Newsweek’s Daniel Gross explains the Consumer Price Index (here’s the official BLS site) in a very simple video. I could do without the goofy sound effects, but it’s a good, 2 minute explanation of how the government tracks inflation.
Per David Simon’s Berkeley talk, though, the video doesn’t go into why this matters. Perhaps they’ll cover that in the next installment of the Economics 101 series.
|
Blogroll
Friends
CT Politics Politics
Technology
West Hartford Blogs Hartford Blogs |
Active Posts
|
|
Track & Validate
|
oh boy… on one hand, great! on the other hand, ew!
This article talks about surveys that show that men have more partners than women on average. I never thought about the math here, and it is impossible for these surveys to be true unless folks are either lying or including homosexual relationships. (via The Big Picture)
Update: Ugh, is the article getting the math wrong, too??? From the article:
that men had a median of seven partners and women four.
It is entirely possible for the median to be higher while the average stays the same. That just indicates that that there are more men who are at the higher end of the scale than women, which would fit the other conclusions of the studies that show men are more “promiscuous” than women. To be sure, the article uses “average” a number of times, but at least for this one example, it’s clearly not an average but the median.
Update: blowing this out into a normal post instead of a Link post. Via Pandagon, I found a response by the math prof quoted in the article over at Salon.com. He points out that he didn’t attack the median statements, only the averages, and also points out that the raw CDC data is fairly useless because of how unlikely the spreads are. Worth taking a quick look.
