes mapping affect the units in which competitiveness is best measured, arguing in favor of vote-share-denominated measures and against vote-share-per-seat measures. Whether elections under multimember proportional representation systems are judged more or less competitive than single-member plurality or runoff elections depends directly on the units in which competitiveness is assessed (and hence on assumptions about how effort maps into votes).

A handful of recent studies have investigated the causal effect of incumbency on dynasty formation in candidate-centered electoral contexts. We use candidate-level data and a regression discontinuity design to estimate the incumbency advantage and its relation to dynasty formation in the party-centered, closed-list, proportional-representation setting of Norway. The results indicate that the incumbency advantage exists even in this party-centered environment; however, in contrast to recent findings for the United States and the Philippines, we find no evidence that incumbency is important to the formation of dynasties. This finding underscores the need for more research into the role of internal party organizational networks in the perpetuation of political dynasties.

Digital signal processing is one of many valuable tools for suppressing unwanted signals or inter-ference. Building hardware processing engines seems to be the way to best implement some classes of interference suppression but is, unfortunately, expensive and time-consuming, especially if several miti-gation techniques need to be compared. Simulations can be useful, but are not a substitute for real data. CSIRO’s Australia Telescope National Facility has recently commenced a ‘software radio telescope’ project designed to fill the gap between dedicated hardware processors and pure simulation. In this approach, real telescope data are recorded coherently, then processed offline. This paper summarises the current contents of a freely available database of base band recorded data that can be used to experiment with signal processing solutions. It includes data from the following systems: single dish, multi-feed receiver; single dish with reference antenna; and an array of six 22 m antennas with and without a reference antenna. Astronomical sources such as OH masers, pulsars and continuum sources subject to interfering signals were recorded. The interfering signals include signals from the US Global Positioning System (GPS) and its Russian equivalent (GLONASS), television, microwave links, a low-Earth-orbit satellite, various other transmitters, and signals leaking from local telescope systems with fast clocks. The data are available on compact disk, allowing use in general purpose computers or as input to laboratory hardware prototypes.

Neither discrete peripheral retinal lesions nor the normal optic disk produces obvious holes in one's percept of the world because the visual brain appears to perceptually “fill in” these blind spots. Where in the visual brain or how this filling in occurs is not well understood. A prevailing hypothesis states that topographic map of visual cortex reorganizes after retinal lesions, which “sews up” the hole in the topographic map representing the deprived area of cortex (cortical scotoma) and may lead to perceptual filling in. Since the map reorganization does not typically occur unless retinotopically matched lesions are made in both eyes, we investigated the conditions in which monocular retinal lesions can induce comparable map reorganization. We found that following monocular retinal lesions, deprived neurons in cat area 17 can acquire new receptive fields if the lesion occurred relatively early in life (8 weeks of age) and the lesioned cats experienced a substantial period of recovery (>3 years). Quantitative determination of the monocular and binocular response properties of reactivated units indicated that responses to the lesioned eye for such neurons were remarkably robust, and that the receptive-field properties for the two eyes were generally similar. Moreover, excitatory or inhibitory binocular interactions were found in the majority of experimental units when the two eyes were activated together. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that map reorganization after monocular retinal lesions require experience-dependent plasticity and may be involved in the perceptual filling in of blind spots due to retinal lesions early in life.