Winging it today on voting qr. I have two data sources, a spreadsheet with census data and congressional apportionments (with voter power computed) at http://www.cs.umb.edu/~eb/qrbook/Voting/census.xls, the other an article about proportional representation in Quebec at http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Canada+voting+system+potential+distort+electoral+outcomes+expert+says/7202885/story.html. There’s a related editorial here: http://www.montrealgazette.com/opinion/editorials/Editorial+Proportional+representation+time+talk/7219354/story.html
Announced next Tuesday’s exam.
Answered a short “tell me again about the 1+ trick” question.
Worked with the census spreadsheet. The only actual calculation we made was the expected number of house seats:
((state pop)/(US pop)) * 435
I did this with a cell reference for the state population, but not for the other two numbers, since I didn’t want to deal with the $ that tells Excel not to increment a pointer.
I did a general riff on working with software – experiment when version of Excel changes, use Help or google, RIGHT CLICK.
Talked about the fact that assigning integral numbers of seats to fractional proportions of the population was tricky.
None of this will be on the exam.
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