5 March, 2008

Spreadsheet addiction

Category: business tools,data analysis,modelling,optimisation,statistics — David Kirk @ 10:57 pm

This article isn’t new, although it seems to have some pretty current info (about Excel 2007, for example).  Worth a read for anyone who uses spreadsheets for everything, but doesn’t want to touch a database, Mathematica / Maple / Maxima / Octave / Matlab or R / S / S+ etc.

http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/spreadsheet_addiction.html

And yes, I use R, Maxima, Octave, MySQL, Access as well as Excel. Right tool for the job, son.

3 March, 2008

Reality check – CPIX at 8.8% in January

Category: economics,news,statistics — David Kirk @ 9:05 am

I guess this has crept up on me slightly. CPIX @ 8.8% for January 2008?  Our inflation target range is 3% to 6%. That’s an acceptable gap of 3%, and now we’re nearly that far away from the top of the range?

Meanwhile PPI figures have been delayed due to ”rebalancing and reweighting”.