27 Oct
2008
27 Oct
'08
10:11 p.m.
On Mon, 27 Oct 2008, Janis Voigtlaender wrote:
Lennart Augustsson wrote:
I can't remember the method being called anything. It was just what we were being taught. With the obvious explanation that .5 is right in the middle so always going one way would introduce a bias. This was circa 1969.
Well, I wasn't serious about the "political" explanation.
And yes, the "avoiding bias" explanation makes sense, but not the "this way of rounding makes repeated rounding safe" explanation.
In measured data the .5-case should be very rare - a "null set"? However I assume that .5 happens more often in practice - because of prior rounding, which was shown to be bad practice in this thread. :-)