Jeremy Leach
Senior Member
This is definitely off topic !
In the current New Scientist magasine (16th Oct 2010) there is an article (page 10) about Benford's Law. This law is all about sets of numbers and how some naturally occurring sets of numbers obey this law - areas of rivers, earthquake data etc.
I'm NOT knowledgeable on this at all, but they suggest people look at their own data - so I have, at the number of views of posts on the PICAXE forum ! It's only a quick analysis of the first two pages of posts as of today, but my graph is attached.
I won't fight anyone who says this is totally useless data for the forum - but it's just interesting that the view data might obey this law (no ?!). It might be because views grow exponentially - ie posts to a thread attract more posts and more views, in an exponential way.
The article says deviations from it can detect tax fraud, voter fraud, digital image manipulation. There's a lot more info out there on the web, for instance Wiki info here :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law
In the current New Scientist magasine (16th Oct 2010) there is an article (page 10) about Benford's Law. This law is all about sets of numbers and how some naturally occurring sets of numbers obey this law - areas of rivers, earthquake data etc.
I'm NOT knowledgeable on this at all, but they suggest people look at their own data - so I have, at the number of views of posts on the PICAXE forum ! It's only a quick analysis of the first two pages of posts as of today, but my graph is attached.
I won't fight anyone who says this is totally useless data for the forum - but it's just interesting that the view data might obey this law (no ?!). It might be because views grow exponentially - ie posts to a thread attract more posts and more views, in an exponential way.
The article says deviations from it can detect tax fraud, voter fraud, digital image manipulation. There's a lot more info out there on the web, for instance Wiki info here :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law
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