Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed

Twitter Digest: 2012-01-17
Benford’s Law, and Worldwide Illicit Financial Flows
Samsung and the Holy RIM
Shit Skiers Say

Twitter Digest: 2012-01-17

Posted: 18 Jan 2012 04:00 AM PST

GRL: A recent and abrupt decline in the East African long rains http://t.co/B6wbooiw ->
PNAS: Global risk of big earthquakes has not recently increased http://t.co/ff1JcRwb ->
Cheap Trick, Surrender. Live at Budokan. And you lovely people thought I didn't care about you. http://t.co/NA08N0aE ->
Benford's Law, and worldwide illicit financial flows http://t.co/g6ppa5a5 ->
Turntable For Video 'Chill' Turns Into Pinterest For Video, Sees 10 Sign Ups A Minute http://t.co/ZUiEzl3E ->

Benford’s Law, and Worldwide Illicit Financial Flows

Posted: 18 Jan 2012 12:06 AM PST

Intriguing new paper:

The leading digit distribution of the worldwide illicit financial flows

Benford’s law states that in many data sets the overall distribution of the significant digits tends to be logarithmic so that the occurrence of numbers beginning with smaller first significant digits is more often than those with larger ones. We investigate here recent data on illicit financial flows from developing countries and reveal that the data does submit to Benford’s law. Further, the general improvement in the statistical accuracy which we observed supports the applicability of the normalization process used to limit the inclusion of the countries in the database for which the illicit financial flows are not substantial.

via [1201.3432] The leading digit distribution of the worldwide illicit financial flows.

Samsung and the Holy RIM

Posted: 17 Jan 2012 07:44 PM PST

Samsung: We are not buying RIM! Will you please listen? We are not buying RIM, do you understand? Honestly!

RIM bull: Only someone buying RIM denies their buying.

Samsung: What? Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right! I am buying RIM!

RIM bull: They are ! They are buying RIM !