[EM] Typo. Convenient terms.

Michael Ossipoff email9648742 at gmail.com
Wed Jun 27 09:45:28 PDT 2012


In my most recent posting, I said:

"I didn't ask to minimize the max s/p. I asked to minimize, over all of
the pairs of states, the amount by which one state's s/p differs from that
of the other."

The meaning is probably clear, but I should add "...maximum...", before the
word "amount".

So it should say:

"I didn't ask to minimize the maximum s/p. I asked to minimize, over all of
the pairs of states, the maximum amount by which the s/p of one of those
two states differs from
that of the other."

Also, p, a state's population, is really an unwieldly and impractically
large number for these purposes.

I've therefore often been speaking of Hare quotas as a measure of
population.

For the purposes of discussing Sainte-Lague/Webster, or other divisor
methods such as d'Hondt, I'd rather use "q" to stand for the quotient
resulting from division of the state's population by the final divisor, the
divisor that results in the desired number of seats.

When not discussing divisor methods, the Hare quota might be the most
convenient population measure to speak of. If I'm going to use "q" to refer
to a state's number of Hare quotas, I'll say so in advance. Otherwise, in
my usage, "q" means the result of dividing the state's population by the
final divisor, as described above. That's the number that I've previously
called the state's "cps".

So, I'll speak of "s/q" instead of s/p. And, instead of the unwieldly
"s/q_i", I'll just use "M" standing for "middle", to represent the ideal
s/q value for all of the states.

I don't know if there will be any more discussion about this, but, if there
is, I wanted to say what terms I'd use. Anyway,even if there isn't, I like
clarifying these things.

Mike Ossipoff
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