Comments on: Benford’s Law http://www.jimcarson.com/2008/benfords-law/ Contains no trans-fats, lead or red dye #2 Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:06:47 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.2 By: jim http://www.jimcarson.com/2008/benfords-law/#comment-3246 jim Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:25:48 +0000 http://www.jimcarson.com/2008/benfords-law/#comment-3246 It looks that way. (The article in question mentions Eliot Spitzer being investigated for financial transactions. The initial concern was he was accepting bribes. Quote: <blockquote> "We had no interest at all in the prostitution ring until the thing with Spitzer led us to learn about it," said one Justice Department official. It looks that way. (The article in question mentions Eliot Spitzer being investigated for financial transactions. The initial concern was he was accepting bribes.

Quote:

“We had no interest at all in the prostitution ring until the thing with Spitzer led us to learn about it,” said one Justice Department official.

]]> By: Sally http://www.jimcarson.com/2008/benfords-law/#comment-3245 Sally Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:55:50 +0000 http://www.jimcarson.com/2008/benfords-law/#comment-3245 jim - do you think benford's law had anything to do with <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4424507&page=1" rel="nofollow">this</a>??? - s jim - do you think benford’s law had anything to do with this??? - s

]]> By: jim http://www.jimcarson.com/2008/benfords-law/#comment-3244 jim Tue, 11 Mar 2008 06:32:25 +0000 http://www.jimcarson.com/2008/benfords-law/#comment-3244 <b>Steve</b> - I was looking at the file size (versus the size on disk, which would allocate whole sectors). Examining the file list further, I discovered a huge cluster of 8,192-byte files were associated with Windows patches and updates and had names of the pattern reg[0-9]{5}. (Over 850 of these were in the "ie7" directory.) As far as I can tell, they're cruft. <b>Kiri</b> - I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. (It was probably the most exhausting post because I kept getting sucked deeper into trying to understand it!) But yeah, I could absolutely picture you running this on Astra :-) Steve - I was looking at the file size (versus the size on disk, which would allocate whole sectors). Examining the file list further, I discovered a huge cluster of 8,192-byte files were associated with Windows patches and updates and had names of the pattern reg[0-9]{5}. (Over 850 of these were in the “ie7″ directory.) As far as I can tell, they’re cruft.

Kiri - I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. (It was probably the most exhausting post because I kept getting sucked deeper into trying to understand it!) But yeah, I could absolutely picture you running this on Astra :-)

]]> By: Kiri http://www.jimcarson.com/2008/benfords-law/#comment-3243 Kiri Tue, 11 Mar 2008 05:09:31 +0000 http://www.jimcarson.com/2008/benfords-law/#comment-3243 I came across this law in a class in grad school and immediately went home and tallied the files in my Unix account. Eerily, the distribution matched Benford's law quite well. I'm still not sure I have an intuitive "yeah, that makes sense" grasp of it, but Laws are descriptive rather than explanatory. :) My best grasp of it is that if you have numbers that really are evenly distributed, then there would be an order of magnitude more 1's than everything else (e.g., since 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13... are all equally likely, more than half of the numbers from 1-20 would start with 1), and so on. If you used leading 0's to make all numbers the same "length", then this effect should disappear (all prefixes would be equally likely). I came across this law in a class in grad school and immediately went home and tallied the files in my Unix account. Eerily, the distribution matched Benford’s law quite well. I’m still not sure I have an intuitive “yeah, that makes sense” grasp of it, but Laws are descriptive rather than explanatory. :) My best grasp of it is that if you have numbers that really are evenly distributed, then there would be an order of magnitude more 1’s than everything else (e.g., since 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13… are all equally likely, more than half of the numbers from 1-20 would start with 1), and so on. If you used leading 0’s to make all numbers the same “length”, then this effect should disappear (all prefixes would be equally likely).

]]> By: Steve http://www.jimcarson.com/2008/benfords-law/#comment-3242 Steve Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:02:10 +0000 http://www.jimcarson.com/2008/benfords-law/#comment-3242 Hmm... were you looking at the "File Size" or the "File Size on Disk"? If the later, that might explain the prevalence of 8192-byte files - they're all those small files that occupy less than one file allocation block (assuming your FABs are 8192 bytes). Hmm… were you looking at the “File Size” or the “File Size on Disk”? If the later, that might explain the prevalence of 8192-byte files - they’re all those small files that occupy less than one file allocation block (assuming your FABs are 8192 bytes).

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