111,111,111 x 111,111,111=12,345,678,987,654,321
Since the declaration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory in Iran’s presidential election, accusations of fraud have swelled. Against expectations from pollsters and pundits alike, Ahmadinejad did surprisingly well in urban areas, including Tehran — where he is thought to be highly unpopular — and even Tabriz, the capital city of opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi’s native East Azarbaijan province.
Others have pointed to the surprisingly poor performance of Mehdi Karroubi, another reform candidate, and particularly in his home province of Lorestan, where conservative candidates fared poorly in 2005, but where Ahmadinejad allegedly captured 71 percent of the vote. Eyebrows have been raised further by the relative consistency in Ahmadinejad’s vote share across Iran’s provinces, in spite of wide provincial variation in past elections.
These pieces of the story point in the direction of fraud, to be sure. They have led experts to speculate that the election results released by Iran’s Ministry of the Interior had been altered behind closed doors. But we don’t have to rely on suggestive evidence alone. We can use statistics more systematically to show that this is likely what happened. Here’s how.
We’ll concentrate on vote counts — the number of votes received by different candidates in different provinces — and in particular the last and second-to-last digits of these numbers. For example, if a candidate received 14,579 votes in a province (Mr. Karroubi’s actual vote count in Isfahan), we’ll focus on digits 7 and 9.
This may seem strange, because these digits usually don’t change who wins. In fact, last digits in a fair election don’t tell us anything about the candidates, the make-up of the electorate or the context of the election. They are random noise in the sense that a fair vote count is as likely to end in 1 as it is to end in 2, 3, 4, or any other numeral. But that’s exactly why they can serve as a litmus test for election fraud. For example, an election in which a majority of provincial vote counts ended in 5 would surely raise red flags.Why would fraudulent numbers look any different? The reason is that humans are bad at making up numbers. Cognitive psychologists have found that study participants in lab experiments asked to write sequences of random digits will tend to select some digits more frequently than others.
So what can we make of Iran’s election results? We used the results released by the Ministry of the Interior and published on the web site of Press TV, a news channel funded by Iran’s government. The ministry provided data for 29 provinces, and we examined the number of votes each of the four main candidates — Ahmadinejad, Mousavi, Karroubi and Mohsen Rezai — is reported to have received in each of the provinces — a total of 116 numbers.
The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit.
Every day, the same, again
A furious couple are to sue an airline after a block of frozen urine smashed through their roof.
Horse owners will have to sign a pledge not to eat their animals under new EU legislation.
Oscar winner arrested on charges of raping or sexually assaulting 11 women lured to his East Side apartment from 2005 to 2008. His female assistant was charged with helping him.
Program pays girls $1 per day to not get pregnant.
The state of New York has decided that women can be paid for donating eggs for research.
Taiwan legalizes prostitution.
Honeybee vision can discriminate between and recognise images of human faces.
Findings show how first Europeans transported meat over long distances without having it rot.
How the Michelin guide crippled France’s restaurants.
Did Steve Jobs’ money buy him a faster liver transplant?
Michael Jackson is dead. Authorities are seeking to clear up the mystery surrounding Michael Jackson’s death, including whether prescription drugs could have been a factor. Shock and grief over Michael Jackson’s death. Long before ‘Thriller,’ Jackson shattered racial barriers. Interactive timeline of the life and career of Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson and VIPs.
I’ve discovered there is a small scientific literature on the cognitive science of belly dancing.
Forty years after Stonewall, the gay movement has never been more united. So why do older gay men and younger ones often seem so far apart?
How Isaac Newton tracked down a counterfeiter–and helped form the modern concept of money.
Chris Anderson’s Free contains apparent plagiarism. Most of the suspect passages come from Wikipedia.
Books suck. (Kindle ad)
Protecting your computer screen from the “shoulder surfers.” If someone is peeking over your shoulder, all they will see is dummy text that is constantly changing.
Plan to teach military robots the rules of war.
High-tech anti-domestic violence advertising.
The future of poop: Compost toilet tech.
A real history of Rupert Murdoch.
A rare instance where it’s not better to be bilingual.
Has martial arts training ever helped anybody defeat a mugger?
Would a glass of water in space freeze or boil?
Can you teach an old dog new tricks?
WD-40 is mostly a mix of baby oil, Vaseline, and the goop inside homemade lava lamps.
Tara Donovan’s newest sculpture.
Ads for atheism appear on Manhattan buses. Related: Selling the name of a subway station has been a goal of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for nearly five years.
Listening to my son’s high school graduation ceremony last night, I was struck by how completely implausible were many speaker claims.
With 3-inch cherry red press-on Lee nails
People tend to be poor judges of the quality of their memories. The circumstances in which eyewitnesses find themselves might render their recollections particularly untrustworthy, says Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology at the University of California and a pioneer in the field of eyewitness research. “When it comes to brief episodes of memory, like in many criminal cases, poor lighting, passage of time, biased or suggestive questioning all can produce an erroneous memory,” she says.
photo { Pipilotti Rist, video still }
Stephanie says that she wants to know why she’s given half her life to people she hates now
Six years ago, I spotted a guy in his late forties in a bookstore in New Jersey. He was buying books about offshore banking and a travel guide to Costa Rica. He paid with a credit card. Afterwards, when he sat down in the bookshop café, I decided to talk to him. “I bet you want to buy a condo in Costa Rica and bank your money in Belize,” I said. “But if you’re running from someone, you’d better avoid paying for those books with your credit card.” We talked for a while. Before I left, I gave him my business card. He was the first person I helped to disappear.
Since then, I’ve helped more than 30 people vanish – people who had problems with ex-spouses, with business partners or with criminals. Normally, it takes me between one month and three to make the necessary preparations. Depending on the case, I charge between $10,000 and $30,000, but I work free of charge for women who are being stalked.
People who hire me are usually afraid for their lives. The guy in the bookstore was a whistleblower who had worked as an accountant in a mid-sized company with government contracts. He had testified against his employer in a fraud case. Somehow, information about him had leaked and former colleagues had threatened him. He could have gone to the police, but he didn’t trust them any more.
Before I started helping people disappear, I had worked as a “skip tracer” for more than 20 years. Skip tracers are private investigators who specialise in finding people, and I was good at my job. Over the years, I located more than 50,000 people. Helping a person to disappear required reverse engineering: I asked myself how I would have found a person, and tried to smear the leads.
There are three key steps to disappearing. First, destroy old information about yourself. Call your video store or electricity company and replace your old, correct phone number with a new, invented one. Introduce spelling mistakes into your utility bills. Create a PO Box for your mail. Don’t use your credit cards and the like.
Then, create bogus information to fool private investigators who might be looking for you. Go to one city and apply for an apartment. Rent a car in another one.
The next, final step is the most important one. Move from point A to point B. Create a dummy company to pay your bills. Only use prepaid mobile phones and change them every month. It is nearly impossible to find out where you are unless you make a mistake.
artwork { Dina Goldstein, Snowy }
‘Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.’ –Steven Wright
i am 17 years old and looking to buy my first car! if you have a good, cheap and reliable car for a student please let me know. thank you!
From Mike Anderson to ***********@*******.org
Hey there!
I saw your ad and have a great car for a young driver such as yourself. I am selling my beautiful 1992 Toyota Camry. This car is almost perfect. 148,342 miles on it. I need to go to Wawa tomorrow, so that mileage might change. I’m estimating it will be somewhere around 148,347 miles. If this is a problem, let me know and I will ride my bike to Wawa.
The car has a few MINOR problems but nothing too bad:
- The ashtray is stuck shut from when I accidentally spilled a beer on it. I think there is like $2 in change in there, so if you can open the ashtray, it’s all yours. (…)
- I bought the car from someone who replaced the original horn with a freight train horn. It is really loud and I don’t recommend using it, I have caused several accidents with it.
Besides these problems, this is a great starter car for any young driver! I actually call it the “ladies mobile” because the chicks dig it.
I am asking $6000 for it, but am willing to negotiate.
Thanks,
MikeFrom joey ******* to Me
hey thanks for the offer! $6000 sounds like a little much for that car. my dad only gave me a $4000 budget, would you be willing to take that?From Mike Anderson to joey ********
Son, you obviously have no experience in buying vehicles. When I said I was willing to negotiate, I meant I was willing to take more money for the car if you wanted to give it to me. Minimum is $6,000. Talk to your dad, and he will tell you that this car is a once-in-a-lifetime deal. He’ll be pissed if he saw that you passed this up.
MikeFrom joey ******* to Me
What the hell is wrong with you? That car is a piece of shit! Stop e-mailing my son, you moron.
Give me a dutch and a lighter I’ll spark shit
During production of the 1997 movie “Mimic,” American Humane Assn. representatives wandered through the Los Angeles set, ensuring that a herd of cockroaches was well taken care of. Licensed animal handlers were to follow state and federal anti-cruelty laws designed to protect the insects, which had been trained to swirl around actress Mira Sorvino’s feet. The roaches had to be fed at a certain time. They could only work a few hours each day. They could not be harmed.
At the same time, in studios in the San Fernando Valley, scores of other actors and actresses were working on movies. They put in long hours, commonly without meal breaks. They often worked without clean toilets, toilet paper, soap or water. More importantly, they were exposed to a host of infectious, and sometimes fatal, diseases.
These performers were making heterosexual adult films for an industry that in California is entirely legal, and utterly unregulated. Its producers take in several billion dollars annually from cable television programming, videos and Internet sites watched by a public whose appetite seems insatiable. They pay taxes, lobby in Sacramento and contribute to political campaigns.
Yet actors and actresses are discouraged from wearing prophylactics during filming because porn producers believe the public wants to see unprotected sex. So adult porn stars commonly engage in sexual acts with scores of partners, and then return each evening to their private lives–dating or having relationships with people across Southern California.
{ LA Times | Continue reading }
L.A. County health officials say at least 16 performers have been infected in addition to one reported this week. That brings the number of HIV cases in porn performers to 22 in the last five years.
‘I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.’ –Edgar Allan Poe
Children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder might appear rowdy and indisciplined, but they are actually trying to cope with a faulty perception of time.
What to most of us seems like a short stretch of time would drag unbearably for someone with ADHD, says Katya Rubia of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London. Her team’s research, reported this week, adds to a growing body of evidence for the importance of time perception in a wide range of psychological disorders.
ADHD affects around 5 per cent of children globally, most of them boys. Studies relating to the disorder have focused on patients’ short attention spans and impulsive behaviour. But ADHD is characterised by a shortage of dopamine, which is known to affect time perception, so Rubia and her colleagues wanted to know if this was the source of the kids’ problems.
artwork { Morris Louis, Lambda II, 1960 | acrylic resin on canvas }
So like a pimp I’m pimpin’, I got a boat to eat shrimp in
1. The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren’t drawing an audience — they’re inheriting an audience. People just want to go to a movie. They’re stung repeatedly, yet their desire for a good movie — for any movie — is so strong that all over the country they keep lining up. (…)
4. There are a lot of reasons that movies have been so bad during the last couple of years and probably won’t be any better for the next couple of years. One big reason is that rotten pictures are making money — not necessarily wild amounts (though a few are), but sizable amounts. So if studio heads want nothing more than to make money and grab power, there is no reason for them to make better ones. (…)
5. The studios no longer make movies primarily to attract and please moviegoers; they make movies in such a way as to get as much as possible from prearranged and anticipated deals.
‘Truth verifies itself.’ –Hegel
In 2005 Malcolm Gladwell published Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. It had an extremely seductive message: that complex decisions are often more accurate when made quickly, unconsciously, in the blink of an eye.
Gladwell described a man who could spot fake antiquities that had fooled all the experts in an instant and another who took only minutes to accurately assess the longevity of a couple’s relationship. It seemed that the received wisdom about complex decision-making was changing.
The claims Gladwell made for rapid cognition had their roots in a surprising line of evidence emerging in the psychological literature. Some experiments had begun to show the power of unconscious over conscious thought in complex decision-making.
In one experiment Dijksterhuis (2004) asked participants to choose between a series of apartments with different characteristics, but distracted one group to stop them thinking consciously about their decision. Compared with a group allowed to consciously deliberate, participants who had been forced to think unconsciously by the distraction made better decisions.
This finding appeared highly counter-intuitive and psychologists were soon hard at work trying to replicate it. The answers are now starting to come in. Three recent studies have re-examined Dijksterhuis’ findings to try and confirm whether or not the effect is real.
In the first a team at the University of New South Wales and the University of Essex describe four separate experiments searching for the fabled power of unconscious thought. One of these was a straight replication of Dijksterhuis’ study and the other three were variations on the theme. All four experiments pointed towards the same conclusion:
In stark contrast to the claims in the literature and the media we found very little evidence of the superiority of unconscious though for complex decisions.
‘And as you make glad/The hearts of the plants/When toward you they stretch/Their delicate arms.’ –Hölderlin
{ Imogen Cunningham and Twinka photographed by Judy Dater, 1974 }
