For Rich's team...

For Doug: C'mon meat, throw me that weak ass shit...

Alas, if only I could eat chicken...

Farm to Fridge...

Thoughts on planning home defense...

Batting Practice video for upcoming season...

Lunch at the Pub...well, maybe next week

Benford's law...

"here are the distribution of first digits vs. Benford's law's prediction for total assets and total revenues."

In other words, corporate numbers behaving precisely as predicted by a purely statistical law! But here is where it gets truly strange. In her words, "Deviations from Benford's law have increased substantially over time, such that today the empirical distribution of each digit is about 3 percentage points off from what Benford's law would predict. The deviation increased sharply between 1982-1986 before leveling off, then zoomed up again from 1998 to 2002. Notably, the deviation from Benford dropped off very slightly in 2003-2004 after the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley accounting reform act in 2002, but this was very tiny and the deviation resumed its increase up to an all-time peak in 2009." Said otherwise, the chronological change in this parameter allows some starting conclusions. As the Economist notes, "This regularity has been used to identify cases of fraud in public documents. Someone cooking books is likely to choose numbers somewhat randomly, generating a distribution of digits far more uniform than Benford's law would predict. Any divergence that shows up sets off alarm bells in those looking for funny business." Visually presented, it looks as follows:

Yes, book-cooking, in the purest statistical "correlation does not imply causation" has hit an all time high! Granted we doubt any regulator, least of all the corrupt criminal SEC, whose own Benford's law chart would look like a lie detector test hooked up to Jamie Dimon during a conference all, would admit this evidence in a court of law, but deluded investors who believe that corporation are being always truthful with data and reporting should probably be aware that that is certainly not the case. Per the Economist: "As Ms Wang notes, this isn't decisive proof of misbehaviour. It is suggestive, however, of the possibility that systematic number-fudging has been on the upswing in recent decades. Moreover, it's an excellent use of clever statistical analysis to provide a new perspective on an economic question." Considering the surge in white collar criminality over the past 3 decades, especially among financial firms, and the fact that this "index" is now at all time highs, we would hardly be as politically correct about the issue as the Economist. But that's us. As for next steps, "What types of firms, and what kind of executives drive the greatest deviations from Benford's law? Does this measure do well in predicting known instances of fraud? How much of these deviations are driven by government deregulation, changes in accounting standards, and traditional measures of corporate governance?" All these are fascinating questions that Wang will answer in the immediate future and we will advise readers when she does. For now, the take home message is this: if it appears that "they" are lying to you, "they" probably are. Just run a numerical regression analysis to prove it.

Mortamins....

SOME vitamins make you stronger. Others make your eyesight sharper, your hair shinier and your nails glossier. Now, though, it seems there are also vitamins which might give you prostate cancer or cut your life short in other ways. Two separate studies published this week sound a cautionary note for vitamin gobblers. Researchers funded by America’s National Institutes of Health set out to study whether vitamin E might decrease the risk of prostate cancer. To their astonishment, they discovered that it seems to do the exact opposite. The findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, come on the tail of a big cancer-prevention trial. As part of that trial’s follow-up, Eric Klein of the Cleveland Clinic and his colleagues examined the effects of taking vitamin E supplements. They found a 17% increase in prostate cancer for men who took the vitamin, compared with those who took a placebo. The mechanism for this pernicious effect is unclear, and indeed the findings themselves are controversial. But the paper is the latest in a stream of damning research. Perhaps even more disquieting were results published a few days earlier in the Archives of Internal Medicine. In a study that looked at the health and habits of nearly 40,000 women over two decades, Jaakko Murso of the University of Eastern Finland showed that older women who admitted to taking multivitamins died at higher rates. This was despite the fact that the women who took supplements also tended to be slimmer and boast lower blood pressure than the women who did not. (Since supplement munching was self-reported, Dr Murso's study did not have a placebo control.) None of this is to say that people must immediately bin all vitamin-containing substances; vitamins are, after all, essential nutrients. Moreover, untangling cause and effect in studies like these is notoriously tricky. And it does not help that the boffins themselves seem baffled by the results. That said, they ought to give pause to the most voracious supplement poppers. The Centre for Responsible Nutrition, an American group representing the industry which caters to them, promptly condemned the research as “a hunt for harm”. That response was predictable—more than 150m Americans take vitamins each year, spending about $27 billion on the stuff.

Something for Edmund...and a cultural void

Government regulation may be the only way...or, don't smoke, duh.

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/email/html/8936scene3.html