Corporate democracy

I doubt he really cares, but I wonder what Justice Kennedy thinks about his reason for voting to allow unlimited corporate giving for political candidates:

“With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in January. “This transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.”

Amazingly, this is what’s happened (bold added):

Business groups, unions and interest groups had spent $266 million as of Tuesday, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, including at least $128 million by groups that are not required to publicly disclose their donors. Some have said outside spending by conservative groups alone could reach $400 million this year.

Yup, good call there Anthony. How could this happen?

U.S. Senate Republicans dealt a blow to President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats on Thursday by again blocking a bill to require public disclosure of who pays for political campaign advertising.

On a party-line vote of 59-39, short of the needed 60, Democrats failed to end a procedural roadblock against the measure, likely killing it for the year.

Drafted with the support of Obama, the bill was designed to blunt the impact of a divided U.S. Supreme Court ruling in January that overturned state and federal limits on independent expenditures by corporations to support or oppose candidates.

The bill would require corporate — as well as union and advocacy group leaders — to disclose their names in campaign ads rather than allow front groups to take responsibility.

So, Republicans have been the main beneficiary of this ruling and for some reason they voted against making disclosure mandatory. I don’t see how Kennedy could have seen that coming.

Bees should be travelling salesmen

It seems that bees can solve the travelling salesman problem:

The team used computer controlled artificial flowers to test whether bees would follow a route defined by the order in which they discovered the flowers or if they would find the shortest route. After exploring the location of the flowers, bees quickly learned to fly the shortest route.

Of course they don’t know that this is an NP-complete, so maybe that’s why they can solve it.

The paper gives a few more details:

However, when tested in configurations where the discovery order sequence was much longer than the optimal route (22% longer in configuration 3, 51% longer in configuration 4), they drastically reduced their use of the discovery order sequence. This abandonment of the discovery order route coincided with a tendency to develop more optimal solutions, thereby using shortest possible routes in about 40% of their foraging bouts in configurations 3 and 4 (table 1). Overall, 80% of the bees adopted an optimal sequence as their primary route in the final array by turning either clockwise or counterclockwise (configuration 4; fig. 3). Therefore, bee foraging sequences do not simply reflect the order in which patches were initially encountered but clearly result from sequential readjustments of preexisting routes after the incorporation of new patches.

It makes sense to have more than one route, because things actually change in nature and so it makes sense to try variations of the best path.

I also learned that bees favor the color blue.