Finally got around to seeing the live-action “Death Note” movie. Was a bit different from what I expected, pretty good story. I’ve never read the comics or seen the anime but I thought it would be cheesy and it was more along the lines of a psychological thriller.
The hero in the story, at least in the beginning, is a talking macbook pro that uses statistical modeling to find criminals :D
This is something I think should be done more in real life. Pal Kedrosky did some basic analysis to see whether the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme could have been caught by testing the numbers for obvious fake number distribution. No dice, but I bet some more sophisticated methods would have run up red flags.
The unfortunate truth is that the best and brightest minds in statistical analysis were probably all working for the trading firms and hedge funds, at salaries much too high for the justice department to cover.
