Geography Students Pretty Accurately Predicted Osama Bin Laden's Location [pdf]
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Re: Geography Students Pretty Accurately Predicted Osama Bin Laden's Location [pdf]
#2[deleted]
Re: Geography Students Pretty Accurately Predicted Osama Bin Laden's Location [pdf]
#3Here's the write up in Science Insider: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/05/geographer...
Re: Geography Students Pretty Accurately Predicted Osama Bin Laden's Location [pdf]
#4Am I missing something here? Their theory predicts Parachinar as the city of hiding where as he was captured in Abottabad.
Parachinar is at the border of Afghanistan - Pakistan, closer to Peshawar and Abottabad is closer to Kashmir & Islamabad.
Edit: w.r.t. the 270km radius, 270 km is a big distance for the region. It doesn't seem that big within the context of USA but for the region of Afghanistan/Pakistan, you're quite spread out within that distance and amongst a significant population with similar buildings in cities/towns of the region.
Re: Geography Students Pretty Accurately Predicted Osama Bin Laden's Location [pdf]
#5[deleted]
Quite the contrary... these people hacked information for some goal, which is EXACTLY the essence of HN.
Re: Geography Students Pretty Accurately Predicted Osama Bin Laden's Location [pdf]
#6http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&client=safari&q=ab...
Some 400 km off. I don't know if I can call that a good result. What was anyone supposed to do with this info? Invade Pakistan and run around searching in a 1000km radius? I don't think so.
This reminds me of the "how many piano tuners are there in x" sort of questions. The result can be surprisingly accurate but there are so many underlying assumptions that if any one of them were wrong (which you have no way of knowing in advance) then your result is off by a large amount.
Re: Geography Students Pretty Accurately Predicted Osama Bin Laden's Location [pdf]
#7tl;dr:
> Our results based on his last know location in 2001 indicate that there is a 98% probability that he is in Kurram, Pakistan, and an 86.6% probability that he is within one of the seven FATAs.
> ... The hypotheses that Osama bin Laden is: (1) located in the Kurram region of Pakistan, (2) located in the city of Parachinar, and (3) at one of the three hypothesized buildings.
all 3 of those were false. Abbotatabad is in a different region, albeit being nearby geographically. The 89.9% accuracy quoted in the Science Insider article (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2510513) is based on the 270km distance from last known location, as shown in figure 2, with the theory that he is most likely to stay close to that point.
Re: Geography Students Pretty Accurately Predicted Osama Bin Laden's Location [pdf]
#8Re: Geography Students Pretty Accurately Predicted Osama Bin Laden's Location [pdf]
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite the contrary... these people hacked information for some goal, which is EXACTLY the essence of HN.
Does +/- karma persist after a comment is deleted? It seems to be becoming common practice to delete comments that are downvoted.
The user who made that comment (and subsequently deleted it) was http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=anon1231213
As you can see, their karma is -2, but there are no comments on their profile. This would suggest that karma does persist after a comment is deleted.
...unless I'm missing something.
Re: Geography Students Pretty Accurately Predicted Osama Bin Laden's Location [pdf]
#10Here's the write up in Science Insider: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/05/geographer...
Pfft. I could have predicted with 100% accuracy that OBL was on Earth. How specific that prediction is, is a different matter entirely.