Talk:Benford's law

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Contents 1 Explanation 2 Dispersion should not be too small 3 Error

[edit] Explanation

The section entitled "Explanation" is difficult to understand. Please remember that Wikipedia is a general encyclopædia and is equally likely to be viewed by individuals of average mathematical knowledge as it is to be viewed by specialists. 68.49.208.76 06:30, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

You are correct - but accurate, easy-to-understand explanations of technical issues are very, very hard to write. Wikipedia is full of excellent articles that are useless to 99% of humanity for that very reason. And Benford's Law is particularly tricky to explain to laymen; it's so counter-intuitive. - DavidWBrooks 11:53, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Dispersion should not be too small

normally never mentioned: the dispersion or variance should be not "to small". A kind of proof in nordisk Matematisk tidskrift from 1965 ( or almost) has that condition included in teh proof. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.226.230.8 (talk • contribs) 16:18, 16 May 2008

[edit] Error

I'm not convinced the log10 should change to log100 just because we look at two digits instead of one. The number is still base10.

Here's an example: Numbers that start with 1 should comprise 30.1% of the numbers. If we subdivide all the numbers beginning with 1 into 10,11,12,...19, we should expect these ten sub-numbers to add up to the 30.1% expectation of all numbers beginning with 1. Using Log10 (and NOT Log100) yields:

10 - 4.14%

11 - 3.78%

12 - 3.48%

13 - 3.22%

14 - 3.00%

15 - 2.80%

16 - 2.63%

17 - 2.48%

18 - 2.35%

19 - 2.23%

---

(summing the distributions)

yields 30.1%

. . .which is exactly what we would expect.

Using Log100, on the other hand, will yield only half of the expected value. You can duplicate this result for all the ranges 1-9.

Caleb B caleb@tcad.net —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.29.42.173 (talk) 21:21, 10 June 2008 (UTC)