Breaking Benford
Radiolab13 Nov 2020

Breaking Benford

In the days after the US Presidential election was called for Joe Biden, many supporters of Donald Trump are crying foul. Voter fraud. And a key piece of evidence? A century-old quirk of math called Benford’s Law. We at Radiolab know Benford’s Law well, and have covered it before. In this political dispatch, Latif and Soren Sherlock their way through the precinct numbers to see if these claims hold up. Spoiler: they don’t. But the reason why is more interesting than you’d expect.

This episode was reported by Latif Nasser.

Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Links:

Walter Mebane, “Inappropriate Applications of Benford’s Law Regularities to Some Data from the 2020 Presidential Election in the United States”


Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(652)

Staph Retreat

Staph Retreat

A strange brew that's hard to resist, even for a modern day microbe. In the war on devilish microbes, our weapons are starting to fail us. The antibiotics we once wielded like miraculous flaming swor...

20 Mars 31min

Return of the Flesh-Eaters

Return of the Flesh-Eaters

If a species is horrible enough, do we have the right to kill it forever? Seventy years ago, a nightmare parasite feasted on the live flesh of warm-blooded creatures in North America: the screwworm. T...

13 Mars 42min

Snail Sex Tape

Snail Sex Tape

In this episode, we consider a creature we often don’t think much about—the snail. And not just snails, but their sex lives. Which, as it turns out, is epic. There is persuasion and subterfuge, spaghe...

6 Mars 29min

Black Box

Black Box

In this episode, first aired in 2014, we examine three very different kinds of black boxes—spaces where we know what’s going in, we know what’s coming out, but can’t see what happens in-between. From ...

27 Feb 1h 5min

Gray's Donation

Gray's Donation

Before he was even born, Sarah and Ross Gray knew that their son Thomas wouldn’t live long. But as they let go of him, they made a decision that reverberated through a world that they never bothered t...

20 Feb 27min

Time is Honey

Time is Honey

In the early 2000s, Sunil Nakrani felt stuck. Back then, websites crashed all the time. When Sunil noticed this, he decided he was going to fix the internet. But after nearly a year of studying the ar...

13 Feb 38min

Kleptotherms

Kleptotherms

In this episode, we break the thermometer and watch the mercury spill out as we discover that temperature is far stranger than it seems. We first ran this episode in 2021: Five stories that run the ga...

6 Feb 44min

Song of the Cerebellum

Song of the Cerebellum

One spring evening in 2024, a science journalist named Rachel Gross bombed at karaoke. The culprit was a bleed in a fist-sized clump of neurons tucked down in the back of her brain called the cerebell...

30 Jan 42min

Populärt inom Vetenskap

dumma-manniskor
p3-dystopia
allt-du-velat-veta
kapitalet-en-podd-om-ekonomi
rss-ufobortom-rimligt-tvivel
rss-vetenskapsradion
rss-vetenskapsradion-2
rss-spraket
paranormalt-med-caroline-giertz
svd-nyhetsartiklar
det-morka-psyket
rss-odla
medicinvetarna
barnpsykologerna
naturmorgon
dumforklarat
sexet
rss-arkeologi-historia-podden-som-graver-i-vart-kulturlandskap
hacka-livet
rss-broccolipodden-en-podcast-som-inte-handlar-om-broccoli