“ Human beings are really bad at randomization. Tell a human to come up with a set of random numbers, and they will be surprisingly inept at trying to do so. Most humans, for instance, when asked to flip an imaginary coin and record the results, will succumb to the Gambler’s Fallacy and be more likely to record a toss of ‘tails’ if the last couple of tosses had been heads, or vice versa. This feels right to most of us — but it isn’t. We’re actually introducing patterns into what is supposed to be random noise. Sometimes, as is the case with certain applications of Benford’s Law, this characteristic can be used as a fraud-detection mechanism. If, for example, one of your less-trustworthy employees is submitting a series of receipts, and an unusually high number end with the trailing digit ‘7’ ($27, $107, $297, etc.), there is a decent chance that he is falsifying his expenses. The IRS uses techniques like this to detect tax fraud.
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FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: Strategic Vision Polls Exhibit Unusual Patterns, Possibly Indicating Fraud (via treblekicker)
Interesting (and serious) stuff - though I’m not delving into the comments to see how the story unfolds.
