The Senseless Census: A Solution By Jon N. Hall May 26, 2010 The original purpose of the census was apportionment -- the drawing of congressional districts so that each would contain roughly the same number of Americans. To do this, the census must count heads and get their addresses. This has not been a mystery since the advent of computers. Computers are used in statistical sampling. Jordan Ellenberg, a professor of mathematics at UW-Madison, made an impassioned plea for using sampling in the census on May 1 in The Washington Post . It was titled: “The census will be wrong. We could fix it.” But in Department of Commerce v. United States House of Representatives (1999), the Supreme Court ruled against the use of sampling in the census. Justice O’Connor delivered the Court’s opinion : “The District Court below examined the plain text and legislative history of the [Census] Act and concluded that the proposed use of statistical sampling to determine population for ...
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So You Think You Understand Language By Jon N. Hall The mathematician John von Neumann once said: “Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.” The same sort of thing might also be said about language -- you don't understand language, you just get used to it. But with language, it may be even more the case than with mathematics. That’s because folks often have to invert the true meanings of words in order to grasp what they’re hearing, i.e. what’s intended. When one thinks about it for a bit, language itself can seem rather mystifying -- better to just use it, right? Not if one is trying to be exact. It is for the sake of exactness and precision that we create “usage rules.” But we Anglophones need better usage rules for some of the most common words in English: conjunctions. Conjunctions can create ambiguity , and in some arenas of contemporary life, like law, ambiguity can’t be tolerated. Sad to say, but w...
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