Benford’s law and cooking the books

Suppose someone presents you with some data in the form of numbers in tables. These numbers may have been used as evidence to support some contention. Can you judge whether those numbers are authentic without actually repeating the entire study?

There have been cases in the past where people have reviewed other people’s data and found suspicious numeric patterns that would have been unlikely to occur naturally. One of the famous cases is that involving Cyril Burt’s studies of twins that purportedly showed that genetics played a far greater role in a person’s development than had been previously thought. In 1974, soon after Burt’s death in 1971, Leon Kamin analyzed Burt’s data and found that they were likely not correct because the statistical correlations he reported stayed stable up to the third decimal place, despite being obtained from different sample sizes. The odds of that happening naturally are extremely low. (Not in Our Genes by R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin (1984) p. 103.) [Read more…]

Film review: Margin Call

Margin Call (2011) is a first-rate film.

It deals with what ensues in a large unnamed investment bank when a junior analyst discovers late one evening in 2008 that the value of the bank’s holdings of mortgage-backed securities has wandered dangerously outside the range of mathematical models of the values that it should have, and that the size of the potential losses is so huge that it could bankrupt the entire institution.

The film tracks events over the next twenty-four hours as this information goes up the chain of command all the way to the chief executive, triggering a series of meetings at higher and higher levels that run through the night and into the dawn, as everyone tries to figure out what to do before the news of this disaster becomes widely known in the financial industry and destroys the company.

In the process, it reveals the thinking and mode of operation of the various players in investment banks, from the junior to the highest levels, the role of money, how people’s allegiance and silence is bought, and how some people are ruthlessly sacrificed so that others may profit, all done calmly and urbanely.

This world is unknown to me since I have never worked in such institutions but I have to say that from what I have read on the financial crises and kinds of people involved, the story and characters seem utterly plausible.

The film keeps you intensely interested even though there is little physical action or even any shouting. It is all talk, low-key and understated, but it shows how a film can deal with serious issues and still be engrossing. What it takes is that it be well-written, well-directed, and well-acted.

Here’s the trailer.

What is objectionable about this comic strip?

My local newspaper The Plain Dealer today had this statement in place of the normal Non Sequitur comic strip, one of my favorites.

Editor’s note: Today’s “Non Sequitur” strip was withheld because it was deemed objectionable by Plain Dealer editors. A replacement strip was unavailable at press time.

I naturally went on the web to see what was so shocking and am frankly baffled. Can anyone tell me why this strip should have been withheld?

Good news on the disease front

A report just released says that it has been one year since there was a case of polio in India. This result was obtained after India carried out a massive program to deliver vaccines, involving 2.3 million vaccinators delivering 900 million doses in the past year. India used to have more than half of the world’s cases of this disease so this is a huge achievement. (Thanks to Ian over at The Crommunist Manifesto for the tip.)

This could mean that India could soon be removed from the list of countries where polio is still endemic, leaving just Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Pakistan on the list. It will take another two years of being disease-free for it to be declared that India has eradicated the disease. It is hoped that soon polio will join smallpox as the second global disease to be completely eradicated.

On a personal note, as a person who contracted polio at the age of six, this news is particularly gratifying.

How many times can you fold a piece of paper in half?

Such a question had never occurred to me but if asked, my initial response would have been “A lot”. But I would have been wrong. It turns out that the number is surprisingly small and that I had (once again) been misled by the deceptive power of geometric progression.

I’ll let readers have the fun of guessing for themselves (assume that you can have a piece of paper of any size to start with) and then they can read this New Scientist report about a group of students who worked on this question for seven years before breaking the previous record.

It turns out that there is some fascinating physics involved in crumpling paper.

Prayer mural in high school ruled unconstitutional

Jessica Ahlquist, a Rhode Island high school student who happens to be an atheist, challenged her local school board, requesting that a ‘prayer mural’ that had been hanging in the school auditorium since 1963 be removed.

The 8ftx4ft mural in the auditorium read:

SCHOOL PRAYER

OUR HEAVENLY FATHER, GRANT US EACH DAY THE DESIRE TO DO OUR BEST, TO GROW MENTALLY AND MORALLY AS WELL AS PHYSICALLY, TO BE KIND AND HELPFUL TO OUR CLASSMATES AND TEACHERS, TO BE HONEST WITH OURSELVES AS WELL AS WITH OTHERS, HELP US TO BE GOOD SPORTS AND SMILE WHEN WE LOSE AS WELL AS WHEN WE WIN, TEACH US THE VALUE OF TRUE FRIENDSHIP, HELP US ALWAYS TO CONDUCT OURSELVES SO AS TO BRING CREDIT TO CRANSTON HIGH SCHOOL WEST.

AMEN

[Read more…]