Effective temperature for finite systems

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.