KARACHI: Not just one or two but four professors of the University of Essex (UK) gave guest lectures at the Hamdard University’s (HU) main campus on Wednesday morning, after which the senior academics of the two institutions discussed ways and means to further enhance cooperation between them.

In her presentation, Prof Laura Sudulich pointed out that about half the world’s population would have voted in elections by the end of this year. She said that as opposed to the past practice of discussing policies and plans during election campaigns, candidates as well as their voters are more fixated nowadays on factors that were once deemed less important.

“Things like the image of a candidate and his/ her rhetoric matter a lot nowadays, instead of manifestos and plans of action. However, as voters, we should never take anything on face value as we are supposed to ascertain carefully which of the candidates is worthy of our votes,” she said.

Turning to the US presidential election, Prof Sudulich pointed out that in 2016 Donald Trump had to work hard to earn the right to become the Republican candidate as several well-known politicians were competing against him in the primaries. “But this year, there was not much competition and he became his party’s candidate rather easily. There was not a lot of public interest in the primaries, as a result.”

Prof Simon Weidenholzer spoke at length about ways in which coordination problems may be solved by using game theory. He said making sense of measurements in a country where metric system is used, as well as, the imperial system, or making sense of railway schedules in a country where there are several time zones, becomes extremely difficult at times. He, however, explained at length how game theory could be applied to solve all such problems.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024