# Zoey S. Davidson

• ### Votes and Spending, Part 2: Spending through the ages

March 19, 2016

I previously found that at large democratic city council candidates who spend more money in the cycle prior to the primary generally receive a larger fraction of votes With the exception of one candidate who received a large fraction of votes though he claimed to have no expenditures. We will find similar occurrences in this analysis . Here I extend the same analysis to two additional city council election cycles for which I could easily acquire data. I find a similar pattern when particularly when standardized within year to account for campaign spending related inflation. Note, many regulatory changes occurred over the time span of the analysis.

• ### Votes and Spending: The 2015 Philadelphia Democratic Primary City Council Race

January 18, 2016

This analysis combines two data sources: campaign finance data and election results from the city commissioner. The finance data does not contain perfect infromation. The current filing system does not appear to check for consistency in spelling across filings, nor does it require all relevant data fields to be completed. Furthermore, there is no standard for keywords for certain types of expenses. For instance, expenses listed as “donations” to Ward committees may actually be in exchange for “get out the vote” work by the committees. These and other shortcomings in the filing system limit the scope of this analysis at present considerably. However, I find a nearly logarithmic relation between expenditures in the filing cycle leading up to the election and the percentage of votes won. Since there is an upper bound of 1 on the voter percentage, it is probably more accurate to call this logistic growth.

• ### Orientational Bond order parameter

January 14, 2016

Halperin and Nelson, described a theory of melting in two dimensionsB. I. Halperin and D. R. Nelson, Theory of Two-Dimensional Melting, Phys. Rev. Lett. 41, 121 (1978) PRL 41, 121 in terms of a bond orientational order parameter, $\psi_6 = \sum_m e^{6i\theta_{m}}$. As a crystal melts, defects in the crystal lattice appear. At early stages of melting, these defects stay closely assosciated with one another, but at later times and higher temperatures they become plentiful and spread throughout the lattice. The long range orientational order disappears; the lattice dissapears as the matter becomes liquid. They predict in a liquid phase, correlations in orientational (and translational) bond order decay exponentially.

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