Under the Ansatz that the occupation times of a system with finitely many
states are given by the Gibbs distribution, an effective temperature is
uniquely determined (up to a choice of scale), and may be computed de novo,
without any reference to a Hamiltonian for empirically accessible systems. As
an example, the calculation of the effective temperature for a classical Bose
gas is outlined and applied to the analysis of computer network traffic.Comment: 9 pages, 10 figure
