Posts tagged statistics

I'm thinking about starting a series to track the little-known numbers and indices that provide a clearer picture of various aspects of our culture than the figures that make the headlines. Call it "the numbers that actually count." Sometime soon I'll explain why you should plug your ears and sing, "La la la, I'm not listening," when any politician talks about cutting "income taxes"—it's not income taxes but payroll taxes that take the biggest bite for many Americans, and any serious tax policy needs to treat the two together. In the meantime, here's another important number at the moment: not the overhyped Dow Jones Industrial Average, but the TED Spread, the blood pressure reading of the global economy. Recently it's been, um, a bit high.

re: business, economics, finance, statistics

Andy:

Generations of Americans have been trained to follow the Dow Jones Industrial Average for a quick snapshot of how the economy is performing or is expected to perform. There’s a lot that’s ill-advised about that habit, but, most importantly, attending to the ups and downs in the Dow won’t tell you much about the current financial crisis. Ours is a crisis of credit: Financial firms are unwilling to lend to each other (at all-but-exorbitant rates) for fear that borrowing firms may fail or that they themselves may need the cash to fend off their own crisis.

Whereas the hourly fortunes of the Dow or any stock index are, at best, indirect reflections of this reluctance to lend, the TED Spread measures credit conditions directly. Bloomberg tracks the TED Spread here. What sounds like second-rate Nutella is actually the difference between the interest rate banks charge each other on three-month loans and the interest rate on three-month U.S. Treasury bills.

The Internet's so great for taking the observational expertise and puttering potential of hobbyists and letting it easily be converted into hopefully useful scientific data ... one wonders what other reserves are waiting to be tapped.

re: climate, gardens and cities, global warming, internet, statistics

Nate:

Participants in BudBurst monitor one or more plants, native or non-native, throughout the growing season. Along the way, they record and report the dates of events such as the first flower or first seed. Like many citizen science programs, BudBurst is modeled after the Audubon Christmas bird count, an annual volunteer effort that has provided ornithologists with a century’s worth of data.

Though some plant experts already have noticed certain species popping up unseasonably early, gardeners may be ideal for observing the subtle waxing of summers or waning of winters. They fill their plots with plants best suited to the weather, so for many, responding to climate change is simply a matter of common sense.

“There’s something about being in the dirt that puts things in perspective,” said Gina Garrison of Forest Park, who plans to monitor plants for BudBurst next spring. “Since planting my garden, I’ve looked into climate change more, looked into what would happen.”

A nice parable of unintended consequences.

re: changing the world, climate, memes, natural sciences, pop culture, statistics, trends

Nate:

In the 2004 movie “The Butterfly Effect” - we watched it so you don’t have to - Ashton Kutcher travels back in time, altering his troubled childhood in order to influence the present, though with dismal results. In 1990’s “Havana,” Robert Redford, a math-wise gambler, tells Lena Olin, “A butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. They can even calculate the odds.”

Such borrowings of Lorenz’s idea might seem authoritative to unsuspecting viewers, but they share one major problem: They get his insight precisely backwards. The larger meaning of the butterfly effect is not that we can readily track such connections, but that we can’t.