Ok, I understand your intent. Now can we go back to the meaning of fitting "b"? Further up you mentioned that if we find "b" for different intervals, at some point it starts looking like "2 sigma different". What are you comparing to what? "b"s before 1950 and "b"s after 1950? But are "b"s before 1950 independent and identically distributed? I am not sure in what sense we can treat "b"s as a quantity to which we can apply the methods that we want to apply.