We've long been intrigued with Benford's Law and its potential for Analytic Journalism.  Today we ran across a new post by Charley Kyd that explains both the Law and presents some clear formulas for its application.

An Excel 97-2003 Tutorial:

Use Benford's Law with Excel
To Improve Business Planning

Benford's Law addresses an amazing characteristic of data. Not only does his formula help to identify fraud, it could help you to improve your budgets and forecasts.

by Charley Kyd
July, 2007
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(Follow this link for the Excel 2007 version.)

Unless you're a public accountant, you probably haven't experimented with Benford's Law.

Auditors sometimes use this fascinating statistical insight to uncover fraudulent accounting data. But it might reveal a useful strategy for investing in the stock market. And it might help you to improve the accuracy of your budgets and forecasts.

This article will explain Benford's Law, show you how to calculate it with Excel, and suggest ways that you could put it to good use.

From a hands-on-Excel point of view, the article describes new uses for the SUMPRODUCT function and discusses the use of local and global range names.  [Read more...]

"Unveiling the Beauty of Statistics Posted: 11 Jul 2007 03:01 AM CDT By Jesse Robbins I presented last week at the OECD World Forum in Istanbul along with Professor Hans Rosling, Mike Arrington, John Gage and teams from MappingWorlds, Swivel (disclosure: I am an adviser to Swivel) and Many Eyes. We were the "Web2.0 Delegation" and it was an incredible experience. The Istanbul Declaration signed at the conference calls for governments to make their statistical data freely available online as a "public good." The declaration also calls for new measures of happiness and well-being, going ...   more »