Forecasting elections with agent-based modeling: Two live experiments.

Election forecasting has been traditionally dominated by subjective surveys and polls or methods centered upon them. We have developed a novel platform for forecasting elections based on agent-based modeling (ABM), which is entirely independent from surveys and polls. The platform uses statistical results from objective data along with simulation models to capture how voters have voted in past elections and how they are likely to vote in an upcoming election. We screen for models that can reproduce results that are very close to the actual results of historical elections and then deploy these selected models to forecast an upcoming election with simulations by combining extrapolated data from historical demographic record and more updated data on economic growth, employment, shock events, and other factors. Here, we report the results of two recent experiments of real-time election forecasting: the 2020 general election in Taiwan and six states in the 2020 general election in the United States. Our mostly objective method using ABM may transform how elections are forecasted and studied.

The Origin(s) of Cell(s): Pre-Darwinian Evolution from FUCAs to LUCA : To Carl Woese (1928-2012), for his Conceptual Breakthrough of Cellular Evolution.

The coming of the Last Universal Cellular Ancestor (LUCA) was the singular watershed event in the making of the biotic world. If the coming of LUCA marked the crossing of the "Darwinian Threshold", then pre-LUCA evolution must have been Pre-Darwinian and at least partly non-Darwinian. But how did Pre-Darwinian evolution before LUCA actually operate? I broaden our understanding of the central mechanism of biological evolution (i.e., variation-selection-inheritance) and then extend this broadened understanding to its natural starting point: the origin(s) of the First Universal Cellular Ancestors (FUCAs) before LUCA. My hypothesis centers upon vesicles' making-and-remaking as variation and competition as selection. More specifically, I argue that vesicles' acquisition and merger, via breaking-and-repacking, proto-endocytosis, proto-endosymbiosis, and other similar processes had been a central force of both variation and selection in the pre-Darwinian epoch. These new perspectives shed important new light upon the origin of FUCAs and their subsequent evolution into LUCA.

[Development of gas chromatographic method for chiral analysis of acrylic ketone alcohol and acrylic ketone acetate].

A gas chromatographic method was developed to directly determine the enantiomers of acrylic ketone alcohol and acrylic ketone acetate. Two pairs of enantiomers were nearly baseline-separated by using Model HP-5890 Gas Chromatograph with flame ionization detector and WCOT CD-Chiral-DEX CB (30 m x 0.25 mm i.d.) column. The optimum conditions were the split ratio of 30:1 for the sample injected, the flow rates of 3.7 mL/min for the carrier gas (nitrogen), 60 mL/min for the hydrogen, and 250 mL/min for the oxygen, and temperatures of 148 degrees C for the column, 230 degrees C for the injector, and 230 degrees C for the detector. The linearity and reproducibility were satisfactory. The regression coefficients were over 0.9965. The RSDs obtained were less than 1.25%. The method was further used to trace the reactants and products, and to evaluate the enzyme catalyst activity and selectivity under different conditions. The results show that the method developed is very successful.