Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Hypothesis Testing

If you put leisure time on the y axis

and # blog posts on the x

you will obtain a downward sloping curve.

From the amount of recent activity on any blog therefore, you should be able to roughly guess at leisure time available to the blogger.

So, does this mean Tyler Cowen and Paul Krugman have a lot of free time on their hands?

;-)

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Downward-sloping? Wouldn't that mean that as leisure time increases, the # of posts decreases (assuming leisure time to be the independent variable)? I'd have thought that's what's meant by d(posting)/d(leisure) being negative.

Of course, I may be misinterpreting you and what you mean is the amount of leisure time left over after blogging, so if someone blogs a lot, the amount of time available for leisure is less. But that would mean that Krugman and Cowen are busy people, no?

Don't do these things to me. My basic math skills get shaky after dinner. Having to cross-check the logic of PhD-aspirants weakens my whole faith in the system.

k said...

upward sloping is what it should be; is mistake of mine.

you're not the only one to have pointed this out btw.

colours said...

'least correct it. what the first person pointed out was that the variables were on the wrong axes. in effect what the phd aspirant has done is: taken the correct graph from some tahkhana of his mind, with leisure on x axis and #posts on y (in which case you can arrive at leisure by observing #posts and using inverse leisure function); rotated the graph along the z and negative time axes to create a leisurely post

colours said...

since when hav u activated blog owner approval