

The US Department of Defense isn't sure where Damascus is: statistical proof - verve
http://usvsth3m.com/post/59778656173/the-us-department-of-defense-isnt-sure-where-damascus

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curveship
I knew exactly where Damascus was, but they put me down as barely making it
inside their 200 mile cutoff, at 163 miles away. I think this is more about
bad UI design. I got a hand cursor rather than a pointer, making it difficult
to be precise, and I never noticed the zoom logo in the upper left.

Plus, with only 65 DOD responses, how significant is a deviation of only 4.5%
from the norm?

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Tloewald
I cheated and still got it wrong -- it's too hard to click on their map (I
doubt I was any more accurate at clicking on Arlington, VA where I live).

The Linux users doing so well against Mac users thing was interesting. I
wonder if it has to do with how it displays in browsers. Also -- did the
measure the delay in responses (e.g. how many people went and googled it
before clicking?)

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lhc-
I used the mousewheel to zoom in, making it much easier. I still was 140miles
away though.

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ddebernardy
Their app sucks. A geographical map without the political boundaries makes
little sense, and their zooming blows to a point that I'm surprised anyone
bothers with it.

Show me how many US citizens can place Kansas City or Atlanta on the same map.

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eli
I know it's tongue in cheek, but that's a pretty unfair headline.

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incision
This reminds of a situation years ago where a friend of mine downloaded a
bunch of archive material from a certain security disclosure site while at
work.

Within a day the site had proudly proclaimed that they were being
"investigated" by his agency.

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tingletech
"Texans were slightly worse than everyone else - 49.3% got it correct compared
to the world average of 52.5%." Let's see the baysean credible intervals...
sounds like that might not be statistically significant.

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chatman
> Mac users are much worse than Linux users .

I guess GNU/Linux users are smarter than everyone else across the world :-)

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Millennium
Within 100 miles: not as great as I'd like, but I do take some pride in the
fact that I got inside Syria (my guess turned out to be right around Homs).

That said, is it really appropriate to be using a physical map to find
political entities?

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aet
No, I couldn't even locate where I live on that map. :)

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kerpal
This seems kind of absurd. What are they doing, looking at an IP block
belonging to the DoD and then laying claim that the DoD doesn't know their
geography because a couple of people on their network did their quiz
incorrectly? Give me a break.

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VLM
The unanswered meta question is why it should matter.

They went into the game knowing they were doing a meaningless internet quiz,
so its going to be hard to abstract how intensely groups goof off when they're
goofing off (or propensity to cheat in a meaningless internet quiz using an
adjacent google maps tab), vs actual knowledge.

Oh well, result were reported to 3 sig figs using a whopping dozens of
samples, so it must be meaningful, LOL. When you know the denominator is
extremely small, you can play a math game trying to find small integer
fractions that divide out to about .493 and so on.

