(FORTUNE Magazine) – GROWTH SITUATION

You have possibly been reading news stories lately about horrifying backlogs at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC now has about 100,000 unresolved cases in its pipeline, more than double the 1990 level. It naturally wants more money and a larger staff to get the backlog down, and its new chairman, Gilbert F. Casellas, is also talking bravely about increasing the agency's productivity.

Unmentioned in any of the news stories read around our house is the possibility of doing something to curb EEOC imperialism. One reason the backlog keeps growing is that ever since the agency was founded (by the 1964 Civil Rights Act), its lawyers have insistently pushed at the boundaries of the law, seeking more expansive interpretations of behavior deemed discriminatory. They are still doing it when the courts let them.

So right in the midst of all the backlog stories, there was this gem out of Chicago about the agency's latest theory on age discrimination. It seems that the local Francis W. Parker School has a 22-step formula linking teachers' pay to work experience. In 1989, being strapped for funds, the school decided not to pay more than $28,000 when an opening arose for a drama teacher. The formula, combined with the salary cap, resulted in the nonhiring of a 63-year-old job candidate, who charged age discrimination and sued with the EEOC's support.

Observing that veterans are generally higher paid than novices, the agency cloudily reasoned that low salary caps had a "disparate impact" on older workers- and therefore violate the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. An Illinois district court threw out the agency's case, and now the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected it as well. But it took years of litigation to repel the imperialists, who are collectively not making much of a case for more funding.

GREAT MOMENTS IN DISTRIBUTION

Even though a defendant sold 2,000 "hits" of LSD at one time, this doesn't prove that she was engaged in a "conspiracy to distribute" the drug, says the Virginia Court of Appeals in reversing her conviction.

There was no evidence that she knew the buyer intended to resell the drug rather than consume it himself. "No testimony was introduced to prove [the buyer's] level of personal consumption ."

The Seventh Circuit held last year that a defendant can't be convicted of "conspiracy to distribute" based solely on the fact that he sold over 500 grams of cocaine in one deal.

-From an article in Lawyers Weekly USA.

NOTORIONS OF 1994

It being that time of year again, one calls for a drum roll and prepares to cry out the names of businessland's ten most notorious characters of 1994. As usual, each bizperson's glitz count is certified and quantified by the number of articles mentioning the guy in the Nexis database during the year ended December 15. Femmes are of course eligible for berths on this lustrous list (now in its fourth year), but none have ever made it, owing to evidently intractable sociobiological forces and Keeping Up's unwillingness to accept that Madonna is in the same line of work as Warren Buffett. In deciding who is and isn't a real bizperson, we generally draw the line at actors even if (like Clint Eastwood) they have their own production companies or (like Paul Newman) manufacture politically correct comestibles. We have also decided to knock off all folks who were once part of the Fortune 500 universe but have recently been morphing themselves into wonks and politicos, which takes care of Ross Perot, who would have been No. 2 this time (and was No. 1 in each of the past two years).

Following are the new big ten and their 1994 Nexis citations:

(1) Steven Spielberg (10,997). Producer Steve began his ascent to five-figure status with a couple of thousand Nexis stories mentioning him in proximity to "Jurassic," and ended the year as postulated top dog on the soi-disant "Dream Team," an emerging entity whose other big barkers are Disney refugee Jeffrey Katzenberg and music mogul David Geffen, both of whom were close but not quite notorious enough to make this year's list.

(2) Rupert Murdoch (7,813). This guy comes at you from a lot of different directions, with 1994 news stories dwelling inter alia on his Fox Network's snatching of numerous NFL games from CBS, on NBC's challenge to Fox as a "foreign-controlled" (and therefore illegal) network, on Rupert's aggressive price cutting in the London newspaper wars, and on various comings and goings at high-fashion Mirabella and other properties of Murdoch Magazines.

(3) Bill Gates (5,311). The richest chap in America kept getting written about in connection with the upcoming version of Microsoft's Windows software, also because he settled an antitrust suit with the Justice Department, then triggered more monopoly muttering by negotiating to buy Intuit Inc., a big marketer of personal-finance software.

(4) Bud Selig (5,160). The sports-page sluggers went after the Milwaukee Brewers veteran like a 3-and-0 pitch when bad luck led to his being acting commissioner of baseball in a strike season.

(5) James McDougal (4,607). The Arkansas S&L character whose Madison Guaranty was at the center of Whitewater shenanigans will become even more famous when the Republican investigations start. (6) Ted Turner (4,570). An easy way to generate ink is to own CNN and the Atlanta Braves, lose a bundle promoting the Goodwill Games in Russia, and keep trying to take over NBC.

(7) Donald Trump (3,545) made news partly by continuing to try getting out from under his mountain of debt, partly by starting up a riverboat casino, partly by having a spouse whose personal publicist was a foot fetishist convicted of stealing Marla's shoes.

(8) Barry Diller (3,310). Always at the center of barely comprehensible deals, Barry started out the year trying to take over Paramount, later was hoping to merge his own QVC cable network with CBS and run the whole show, was recently fretting over big QVC losses, is eternally part of the chatter about cable home shopping.

(9) George Steinbrenner (3,214) spent the year kvetching about such matters as Yankee Stadium's neighborhood (unsafe) and relief pitcher Jeff Reardon's hair (too long), also drew coverage as part of a pigskin group interested in buying the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

(10) Michael Eisner (2,753). Disney's CEO has another way to get coverage: have quadruple bypass surgery while intensifying competitive struggles with other Disneyites like Dream Teamer Katzenberg.

Not anyplace on this list: a CEO of an auto, steel, oil, airline, or commercial banking company, or Warren Buffett (998).

ASK MR. STATISTICS

Dear Oddsist: Columnist Jimmy Breslin recently did a piece in Newsday stating that there was something wrong with his brain, and at first I thought he was going to finally explain the 1969 episode wherein he actually ran for president of New York's City Council on a silly-party ticket that had fellow scrivener Norman Mailer as the candidate for mayor, but then it turned out that Jimmy was more interested in discussing various probabilities associated with his newly discovered aneurysm. An aneurysm is an abnormal swelling in the wall of an artery. Jimmy's was in the brain, and the doctor had told him there was a 1% to 3% chance each year that it would burst and kill him or worse, so the smart thing to do was operate and get rid of it. On the other hand, the doc also mentioned that there was a 10% chance of "something going wrong" in the operation. This language would cause the undersigned and his brain to stand pat if similarly situated. Would the science of statistics support us?

LOVE MY CORTEX

Dear Head Case: The case for an operation is somewhat age-sensitive, but at 64 Breslin is still young enough so that it would plainly make sense. An otherwise average white male who has reached that age but has an additional 2% a year mortality risk (taking the midpoint of the doctor's range) would have an 80% chance of discovering himself still alive after four years if he did not have the operation-and a 77% chance if he did have it. But in later years, the survival rates increasingly favor those who opted for the surgery. The chances of reaching age 80 without having had it are only 32%; with the surgery, they are 41%. We rate it a no-brainer. Dear Statmeister: What can the science of statistics tell us about the lousy luck of the Miami Dolphins, who are 9-5 and looking toward the playoffs as I write in mid-December but who would have done even better except for certain maddening events. As is well known among males, NFL games are preceded by coin tosses: The referee flips, and a representative of the visiting team guesses whether the coin will come up heads or tails. If he guesses right, his team can elect to receive the opening kickoff; otherwise, it will start off on the defensive. The Dolphins' problem is that they hardly ever win the toss. When the team is on the road, linebacker Bryan Cox makes the call. He always calls tails, and he has been wrong six times out of seven. Overall, the Dolphins have won only four of the 14 tosses, and as a result they keep starting out behind; in 11 of their games, they have trailed at the end of the first quarter. The New York Times-writing at a time when the Dolphins were only one for 11 on tosses-registered astonishment at this record and stated, after conferring with statisticians at Florida International University, that the odds against any such record were 186 to 1. Why is my team such a flop at coin-tossing?

READY TO FLIP

Dear Flip-Flop: The question you raise presents certain points of interest, but the dire Dolphins data you cite are less astonishing than they might appear. Your own team was certainly unlucky, but not to any record-setting extent: One would in fact expect fewer than five successes in 14 flips 9% of the time.

Arguably more fascinating is the double-barreled question of (a) how it could be that an institution with the fantastic resources of the Times would feel obliged to go to a university statistics department for a calculation that the average American bookie could do in five seconds and (b) how after checking with the profs the paper managed to come up with a not-quite-right answer. It is true that there is one chance in 186 of only a single correct call in 11 trials-but that means the odds against the event are 185 to 1. About the same as the odds against the Times printing a correction.