Auto norm

Autonorms, in pub wan discourse, are taken to mean the preferences and priorities of individuals. They identify "measurable" parameters (norms) as desirable or otherwise, and establish priorities between such parameters. An understanding of one's personal priorities (values, if you will) is as important as understanding one's preferences. This is because maximizing or minimizing parameters to reflect one's preferences may reveal "tradeoffs" between parameters.

There is also a constant need to negotiate tradeoffs between one's own autonorms and the "ambient" set of ortho norm's, or institutionally-imposed constraints on possible (actually, permissible) market baskets, or system configurations. Autonorms express what is preferred, orthonorms what is permitted, and Iron (natural) Laws what is possible. Inclusion of all three types of constraints in mathematical modeling exercises addresses the reality of constraints, while facilitating an individual's pursuit of living on eir own terms.

One goal of pubwan is the mass storage and tabulation of autonorms. This is intended as a means to use normset encoding schemata (such as maxhi schema and swar schema) to express personal values (which is to say, opinions). The present author (lorraine lee) has prepared a sample normset which expresses some of her own subjective norms (autonorms).

An auto-norm set can also function as a template for database queries. In the maxhi schema, the selection set represents the Pareto "nondominated set" implicit in the individual's designation of parameters to be maximized, minimized or ignored. The priority (high or low) component of the maxhi schema species the "location" (coordinates) within the nondominated set most representative of the normset. A maxhi query would ideally sort the selection set by distance of parameter data points from the "priority point." An algorithm for doing this with very small (memory resident) data sets is illustrated at http://geocities.com/n8chz/dom.txt.

An advanced application might be the design (mathematical modeling) of virtual (intended) communities around the autonorms of individual participants in such a project. The spatial design of such virtual spaces is the purpose for which swar schema was devised.