Re: gus is ignored by fewer than 40 people
33 exactly as of late.... You may also add that I've been bookmarked by 28 members... Anyway, except you, who cares about those bogus data? LOL... Hey, did you check Raymond Duray's profile? He's allegedly bookmarked by as many as 187 members and "ignored" by a whopping 164!!! Whew... actually, it's ol' Raymond's data that made me twig that something was wrong with those data... If I had the time, I'd crunch all those "bookmarked" and "ignored" data through a Benford Test --clue:
August 4, 1998
Following Benford's Law, or Looking Out for No. 1
By MALCOLM W. BROWNE
Dr. Theodore P. Hill asks his mathematics students at the Georgia Institute of Technology to go home and either flip a coin 200 times and record the results, or merely pretend to flip a coin and fake 200 results. The following day he runs his eye over the homework data, and to the students' amazement, he easily fingers nearly all those who faked their tosses.
"The truth is," he said in an interview, "most people don't know the real odds of such an exercise, so they can't fake data convincingly."
There is more to this than a classroom trick.
Dr. Hill is one of a growing number of statisticians, accountants and mathematicians who are convinced that an astonishing mathematical theorem known as Benford's Law is a powerful and relatively simple tool for pointing suspicion at frauds, embezzlers, tax evaders, sloppy accountants and even computer bugs.
The income tax agencies of several nations and several states, including California, are using detection software based on Benford's Law, as are a score of large companies and accounting businesses.
Benford's Law is named for the late Dr. Frank Benford, a physicist at the General Electric Company. In 1938 he noticed that pages of logarithms corresponding to numbers starting with the numeral 1 were much dirtier and more worn than other pages.
(A logarithm is an exponent. Any number can be expressed as the fractional exponent -- the logarithm -- of some base number, such as 10. Published tables permit users to look up logarithms corresponding to numbers, or numbers corresponding to logarithms.)
Logarithm tables (and the slide rules derived from them) are not much used for routine calculating anymore; electronic calculators and computers are simpler and faster. But logarithms remain important in many scientific and technical applications, and they were a key element in Dr. Benford's discovery.
Dr. Benford concluded that it was unlikely that physicists and engineers had some special preference for logarithms starting with 1. He therefore embarked on a mathematical analysis of 20,229 sets of numbers, including such wildly disparate categories as the areas of rivers, baseball statistics, numbers in magazine articles and the street addresses of the first 342 people listed in the book "American Men of Science." All these seemingly unrelated sets of numbers followed the same first-digit probability pattern as the worn pages of logarithm tables suggested. In all cases, the number 1 turned up as the first digit about 30 percent of the time, more often than any other.
[...]
courses.nus.edu.sg
In case you want to do the Benford math, here's the formula:
mathworld.wolfram.com |
