Mass & Benford’s Law
Here in Spain it’s usual that a part of the mass is what we call the ‘cepillo’ (donations). How much is the total ‘collection’?. If we assume no notes are handed over and we can’t sumise the coin value for its ‘clinck’, one of the possibilities we have in order to estimate the total collection is:
1) Count the number of coins based on the number of ‘clincks’.
Sup. 1 ‘clinck’ = 1 coin
2) Consider Benford’s Law to estimate the distribution of the coins.
|
Coin Starts with |
Probability of occurence |
|---|---|
| 1 | 30.1% |
| 2 | 17.6% |
| 3 | 12.5% |
| 4 | 9.7% |
| 5 | 7.9% |
| 6 | 6.7% |
| 7 | 5.8% |
| 8 | 5.1% |
| 9 | 4.6% |
Here in Europe we have coins of 1c, 2c, 5c, 10c, 20c, 50c, 1 EUR, 2 EUR. So, the previous table could be re-written (n.b.: guesstimation):
|
Coin |
Probability of occurence |
|---|---|
|
1c, 10c, 1 EUR (Simple Average = 37c) |
54.1 % |
|
2c, 20c, 2 EUR (Simple Average = 74c) |
31.7 % |
|
5c, 50c (Simple Average = 27.5c) |
14.2 % |
Other possibility is to wait until the end of the fiscal year and expect your Parish will make available the collection figures and try to estimate a weighted average for a normal Sunday. And we’ll be having better information, since the method is quite flawed, starting for the distribution of coins in the pocket may follow a uniform distribution, plus the simple averages used in the second table don’t make any sense. However, this is a starting point.
Disclaimer: I attended a Catholic School, I even tutorised church lessons for two years while in High School; I’m very respectful to any religion, including Catholicism, whenever they are respectful to the rest. This was just an exercise of applying OR to another normal aspect of life.
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I already live 500 years ahead;…
…I already live in an Idiocracy. I don’t watch too much TV, regretfully not even my beloved ‘IT Crowd‘, ‘Discovery Channel’, ‘History Channel’, CNN (Spanish version), other news, and some stand-ups (‘monólogos’ in Spanish), so I had to find out about "Idiocracy" (the movie) thanks to ‘Soy Geek‘. It seems I don’t have to regret that much have had no such notice of the movie, since the box office was such low they took it out inmediately from the screens (that is, not much advertising on this masterpiece); this is what I call a ‘death by success’: yes, it was a success, they anticipated the future in such a way we should be categorise the movie as a ‘reality show’ rather than ’sci-fi’ (that’s why everyone hated the movie!!!).
From OR perspective what really liked was to see the Gaussian Curve to show the military listening to the doctor that was preparing the experiment the guy he’d choosen to be frozen was ‘AVERAGE‘. He damned really was (that point where average equals median equals mode)… until he awakes… the distribution has changed… and he’s now in the upper tail!!!, ‘King of the World’!!!.
Morale: No matter how you’re, you’ll always be who you’re in comparison to others.
Hey!, No one told us Statistics was a good subject for ‘morales’!. I personally don’t like this morale.
