Tag Archives | fraud
radioactive_warning

Stress Testing: A Reminder from Fukushima

March 17, 2011

The eyes of the world are on Fukushima, Japan, where heroic technicians and military personnel struggle to prevent a nuclear armageddon. A massive earthquake spawned a devastating tsunami that knocked out a nuclear power plant’s cooling system. And here we are. This reminds us how low-probability high-impact events tend to be correlated. If a country experiences prolonged draught, [...]

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Financial Reform: Sound Bites and Window Dressing

January 8, 2011

On Thursday, Representative Michele Bachmann (Tea Party Republican of Minnesota) introduced a bill to repeal the Dodd-Frank financial reform. With the Senate and Obama standing in the way, it won’t go anywhere. But who cares? The 2008 market crisis should have prompted serious reforms. Instead, we got sweeping window dressing. Dodd-Frank left in place the [...]

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Benford’s Law

December 10, 2007

Benford’s Law is a fascinating theorem from statistics that states, for most forms of data, the leading digits of numbers are not uniformly distributed among 1 through 9. Instead, any given data point has a 30.1% probability of having a 1 as its leading digit. There is a 17.6% probability of the leading digit being [...]