Alan Natapoff
homepage:http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/x6577.xml
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Description

Alan Natapoff studied physics at Cornell, and as a graduate student in particle physics at Berkeley. He came to MIT as a postdoctoral fellow in biology and brain sciences and, since 1969, has been a research scientist at MIT's Center for Space Research in the Man-Vehicle Laboratory. His area of study is human nervous system performance in space, in simulations of space, and in virtual reality.

Natapoff has taught in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. To test the results of his researches into the evolution of human abstraction, and assess their potential practical impact, he developed a program for teaching mathematics to students diagnosed with learning disabilities. (Since its inception, several thousand students of arithmetic, algebra and college physics have taken part in the program.) He has served as Senior Consultant in Mathematics to the Massachusetts State College System. For several decades, Natapoff has been interested in the problems of voting power and was technical advisor to Harvard Medical School's faculty in the design of its voting system.

In 1977 he was invited to testify on the design of the Electoral College before the Senate Judiciary's subcommittee on Constitutional Rights (then chaired by Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana). In 1996, his views on the Electoral College appeared in Public Choice under the title, "A mathematical one-man one-vote rationale for Madisonian presidential voting based on maximum individual voting power." In defending the essential design of the Electoral College as necessary to the preservation of individual voting power in presidential elections, his work has been described in articles published in Discover magazine, Business Week, and The New York Times.


Lectures:

debate
flag The Electoral College Experts Debate and Audience Dialogue (Part 4)
as author at  To Keep or Not to Keep the Electoral College: MIT World Series: New Approaches to Electoral Reform,
together with: Alexander S. Belenky (moderator), Judith Best, Robert Bennett, Alexander Keyssar, Robert Hardaway, John Fortier, Akhil Amar, Vikram Amar, Paul Schumaker, Arnold I. Barnett, David Hawking,
3252 views
  debate
flag What (if Anything) Should Be Done About Improving the System of Electing a President? (Part 3)
as author at  To Keep or Not to Keep the Electoral College: MIT World Series: New Approaches to Electoral Reform,
together with: Arnold I. Barnett, David Hawking, Alexander S. Belenky,
3037 views
debate
flag The Electoral College Experts Audience Dialogue (Part 5)
as author at  To Keep or Not to Keep the Electoral College: MIT World Series: New Approaches to Electoral Reform,
together with: Arnold I. Barnett (moderator), Judith Best, Robert Hardaway, Robert Bennett, Paul Schumaker, Akhil Amar, John Fortier, Alexander S. Belenky, Vikram Amar, Alexander Keyssar,
2957 views