An important contribution of the Internet and Internet browsers is the widespread availability of primary data, perhaps referenced in newspapers, for independent analyses. This session seeks to assess how software tools are keeping abreast of this development. In particular, is software available to download an HTML table and analyze it?

As a start we compare the utilities of Splus and APL with Gnuplot in analyzing the Consumer Confidence Index published by Siena College for Jan 1999 through Jan 2001: http://www.siena.edu/sri/results/.

This index has recently been frequently cited in the news media in association with predicting/measuring the current economic downturn. In addition to comparing the complexities of reading the data we also present comparisons of the associated time series analysis of these short multivariate series of 25 data points.