The term 'afford ability' has been gaining currency in housing policy debates, but neither government nor academic researchers have given much consideration to defining it. This paper considers what meanings have been given to the term affordability in practice and suggests a range of analytically more useful definitions. It argues from economic first principles that it is more logical to use some form of residual income definition than one based on a prescribed ratio of housing costs to income. Most researchers have been using a ratio definition. The paper then uses data from a household survey in the Glasgow Travel-to-Work Area in 1988/89 to examine the incidence of 'unaffordability' of housing costs according to a variety of definitions.
A recently resolved debate centred on the interpretation of a major set of INAA data that was based on Olmec ceramics from Mexico. In an attempt to answer questions arising from the debate, this paper discusses the effect of numbers of samples chosen for data interpretation. It also presents interpretations of the ceramic data set based on a bivariate data-splitting approach and compares the results of this with the multivariate analysis approaches employed by the initial publishers of the data. and their laboratories are closed. We would therefore add the plea that there be a revival of the publication in papers of group means and standard deviations, or group means and their percentage errors, as was common in the first decades of archaeometry, together with the safe long-term storage of data, as is practised at MURR.
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