Posts tagged…Data
U.S. and Global Temperatures: a correction
Fri, May 22 2009
Dr Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA and a principal author of the Real Climate weblog, has emailed me to point out an error (mine) in my review of Ian Plimer's Heaven + Earth.
I said that I had learned from Ian Plimer that NASA had reversed it's claim that the ten years following 1995 were the hottest ten years of the century when Steven McIntyre showed that the record belonged to 1934.…
Read more…Scary pictures of a deep recession
Tue, May 19 2009
From the Federal Reserve of Minneapolis, these charts comparing output and employment trends in this recession compared with all post-war recessions in the United States. No sign of bottom here.
The charts are interactive. You can pick your own poison, if you follow the link.
Two strikes from recession, not three
Sat, May 16 2009
Lindsay Tanner's claim reads like part of a narrative that has been prepared by the Rudd government.
"The challenge for the government now is that whereas Hawke and Keating had ’86 terms of trade, ’87 stock market crash, ’90 recession, we’ve had all three, in effect, within the space of about a year and all feeding off each other in various kind of negative synergy ways." Extract from Business…
More transparency in the Federal budget
Fri, May 08 2009The budget to be introduced next Tuesday will be the first to fully implement the recommendations of the (former Senator Andrew) Murray Review on cutting gobbledygook and sloppiness out of budget estimates and on enforcing more rigorous reporting and audit of government use of our money.
All of this is a good thing. It is being managed by Lindsay Tanner's Ministry of Finance. But the program…
Evidence on obesity and HIV prevention
Mon, Apr 20 2009
Two notable evidence-based re-assessments of medical risk that deserve your attention—if only as antidotes to policy-based or dogma-based spin.
The first is a journal article by Katherine Flegal, a senior researcher at the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, who examines the evidence from a large study of the U.S. population on whether obesity is strongly linked to death from disease,…
Australia’s information deficit
Wed, Apr 15 2009
Australia is falling behind on access to data, thanks to apparently indifferent government at the Federal and State level—and it has nothing to do with proposed NBN. The United States, however, is moving ahead wth plans for the creation of a government-wide data access facility.
data.gov will be managed by Obama's 'Chief Information Officer', Vivek Kundra. Here is an example of what he has…
Growth rate of regional trade agreements
Wed, Apr 08 2009
It is often said that the growth in the number of RTAs has been 'exponential'. Thanks to the WTO's database of RTAs it's now easy to keep tab of the trend. Here's what it looks like as of March 2009.
Competitiveness of U.S. agriculture
Tue, Mar 31 2009
As usual, the export outlook depends more on the dollar exchange-rate than on the impact of recession on underlying demand—at least, from 2010 onwards:
"The main uncertainty for the long run concerns the value of the U.S. dollar compared with currencies of other major trading countries. One possibility is that the dollar will continue to strengthen substantially, especially against the Chinese…
The truth about employment trends
Fri, Mar 13 2009There's a level of hysteria to the reporting of the February employment data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Better to look yourself at the ABS report (it's quite readable) where it is clear that, although unemployment is trending up after a long decline, there is no need for alarm about current levels. Australia still enjoys historically low levels of unemployment, while employment…
Why the EUA speaks Spanish
Fri, Mar 13 2009
That's the Estados Unidos de América.
Another astonishing info-graphic from the New York Times; not the best designed on-line paper (the Guardian takes that prize, in my view, followed by Le Monde and the Wall St Journal), but easily the best at visual presentation of data.
These two graphs are extracts from the same graphic illustrating the origins of migrants and the size of their population…
Finding data on WTO Agriculture agreements
Mon, Mar 09 2009The WTO's framework of trade agreements for agricultural policies is complex. The WTO Agreement on Agriculture (supplemented by rules in the GATT, the Subsidies Agreement and the SPS Agreement) regulates the external impacts of countries' border barriers and the impact of their internal market manipulation policies on external competition. It's impossible to make useful assessments of the…
Case for due diligence in public policy
Sun, Feb 22 2009This is a great, if horrifying, read. Bruce McCulloch and Ross McKitrick have compiled a case-book of unsupported claims in science and public-policy research that complements Gary Banks' recommendations on evidence-based public policy.
"Empirical research in academic journals is often cited as the basis for public policy decisions, in part because people think that the journals have checked the…