At 10:11 AM 11/22/98 -0500, Herb wrote:
|On Sat, 21 Nov 1998 17:04:33 -0700 Jim Green <JMGreen@SISNA.COM> writes:
|>Isn't there a fancy way to say "round to the nearest five" or "ten"
|>something like "nearest decade" or is it "decile"? But what would
|>five be? Quintile????
|No.... five would be "half-decade" to avoid addition of unnecessary
|terminology.
Well, Herb, I don't think that that does it: decade, decile, etc include
the points between the ends. I want to refer to the endpoints -- like the
number next smaller (or larger) which is evenly divisible by five (or ten
or what ever).
|Herb Gottlieb from New York City
|(Where we use significant figure conventions in our physics courses.
|These never require rounding out to the nearest quintile.)
This is very nice, but suppose the collection of numbers is composed of
integers -- the idea of significant figures doesn't compute in this case?
--- as in the UK 1841 census the age recorded was the next lower age
divisible evenly by five -- this is too much of a mouthful -- I was hoping
that there was better language.