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Students Guessed bin Laden's Hideaway?
Radio said the students put him in Abbot-town, but the original article is not so generous -Could Osama bin Laden have been found faster if the CIA had followed the advice of ecosystem geographers from the University of California, Los Angeles? Probably not, but the predictions of UCLA geographer Thomas Gillespie, who, along with colleague John Agnew and a class of undergraduates, authored a 2009 paper predicting the terrorist's whereabouts, were none too shabby. According to a probabilistic model they created, there was an 88.9% chance that bin Laden was hiding out in a city less than 300 km from his last known location in Tora Bora: a region that included Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was killed last night. A 300 km radius takes in about 70 million acres, or over 100,000 square miles. Not all that impressive abulls-eye. But maybe the radio editor saw an earlier version - *This item has been corrected. The figure initially reported was incorrect; the model predicted a 88.9% probability given the distance. Also, the model only predicts the probability of his being within a geographic radius of his last known location, not a specific city. The article has been corrected to reflect this fact. Expect some in the media (that don't do careful fact checking) to get this wrong. They would've, to embarass other Presidents - like - "Students Knew - Why Not Bush?" Posted by: Bobby 2011-05-04 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=321822 |