0 Wrestling with data

I'll suggest those who haven't been, join me in keeping an eye on a series of posts that Ron Broberg is doing over at The Whiteboard.  As befits a whiteboard, he's showing a lot of the details that get cleaned out of most final publications, even on blogs.  The topic at hand is looking at the temperature records since 1880 and testing ideas on fitting curves to the data.  The series is now to #9 and it's apparent that there will be several more:


http://rhinohide.wordpress.com/2011/01/07/lines-sines-and-curve-fitting-1-oh-my/ (Starts out more on the issue of testing ideas on what we can conclude about temperature trends)
http://rhinohide.wordpress.com/2011/01/08/lines-sines-and-curve-fitting-2-r/ (try fitting the sine and then a line)
http://rhinohide.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/lines-sines-and-curve-fitting-3-double-down/ (Try fitting 2 sine waves)
http://rhinohide.wordpress.com/2011/01/10/lines-sines-and-curve-fittings-4-walk-and-chew-gum/ (Simultaneous line and sine fit.)
http://rhinohide.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/lines-sines-and-curve-fitting-5-a-growth/ (Trying an exponential curve)

http://rhinohide.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/lines-sines-and-curve-fitting-6-backcast-and-forecast/
http://rhinohide.wordpress.com/2011/01/15/lines-sines-and-curve-fitting-7-normal/  (Testing Normality 1)
http://rhinohide.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/lines-sines-and-curve-fitting-8-dagostino/ (Testing Normality 2)
http://rhinohide.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/lines-sines-and-curve-fitting-9-girma/

A sine is a standard oscillation.  It would be a pure tone (rather flute-like) in music.  For a bit more about oscillations and data series, and the language of time series analysis, take a look at my Introduction to Time Series Analysis.