-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Tue, 11 Jul 1995 hardin@cyberspace.com wrote:
John Young posted:
He's Got Their Number: Scholar Uses Math to Foil Financial Fraud
prices are anything but random. A very heavy concentration of eights (8) & nines (9), apparently this company is more into $508.98 (color inkjet printer) & $38.98 (well known game s/w) than the old late night TV standby of "JUST $19.99!". Of course, this is because of excessively documented ad nauseum human psychological tendencies that salescritters, who set at least the lsd's of price, have been aware of for millenia. I'd bet, that 5(five), 8(eight), & 9(nine) are significantly more represented across the board in prices (& thus in amounts for checks & tax write offs) than than their random distribution by Benford's Law or more well known tests for randomness would suggest. Has Mr. Negrini factored this into his program? I guess the lesson is do a few pgp make__random's & convert a few of the hex numbers to dec digits for the lsd's the next time one does creative expense reporting.
check amounts will also include any relevant sales tax thus skewing the distribution in some fashion. patrick finerty = zinc@zifi.genetics.utah.edu = pfinerty@nyx.cs.du.edu U of Utah biochem grad student in the Bass lab - zinc fingers + dsRNA! ** FINGER ME for my pgp public key ** CRYPTO FOR THE MASSES! zifi is a 486 DX4-100 running LINUX 1.2.10, send me all of your RAM now! -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMALPYk3Qo/lG0AH5AQE5PAP/fKnoVXL4SiCR5yv0NK0lUcdxW30q3NOL ZSg+CnDWdW4QEbTGe6yi8mxcAQRQuxXwikL1qtfFrYgxhEN2nTiD2TrAuzRUbBOJ c5X5ieC2drPUpITRUI6NvQA9H7IO7FRzQXH46RLosYpN4zy6EfzskbTZM/Zbj3cU Wg7XHHFZcUo= =+upl -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----