1. “It is clear that one thing”: Coupling 1950, 84.
2. “[The] power of accurate observation”: The full quote referred to the fashion for real objects as stage props on the London stage of the 1890s: “Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.” Shaw was writing in The World, July 18, 1894.
3. “A good magician”: Sept. 13, 2012, Twitter post on @danguterman.
1. Required to wear neckties; 400 ºC, assistant left vinyl gloves in oven: David Hagelbarger interview, Nov. 27, 2012. Lucky 1989, 51, gives a slightly different account.
2. Read and think: David Hagelbarger e-mail Nov. 21, 2012. He read The Design of Switching Circuits, published 1951, by William Keister, Alistair E. Ritchie, and Seth H. Washburn.
3. Article on a computer composing music: Coupling 1950.
4. A year before Cage’s experiments: Christian Wolff gave Cage a copy of the I Ching in 1951.
5. “One may, for instance”: Coupling 1950, 84.
6. “The strategy of the machine”: Hagelbarger 1956, 3.
7. “Did I put on a red tie this morning?”: Lucky 1989, 53.
8. “No scientist or engineer will fail to recognize”: Lucky 1989, 53.
9. “You should do something on that”: Gertner 2012, 196.
10. Founding document: Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner called it “possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master’s thesis of the century.”
11. “told me I was married to a brilliant, brilliant man”: Gertner 2012, 121.
12. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”: Shannon 1948.
13. “We hope that research in the design”: Shannon 1955, 448.
14. Short film about Theseus: Gertner 2012, 140. As far as I can tell, the film is not presently on YouTube.
15. Lego block version of ultimate machine: See www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKsP4vuTg2c
16. “My characterization of his smartness”: Gertner 2012, 143.
17. Story about EEG machine: Lucky 1989, 53.
18. 65 percent success: See chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/links/pdf/chapter6/ 6.19b.pdf
19. “discussed from the game theoretic angle”: Shannon 1953.
20. Hirzebruch and outguessing machine: Schroeder 1992.
21. Description of mechanical scorekeeper: See Shannon 1953 and Lucky 1989, 53.
22. “To give an idea of how much intellectual activity”: Hagelbarger 1956, 3.
23. “The three machines were plugged together”: Shannon 1955, 452; Hagelbarger 1956, 4.
24. “Why build such a machine”: Hagelbarger 1956, 1–2.
25. “It is possible, if not probable”: Hagelbarger 1956, 3.
26. “It is extremely difficult to carry out”: Shannon 1953.
27. Stanford Research Institute and psychic research: See Wikipedia entries for “SRI International” and “Stargate Project.”
28. “My daughter got this in the mail”: Duhigg 2012.
29. “I had a talk with my daughter”: Duhigg 2012.
30. Visa predicts divorces, default rates: Ayres 2006, 36.
31. “With the pregnancy products”: Duhigg 2012.
32. UPS initial public offering prices: See money.cnn.com/1999/11/10/companies/ups/.
33. Mark Madoff story: Tim Reynolds, interview, January 19, 2011.
1. McDonald’s yacht, checked suits, gin, and pistachio ice cream: “Zenith” in Time, June 29, 1936.
2. Interest in pirate gold: “McDonald v. the Adenoidal” in Time, Feb. 4, 1946.
3. WATCH ABSENCE OF PEOPLE ON STREET: “Zenith” in Time, June 29, 1936.
4. Zenith radios in movies: Zenith had a particularly close relationship with MGM and Columbia studios. The Three Stooges short in which Curley gets hit with a Zenith is “Punch Drunk.” See Cones, Bryant, Blankinship 2003, 188–192; also the discussion at www.antiqueradios.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=981751.
5. DEVELOPED IN PARAPSYCHOLOGY LABORATORY AT DUKE UNIVERSITY: The cards regularly turn up on eBay with photos.
6. “the brief rage of women’s clubs”: “Radio Patterns and Peepholes” in Time, Sep. 5, 1938.
7. MacDonald invited Rhine aboard yacht: Horn 2009a, 60.
8. “nothing stops a crowd on a street”: Horn 2009a, 61–62.
9. Day and time of Zenith show: The most complete sources for details of the show are Cones, Bryant, Blankinship 2003 and Goodfellow 1938.
10. “a program so DIFFERENT”: Cones, Bryant, Blankinship 2003, 184.
11. “The broadcasts of The Zenith Foundation have been planned”: Cones, Bryant, Blankinship 2003, 184.
12. “Narrator. It is best to write down your impression”: Goodfellow 1992, 130.
13. Woolworth’s sold out of ESP cards: Horn 2009a, 62.
14. 150,000 decks printed: Horn 2009a, 63.
15. Fifteen weeks, over a million responses: Goodfellow 1992, 130.
16. 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 to one: Goodfellow 1992, 140.
17. Goodfellow’s description: Bechtel-Wherry and Womack 2009, 17.
18. McDonald canceled the show: The Cones, Bryant, and Blankenship book says the last broadcast was March 27, 1938. Goodfellow gives results through January 2, 1938.
19. “pricked Telepath McDonald’s iridescent bubble”: “Radio Patterns and Peepholes” in Time, Sep. 5, 1938.
20. “full of loopholes”: Horn 2009b.
21. Problems with ESP cards, B.F. Skinner demonstration: Horn 2009a, 62–63.
22. “Rhine and Goodfellow keep me supplied”: Horn 2009b.
23. Thornton Fry’s interest, ESP machine, Rhine’s visit: Horn 2009a, 192.
24. “Mr. Townsend, do you know”: Chapanis 1999, 139.
25. Design of kitchen stove controls: Chapanis 1999, 202–203.
26. “Use all the numbers”: Chapanis 1995, 1350.
27. “more random”: Chapanis 1995, 1355.
28. 17, 28 percent accuracy: These figures are derived from those in Table 5 in Chapanis 1995, 1359.
29. Chapanis was spy: Chapanis 1999, 226.
30. “persons not acquainted with mathematics”: Reichenbach 1949, 153.
31. “there is no way of combining details”: Wagenaar 1972, 69.
32. Favored letters common in English: Rath 1966, 100–101.
33. Hill homework assignment: Hill 1998.
34. 90 percent success rate: Maue 250.
1. “The client was very serious about this”: Vogel 2005.
2. “There was some discussion”: Vogel 2005.
3. $17.8 million: Auction prices are quoted inclusive of the auction house commission. The paintings went for $15.9 million plus a 12 percent commission.
4. “I went in scripting only my first throw”: Sean Sears interview, Nov. 19, 2012.
5. “I didn’t worry about what I was going to do”: Interview on CBS Morning News, Oct. 27, 2008. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecNuYjHl1I8.
6. Monaco wears dark sunglasses: See www.mtvu.com/shows/spring-break/ rock-paper-scissors/rps-contestant-jonathan-naco-monaco/.
7. Hand tells: In 2012 the University of Tokyo unveiled an RPS-playing robot, Janken, that works entirely by hand tells and has a 100 percent win rate. Its machine vision is able to recognize the human sign as it’s being formed and then respond with the winning countersign in one millisecond.
8. Lacan’s classroom experiment: Geoghegan 2011, 191n.
9. “If I was behind, I would play”: Sean Sears interview, Nov. 19, 2012.
10. RPS outguessing apps on the Web: There’s a good one on the New York Times site, www.nytimes.com/interactive/science/rock-paper-scissors.html. It offers two modes, “novice” and “veteran.” “Novice” starts playing randomly and gradually learns to exploit your unconscious biases. “Veteran” incorporates statistics on 200,000 previous games to give it a head start.
11. Preference for rock enhanced: See Walker and Walker, 101–102, a semifacetious treatment that claims a 90 percent success rate!
1. Educators told to vary location of right answer randomly: See Haladyna, Downing, Rodriguez 2002, for an overview of professional thinking about how multiple-choice exams should be constructed.
2. Physical Geology quiz: This is a true-false quiz accompanying chapter 17, online at highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072402466/student_view0/chapter17/true_or_false_quiz.html.
3. “none of the above” answers right 65 percent of the time: Quizzes for Physical Geology by Plummer, McGeary, and Carlson.
4. Longest answer is most likely to be correct; see, for instance, the University of Minnesota’s “How to Be Test Wise” at www.sass.umn.edu/pdfs/111%20StudySkills/Exams/Objective%20Exams/How%20To%20Be%20Test%20Wise%20%20C%204.5.7.pdf.
5. “To turn right, you should be in”: www.dol.wa.gov/driverslicense/practicetest.html.
6. A word used to describe a noun: Burton, Sudweeks, Merril, Wood 1991, 21.
7. Rated multiple-choice strategies: For each test, I determined how often a strategy would have succeeded when applied to the applicable questions and divided its success rate by the expected rate for random guessing with that number of choices. I then averaged the relative success rates among all the tests. The averaged result was greater than 100 percent for each effective strategy (190 percent for picking “none of the above” or “all of the above” answers). The benchmark, random guessing, would be rated 100 percent. I subtracted that from each strategy’s value to get the improvement (90 percent for “none of the above”–style answers).
8. Won’t give the question: In case you’re curious, the question is
Choose the word or set of words that, when inserted into the sentence, best fits the meaning of the sentence as a whole.
Barbara McClintock’s systematic examination of corn demonstrated the transposition of genes, a finding that overturned entrenched beliefs and proved that ------- study may produce brilliant insights and ------- change.
This was “Question of the Day” for September 25, 2012 on the College Board website, sat.collegeboard.org/practice/sat-question-of-the-day?questionId= 20120925&oq=1.
9. “distractors”: Haladyna, Downing, Rodriguez 2002, 317.
10. Pick most familiar answer: This is known as favoring “cognitive fluency.” Daniel Kahneman talks about using it on a driver’s written exam in Kahneman 2011, 62.
1. New Jersey introduced pick-number lottery: Thaler and Ziemba 1988, 172.
2. “if the system were good and this became well known”: Chernoff 1981, 172.
3. 7 is most popular pick: Thaler and Ziemba 1988, 169; Ziemba, Brumelle, Gautier, Schwartz 1986.
4. Fortune cookie wins: See www.lotterypost.com/news/112702; Garcia 2005.
5. Lost numbers played in lottery: See Wikipedia entry for “Mega Millions.”
6. Least-played numbers: Ziemba, Brumelle, Gautier, Schwartz 1986.
7. “Dynasty” could use system: MacLean, Ziemba, Blazenko 1987; Thaler and Ziemba 1988, 169.
8. Almost never pays off while you’re drawing breath: This idea is given mathematical form in the “Kelly criterion” of John L. Kelly, Jr. See Poundstone 2005.
9. “I figure you have the same chance”: This appears in many Internet quote archives. See www.goodreads.com/quotes/85215-i-figure-you-have-the-same-chance-of-winning-the.
1. “There was one opponent who would serve to my backhand”: Fisher interview, Oct. 15, 2012.
2. “rhythm”: Fisher interview, Oct. 15, 2012.
3. Fisher read about outguessing machine: Fisher 2004.
4. “It’s very easy to become one-dimensional”: Walker and Wooders 2001, 1522.
1. 60 percent of major-league pitches are fastballs: These are calculated from the figures in Kovash and Levitt 2009. Somewhat different percentages are given in Weinstein-Gould 2009, 6.
2. Study of 3 million major-league pitches: Kovash and Levitt 2009.
3. .001 OPS worth 2.16 extra runs: Fox 2006, cited in Kovash and Levitt 2009.
1. University of Amsterdam psychologists in a bar: Vedantam 2001.
2. Rules said goalie can’t move until the kick: Chiappori, Levitt, Groseclose 2002, 1140.
3. 90 percent chance of score: Chiappori, Levitt, Groseclose 2002, 1141.
4. Studies of soccer penalty kicks: Chiappori, Levitt, Groseclose 2002; Palacios-Huerta 2003.
5. Van Breukelen, Lehmann crib sheet: See Wikipedia entry for “Penalty Kick.”
6. Humans look right; influences design of supermarkets: Poundstone 2010, 150.
1. 1982 experiment at Northwestern University: O’Neill 1987.
2. Hess experiment with pinup picture: Hess 1965, 46.
3. “interesting possibility…”: Hess 1965, 53.
1. Klingon name site may harvest passwords: Nick Berry interview, Jan. 8, 2013.
2. Stolen passwords sell for $20: Perlroth 2012.
3. 1 percent of passwords can be guessed in four tries: Weir, Aggarwal, Collins, Stern 2010, 168. This statistic refers to passwords of seven characters or more.
4. Program claims it can check 2.8 billion passwords a second: See www.elcomsoft.com/eprb.html#gpu.
5. “Simply, people can no longer”: Schneider on Security blog, June 17, 2005. www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/06/write_down_your.html.
6. RockYou.com passwords compromised: Siegler 2009.
7. Twitter hacking: Zetter 2009.
8. “Protect the hell out of it”: Berry interview, Jan. 7, 2013.
9. Palin, Romney accounts hacked via security questions: Palmer 2012.
10. Berry’s most-used PINs: Scherzer 2012.
1. “the first number that comes to mind”: Kubovy and Psotka 1976, 291.
2. “the first number that comes to mind”: Kubovy and Psotka 1976, 293.
3. “The subject is placed in a paradoxical situation”: Kobovy and Psotka 1976, 294.
4. “the unique position of being…”: Kubovy and Psotka 1976, 294.
5. “School ‘Fine,’ U.S. Teens Report”: www.theonion.com/articles/school-fine-us-teens-report,236/.
1. “I went to the library that night”: Nigrini interview, Sep. 21, 2011.
2. Newcomb discovered same law earlier: Newcomb 1881.
3. “That the ten digits do not occur”: Newcomb 1881, 39.
4. piggybacked on the fame of Bethe physics paper: See Goudsmit 1977.
5. “is really the theory of phenomena”: Benford 1938, 572.
6. Chapanis made bar charts: Chapanis 1995, 1352.
7. “was the anti-Benford”: Nigrini interview, Sep. 21, 2011.
8. Bought IRS tax return packages; use of VAX computer: Nigrini interview, Sep. 21, 2011.
9. One of Nigrini’s first believers: Nigrini interview, Sep. 21, 2011.
10. “Bingo, that means fraud”: Berton, 1995.
11. Team of crooks with pooled data make fraud harder to detect: Nigrini interview, Sep. 21, 2011.
12. “It wasn’t the first digits that caught her”: Nigrini interview, Sep. 21, 2011.
13. Fast-food manager made up sales; no number ending in 00: Nigrini, talk at Saint Michael’s College, April 1, 2008.
1. Insurance salesman who changed receipts: Nigrini interview, Sep. 24, 2011; also Nigrini 2012, 172.
2. “This is usual for government”: Nigrini interview, Sep. 24, 2011.
3. SEC charges against Health Maintenance Centers: Complaint: SEC v. Health Maintenance Centers, Inc., filed in U.S. District Court, Seattle, Jan. 17, 2002. See www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/comp17335.htm.
4. “Well, thank you very much”: Kneale 2009.
5. Enron bump: See Nigrini 1993.
6. AIG and AOL TimeWarner losses: Nigrini 2012, 209.
7. 5 percent criterion is arbitrary: It’s based on the probability of a normally distributed variable exceeding the mean by two standard deviations.
8. IRS use of digit analysis: See Berger and Hill n.d., 2.
9. “The income tax agencies of several nations”: New York Times, August 4, 1998.
10. Random audits resumed in 2011: See www.michaelplaks.com/irs-problems/random-audits.
11. Inland Revenue finding: Nigrini interview, Sep. 21, 2011; Nigrini 2012, 79.
12. Tax evasion based on tax-table steps: Nigrini 2012, 193–6. Nigrini used tax data from 1978, when a typical tax step was $7.
13. Sobyanin study of Russian elections: Sobyanin and Suchovolsky 1993.
14. magic black box: Deckert, Myagkov, and Ordeshook (n.d.).
15. “There has been fraud of course”: Quoted in Deckert, Myagkov, and Ordeshook (n.d.), 4, from Moscow Times, Sep. 9, 2000.
16. Argument about crooks’ knowledge of Benford’s law: Nigrini 1993.
1. “I… was successful at the start”: Henriques 2011.
2. “When everyone is running around like a chicken”: Lux 2000.
3. Split-strike conversion strategy; experts couldn’t duplicate returns: Bernard and Boyle 2009.
4. 123 Procter & Gamble calls reported versus 20 traded: Patterson 2010, 63.
5. “concerned about lack of transparency”: Chew 2009.
6. Threat to Madoff investors: Whitehouse and Decambre 2008.
7. Fairfield Sentry returns less Benford-like than S&P 500, stocks: See discussion of this in Nigrini 2012, 259–265.
8. Madoff golf scores: Rampell 2008. All the scores had 8 as the first digit, and the most common was 84, which occurred six times.
1. “He was a rough player”: Barbara Tversky interview, July 8, 2008.
2. “You’re in a world all your own”: quoted in Tversky and Gilovich 1989a, 16.
3. “I went to talk to Amos about it”: Gilovich interview, Oct. 28, 2012.
4. “The Hot Hand in Basketball”: Gilovich, Vallone, Tversky 1985.
5. “Who is this guy?”: quoted in Gilovich 1993, 17.
6. “There are so many variables involved”: quoted in Gilovich 1993, 17.
7. “Please tell the stat man to get a life”: Gilovich interview, Oct. 28, 2012.
8. Hebrew University hot hand study: Neiman and Loewenstein 2011; Matson 2012.
9. Hot hand is not always a myth: McFall, Knoeber, and Thurman 2009.
10. “When your whole life is telling you one thing”: Gilovich interview, Oct. 28, 2012.
11. Si Stebbins arrangement: Si Stebbins was the stage name of William Coffrin, an American vaudeville magician, acrobat, and clown who died in 1950. See Schiffman 2005, 268.
12. “The beeps are coming in bursts”: Pinker 2011.
13. “To the untrained eye”: Feller 1968. The randomness of the London Blitz figures in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
14. “Who are you going to believe”: said in Duck Soup (1933).
15. Run of twenty-six blacks at Monte Carlo: See Wikipedia entry for “Gambler’s Fallacy.”
16. “People’s intuitions about random sampling”: Tversky and Kahneman 1971, 105.
17. Predicted future occupations: Kahneman 2011, 6.
18. Influential 1972 paper: Kahneman and Tversky 1972.
19. Cite Zenith experiments: Kahneman and Tversky 1972, 436.
20. “unlike the situation with elephants”: Lopes 1982, 630.
21. “Does belief in the hot hand matter for economics?”: Camerer 1989, 1257.
1. “Buttons” the guinea pig: Behrens 2010.
2. Rivals Super Bowl betting: Kaplan, Garstka 2001 notes that about $80 million was wagered on the Final Four in 1998, an amount comparable to reported Super Bowl bets.
3. No #1 team has lost to a #16 team in twenty-five years: Butler 2010.
4. “The authors of this paper”: Kaplan and Garstka 2011, 370.
5. Three top-performing brackets won 21 percent of games: Adams, “A Study of Two Pools.”
6. Too many choose #1 team: Butler 2010.
7. Metrick study of twenty-four pools: Metrick 1996.
8. “In spite of the publicity”: Tom Adams e-mail, Jan. 16, 2013.
9. 60 percent of Chicago brackets money losers: Niemi, Carlin, and Alexander 2008, 44.
10. “People tend to pick upsets early”: Butler 2010.
11. “I live in a Big Ten town”: Butler 2010.
12. “The pool was disbanded and then reorganized”: Tom Adams e-mail, Jan. 16, 2013.
13. “Last year the pool organizer”: quoted in Tom Adams e-mail, Jan. 16, 2013.
14. “No matter how successful you are”: Mather 2011.
1. Charles K. McNeil invented spread betting: Wikipedia entry, “Spread betting.”
2. Levitt suggests that bookies maximize profits: Levitt 2004.
3. 51.1 percent of NFL underdogs won: See www.onlinegambling.com/sports/american-football/betting-on-underdogs.htm.
4. betting on a home team increased 3.15 percent: Paul, Weinbach, Humphreys 2011, 10.
5. 57.7 percent of the time: Levitt 2004, 235.
6. 53.3 percent of the time; NCAA and NBA statistics: The 53.3 percent is computed from 46.7 percent, the fraction of games won by visiting favorites. See Levitt 2004, 236.
7. Looked at NFL games from 1985 to 2008: Wever and Aadland 2010.
8. Three-quarters of bettors pick favorites: Levitt 2004, 236.
1. SAG “best actor” won Oscar, too: Whipp 2012. I’ve updated the statistic to reflect Jean Dujardin’s dual win in 2012 and Daniel Day-Lewis’s in 2013.
2. Academy voters 77 percent male, 94 percent white: Horn, Sperling, and Smith 2012.
1. Primary and secondary offers: forteconsultancy.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/stopping-churn-in-its-tracks—proactive-retention-strategies-for-mobile-operators/.
2. “Real-time consumer insights”: See Neustar Information Services website, www.neustar.biz/infoservices.
3. “pinpoints a caller’s location within feet”: Neustar’s white paper, “Jenny Craig Overcomes Complex Store-Locator Technology Needs.” www.neustar.biz/information/docs/pdfs/casestudies/jennycraig_locator_casestudy.pdf.
4. Neustart scores consumers from phone numbers: Singer 2012 (which refers to the company by its previous name, TARGUSInfo).
5. “Knowing the bottom is more important”: Singer 2012.
6. Google Voice; *67 does not work with toll-free numbers: See productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/voice/getting-started—tips—tricks/AoEwD7udhAU.
7. “Why don’t you just give me these prices in the store?”: www.vons.com/ShopStores/Justforu-FAQ.page?#answer_3.
8. Vanek switched between Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts coffee: Clifford 2012.
9. Abandoned shopping cart strategy: Tuttle 2012.
10. Best Buy, Home Depot: Gladstone 2012.
11. 65 percent of shopping carts abandoned: Gladstone 2012.
1. Phoenix, Las Vegas gains; Case’s worry: Lazo 2013.
2. Friday listing sold for 99.1 percent of asking price: Tanaka 2013.
1. Close to $400 billion: Plunkett Research estimates $391 billion for 2012. See www.plunkettresearch.com/consulting-market-research/industry-and-business-data.
2. “Each year the prediction industry showers us”: Sherden 1998, 5.
3. “We reach the point”: Tetlock 2005.
4. Prediction tournament: “How to Win at Forecasting: A Conversation with Philip Tetlock,” edge.org/conversation/win-at-forecasting.
5. “mechanized ‘hugging booths’ ”: 2006 predictions, archived on www.faithpopcorn.com.
6. “a surge in popularity”: 2006 predictions, on www.faithpopcorn.com.
7. “will turn battlefield decisions”: 2011 predictions, on www.faithpopcorn.com.
8. “As the cost of genetic modification”: 2006 predictions, on www.faithpopcorn.com.
1. “I criticized all those who had concluded”: Cassidy 2007.
2. Floor trader could predict price movements: Niederhoffer and Osborne 1966, 897.
3. “Professional traders will recognize these rules”: Niederhoffer and Osborne 1966, 914.
4. Keeley told Niederhoffer to invest in Thailand: Cassidy 2007.
5. Half of today’s trading: Steinert-Threlkeld 2013.
6. Trading is hazardous to your wealth: Barber and Odean 2007.
7. DALBAR study on average investors: Richards 2010.
8. “People tend to be overconfident”: Nocera 2012.
9. $266 billion in mutual fund redemptions: Harris 2001.
10. Five to ten years of earnings: Graham and Dodd 1934, 452.
11. Analyst projections too high in nineteen years out of twenty-one: Sharpe 2002, 637.
12. “one might have thought”: Shiller 1996.
13. “Long-term investors would be well advised”: Shiller 2005, 187.
14. “Suppose it was demonstrated”: Bogle 2007.
15. Almost tripled money in ten best days: This is computed from the record gains on the Wall Street Journal’s site at online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3024-djia_alltime.html.
16. Half a percentage point a year: This is estimated from figures and charts in Stein and DeMuth 2003, 37–42.
1. $300 billion: This figure is taken from Light, Rutledge, Singleton 2011, which gives $255 to $300 billion as the size of the illegal football, basketball, and baseball betting market. Legal sports bets are a drop in the bucket. In Nevada they came to $2.8 billion in 2010.
2. $5 billion: This is a Federal Trade Commission estimate from a 2003 survey. I would imagine the figure is higher today. See www.ftc.gov/opa/2003/09/idtheft.shtm.
3. $54 trillion: Roxburgh, Lund, Piotrowski 2011, 13.
4. “Fate—monstrous and empty”: See Wikipedia entry for “O Fortuna.”