Benford's law is an amazing thing. If you know the probability distribution that classes of "natural" numbers should have, you can detect where people might be faking data: phony tax returns, bogus scientific studies, etc. [Read more...]

Did you wake up this morning hoping that you would be able to listen to telephone beeps inspired by Estonian web site metrics? I knew you did! First things first: I came up with the slightly crazy idea of using the bleepy sounds that telephones make, called “dual-tone multifrequency” (DTMF) ... [Read more...]

Tom Taverner introduced me to Benford’s Law as we were eating lunch together at a statistical computing conference: If you look at the first digits of data in many naturally-occuring datasets, a startling 30 percent of them are ones. “Pah!” I said. “That belies intuition! Why would one digit occur ... [Read more...]