The Iranian Election

It’s a bit depressing to see how so many news sites only seemed to cover the Iranian situation because it happens to feature Twitter and Facebook. Election fraud is so old hat, I guess, that we need a new twist to drive interest.

Well, here’s an article about some election science that should be covered everywhere. The authors were apparently too busy to tweet, but they found the Washington Post just the same.

Update: here’s a blog roundup on #iranelection/Twitter that highlights the possibility that much of the so-called Twitter revolution is actually just ye old neocons up to their old tricks. Funny how TechCrunch fanboys (editors) are going ga ga over the fact that a neocon on FoxNews claimed twitter founders should get the nobel prize for keeping their servers running through the crisis. I’ll buy that for a dollar!

 

2 Responses to “The Iranian Election”

  1. It seems like the media loves to hype Twitter all the time now solely because it benefits them to do so, to the point that it’s gotten quite annoying.

    Thanks for posting this, it makes some very interesting points! Much more informative than some of the “news” about Iran on most news sites right now.

  2. Here’s another statistical take that hints at fraud, this time focused on the most-significant digit:
    http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227144.000-statistics-hint-at-fraud-in-iranian-election.html

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law
    “Benford’s law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way. According to this law, the first digit is 1 almost one third of the time, and larger digits occur as the leading digit with lower and lower frequency, to the point where 9 as a first digit occurs less than one time in twenty.”

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