A make-over for your correlation matrix

This morning I received a pleasant surprise in my inbox. Taiyun Wei , a student from Hunan, China emailed me about his/her R package, corrplot. This package can produce a number of pretty "stylish" visualization of your correlation matrices. Next time I need to present such a matrix of mine, I may give it a make-over from the "wardrobe" of Taiyun's functions. More of Taiyun's art-like statistical graphs can be found here.

Election-fraud detection

WSJ.com published an article on "Rise and Flaw of Internet's Election-Fraud Hunters: Benford's Law, Which Tests Numbers for Authenticity, Might Detect Vote-Rigging but Can't Prove It" that describes how one can use the limited information in the election count data to possbly detect fraud. Because of the limited nature of the data, some "model" has to be assumed, which can be wrong in the first place.