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Do the courts recognize Benford’ Law?
bkmk
I just tried doing a manual link on FB and got a stern warning. I am so pissed!!
Been posted from various sources about 20 times but not necessarily with the name Benson’s. Here’s a few with mathematical in title, https://freerepublic.com/focus/search?m=all;o=time;q=quick;s=mathematical
It’s certainly highly provocative. Benfords law applies to processes that grow or are distributed logarithmically, or geometrically (same thing). Inflation is an example. Take the price of a car, over the course of a century. It should take more than six times as long for the price to go from $1,000 to $2,000 dollars as it does to go from $9,000 to $10,000, [log(2,000/1000)/(log(10000/9000) ~= 6.58]. given that inflation is uniform. Prices distribution themselves logarithmically with time. I have heard of this law being applied to elections in Iran before and used as evidence of fabricated results. It is a standard tool used in audits of expenses, when expenses consist of a variety of goods and services, that would be expected to follow Benford’s law in the limit.
The history of the law is that its operation suggested itself to two different men took note of the fact that a heavily used table of logarithms wears out first in the pages which display the logarithms of numbers starting with 1.It would seem, therefore, that a table of logs should display one more digit of precision in the “leading 1’s” - and perhaps even the “leading two’s” as well - than in the “leading nine’s.” That would presumably make a more handy table as well as one less likely to wear out with heavy use . . .
Actually, a slide rule sorta does that - accurately setting “1.1” on a sly drool (spelling intentional) is dramatically easier than setting “9.1”
You can set “10.1” on a slide rule almost exactly as accurately as you can set “9.9”