[Air-l] what does this Statistics Canada index mean?

[Peter Timusk]

sorry for any cross posting that may have occurred to you being on  
the same lists that I choose. Your intelligent. What more can I say? lol

In my helping consumer survivors of mental health services with  
getting computers I am quoting a Statistics Canada index for consumer  
computer prices. I don't work on this at Statistics Canada.

more info on this here.

http://www.statcan.ca/cgi-bin/imdb/p2SV.pl? 
Function=getSurvey&SDDS=5032&lang=en&db=IMDB&dbg=f&adm=8&dis=2

and in French here

http://www.statcan.ca/cgi-bin/imdb/p2SV_f.pl? 
Function=getSurvey&SDDS=5032&lang=en&db=IMDB&dbg=f&adm=8&dis=2

my question for you to discuss is the meaning to this index and if  
you know of any other states that use a similar official statistic  
that measures consumer computer prices.

The index I believe was set to 100 in 2001 and is in October 2006 at  
16. I have been saying this means 100 dollars in 2001 bought you so  
much computer, and you can get the same amount of computer for 16  
dollars these days. Am I very wrong or only sightly wrong? The prices  
at computer shops seem to reflect a downward trend. The iBook in 1999  
was 2000 CND dollars and now a similar model in Apples lineup the  
Macbook costs about 1000 CND dollars. I know this might be only one  
example drawn from the aggregate index




Peter Timusk,
B.Math statistics (2002), B.A. legal studies (2006) Carleton University
Junior Statistical Clerk Statistics Canada
Systems Science Graduate student, University of Ottawa (2006-2007).
just trying to stay linear.
Read by hundreds of lurkers every week.