Posts tagged…Data
World Opera season programs
Wed, Mar 31 2010
For opera devotees, fans, 'tragics' … etc., but mainly for myself, I've developed a synthetic RSS feed of news about Season events, tickets and subscriptions for Opera houses around the world that you can find near the bottom of this page.
I've used Yahoo Pipes and Yahoo's YQL—an SQL-type query language for Yahoo search databases—to search for new season announcements from the world's opera…
Read more…A call for evidence-based policy
Thu, Mar 18 2010Excellent!
"Many social, educational and economic policies are the modern equivalent of Dr Spock’s advice that babies should sleep face down: well-meaning, authoritative – and wrong. No doubt it would be awkward to see the wisdom of experts punctured and the pet policies of politicians discredited on a regular basis. But if politicians really cared about those they represent, they would insist on…
Offensive teenagers
Thu, Mar 18 2010
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics more than 1 in 12 teenage males commits an offense that comes to police notice.
What explains tariff levels?
Fri, Dec 04 2009It's not economic policy (or even necessity) as much as the political economy that drives trade policies.
"The relationship between the overall tariff policy (considering all product groups together) and the socio-economic variables is even more diffuse, and no strong relationship emerges between tariff policy clusters and the socio-economic context. Consequently, we can conclude that trade…
Airstrip One lands
Thu, Nov 19 2009Of course, the name of this madness is pure NewSpeak:
"The new rules, known as the Intercept Modernisation Programme, will not only force communications companies to keep their records for longer, but to expand the type of data they keep to include details of every website their customers visit, effectively registering every online click. While public authorities will not be able to view the…
Let’s look at the data
Fri, Oct 30 2009
This is a very fine summary of the case that nothing very unusual is happening to the global climate and of the evidence—direct data, not proxies—that the IPCC projections are simply wrong about the key factor they say will result in alarming climate change (by the way that's not CO2)
Lindzen has a record that calls for attention. He has researched and taught atmospheric and climate science for…
Century trends in Victorian temperatures
Mon, Aug 17 2009
There are a dozen or so rural Victorian weather stations, of the 255 listed as reporting maximum temperature data to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, that have records stretching back to years before 1900. I have found them by skimming through the listings on this page at the BOM website. It has a helpful graphic that dynamically displays the record length.
I thought it might be interesting…
The ABS explains “trend estimates”
Fri, Jul 31 2009I've argued several times that the broadcast media has misrepresented quarterly unemployment by focusing on (the scarier of either) the raw or seasonally-adjusted data. Although there's a great deal to be said for just eyballing a trend when you have a long time-series that accurately samples an 'atomic' phenomenon, trends in a series with statistically simple ('normally distributed')…
Market and PPP measures of GDP
Tue, Jul 14 2009
In comments on the previous post, Ian Castles AO, the former Australian Statistician, notes that the World Bank and IMF create confusion in their reports by mixed use of market-exchange-rate (MER) and purchasing-power-parity (PPP) bases for estimating output and growth. Simply, using market exchange rates to compare the value of output among countries over-estimates the size of developed…
Modeling a Doha agreement on agriculture
Tue, Jul 07 2009
To conclude my series of posts on modeling a critical mass agreement on agriculture, I would like to show you how I set up UNCTAD's Agricultural Trade Policy Simulation Model (ATPSM) to project the economic impacts of an agreement to liberalize agricultural trade based on WTO's December, 2008, draft 'modalities'. In my previous post, I compared the results of this simulation with the results of…
How bad is global deforestation?
Sun, Jul 05 2009
The short answer: if the data is reliable (it may not be) annual forest 'loss'—mostly conversion of land to agriculture—is small: a fifth of one percent and slowing. Does this small loss of forest add to net CO2 emissions, or reduce them, or make no difference? It's not clear.
In this post I take a look at the FAO data on global deforestation rates, just to get a feeling for the size of the…
Budget transparency turns murky
Thu, May 28 2009So much for the Government's "Operation Sunshine" that was supposed to make budget program expenditure more transparent and accountable.
On the biggest single program item, Defense—a staggering 2.3% of GDP or $27 billion dollars next year alone—it seems to be a case of re-negging and obscurity.
"As the first budget after a new Defence White Paper, there is a glaring absence of substantive…