Hello, everyone! This is my first posting in at least seven months, so let me first re-introduce myself before briefly reviewing some EM publications that I have not yet seen noted on this list.
RE-INTRO. I am a (Ph.D.) mathematician and now working applied statistician. I started with research in logic and networks, and held academic posts, then twenty years ago turned to applied math and stat. I have since worked in energy conservation engineering, then in military-related operations research, and for the past ten years in environmental conservation and management. Just over a year ago, our office prepared to relocate, so I found it useful to get rid of boxes of accumulated old papers, including math and other journals. On a would-be final read of some of these - notably of an old Balinski-Young paper on fair apportionment and of a more recent paper by Don Saari on electoral preference paradoxes - I got hooked on election methods and their reform. My interest has been stoked also by recent and continuing involvement in actions for local civic reform and environmental preservation in our excessively misgoverned city of Long Beach, CA. So, about a year ago I joined this EM list, but about seven months ago was summarily dropped. (The EM-list control software claimed that my email program was �rejecting' too many EM-posts, but I don't know what was actually happening. In truth, I would still prefer to be able to post out to the list with my inbox being protected from individual EM-list posts - preferably by the EM-list control software rather than my own imperfect inbound mail filter. If anyone knows what method, if any, actually works for arranging this, please let me know.) Anyhow, during the last seven months I've had little time to contribute to the list, and have been content to read Yahoo-archived posts. Thanks are due to all of you (especially indefatigable Forest and ever-vigilant Bart) for the ideas which have made this reading worthwhile. Just lately I've rejoined the list (for which I thank the Moderator), in hopes of being able to contribute occasionally. In particular, I hope soon to post summary conclusions which I have gleaned from list discussions. Some of these conclusions confirm my prior beliefs, but others do not. BRIEF REVIEW OF SOME EM-PUBLICATIONS. During the year 2000, various pubs written by (and often for) applied mathematicians explored the topic of election methods. Perhaps the best, albeit imperfect, was noted prominently on this list: Dana Mackenzie's Discovery Mag article. In addition, however, SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) presented other pubs which I haven't seen noted here. These were, at first blush, quite apropos, as Saari's key article cited above had also a few years earlier been published by SIAM, namely, in the mid 1990s in SIAM Review. As its first title in a projected new series in �discrete math', during year 2000 SIAM put out a monograph, by five Roman academics, under the title �Evaluation and Optimization of Electoral Systems'. For brevity, I'll cite this as IJ - �the Italian Job'. IJ usefully described various of the European electoral systems, and it discussed a broad range of various interesting and relevant EM topics, e.g. EM axioms, fair representation methods, and criteria for drawing district lines. However, each of the topics was unimpressively treated: some major approaches were scarcely noted, important defects of some noted approaches were not discussed, and insightful critiques and suggestions were few. Despite a plethora of formalism, IJ used many imprecise or misleading terms which, as I and others have noted here, needlessly plague typical EM terminology and reinforce rather than correct for deficient taxonomy. During fall 2000 (I believe in Oct. or Nov. or both), SIAM News also ran several EM-focused articles. These articles were poorly edited: in particular, they lacked basic cross-referrals to relevant pubs - even to SIAM's, including SIAM News itself! For instance, one article, about Italian electoral politics, never mentioned IJ - despite the very same issue of SIAM News running a separate ad for IJ! Another of the articles, by Mackenzie, featured Saari's work - whose main findings had first been presented in the above-cited SIAM Review paper - but Mackenzie did not cite this paper! Moreover, despite being targeted at what might be assumed a technically more advanced readership, this article of Mackenzie's was actually not as rationally organized (nor as generally relevant) as his Discovery Mag article. As a mathematician I was quite disappointed by all these publications. Their timing was opportunistic (for USA elections) but they lacked basic and readily expressed mathematical insights into our problems of finding and confirming good, improved and optimal election methods. A mathematician who is seriously attacking a given problem will set great store on defining (with rationale) just what are the problem's key variables (or dimensions), and using these to describe clearly what a solution requires. [This requirement will often take one of three forms: solve for a given variable, find a case where the variable is constrained within given limits, or find a case which optimizes (maximizes) the variable.] Key variables are also needed in order to define and work with a logical taxonomy of problem cases. Unfortunately, none of these various pubs thus addressed our EM problems, or even correctly described them. Joe Weinstein Bixby Knolls, Long Beach CA USA _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp
