Breaking Benford
Radiolab
00:00
The Benford Curve: A Fake Addition of Numbers
The idea is that random numbers follow this pattern, but human created numbers don't. This is a way of seeing human meddling. The problem is when you're looking at precinct data, these precincts are basically purposefully made just for counting election data. And the reason that those are helpful is because they're all the same size. So there's some really short rivers and there's some super, continent long rivers. But the precincts do not have multiple orders of magnitude... Precincts tend to be about a thousand in size.
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