Getting at the Truth - Part 1

Mathematics has helped investigators in several major cases of
human rights abuses and election fraud. Among them: The 2009
election in Iran. A mathematical result known as Benford's Law
states that the leading digits of truly random numbers aren't
distributed uniformly, as might be expected. Instead, smaller
digits, such as 1's, appear much more frequently than larger
digits, such as 9's. Benford's Law and other statistical tests have
been applied to the 2009 election and suggest strongly that the
final totals are suspicious. Ethnic cleansing. When Slobodan
Milosevic went on trial, it was his contention that the mass exodus
of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo was due to NATO bombings and the
activities of the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army rather than
anything he had ordered. A team collected data on the flow of
refugees to test those hypotheses and was able to refute
Milosevic's claim in its entirety. Guatemalan disappearances. Here,
statistics is being used to extract information from over 80
million National Police archive pages related to about 200,000
deaths and disappearances. Sampling techniques give investigators
an accurate representation of the records without them having to
read every page. Families are getting long-sought after proof of
what happened to their relatives, and investigators are uncovering
patterns and motives behind the abductions and murders. Tragically,
the people have disappeared. But because of this analysis, the
facts won't. For More Information: Killings and Refugee Flow in
Kosovo, March-June 1999, Ball et al., 2002.