

This Class of Geography Students Found Bin Laden's Hideout Long Before the CIA - aak
http://www.good.is/post/ecosystem-geographers-predict-bin-laden-s-hideout/

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hugh3
This article makes no damn sense. Not only does it fail to explain the
nonsensical-sounding theories which they used to predict it, it also says:

 _According to a probabilistic model they created, there was an 80.9% chance
that bin Laden was hiding out in Abbottabad, Pakistan_

Wow, really? But...

 _To be clear: the class identified the nearby city of Parachinar as being the
most likely hideout._

So there was an 80% chance he was in Abbotabad, but they considered it more
likely that he was in Parachinar?

The whole thing sounds about as useful as the psychics who will no doubt come
out of the woodwork over the next few days to say that they too correctly
predicted UBL's hiding spot.

~~~
gwern
It's a bastardized summary of a technical paper; this is not a surprise if
you've ever read _USA Today_ trying to explain what XML is.

That said, they link the paper so you can read it for yourself. So far it
makes a lot of sense to me; turns out you can eliminate a great many buildings
and locations by selecting a few characteristics.

For example, bin Laden's height, need for dialysis, entourage, and defensible
walls rules out all but 16 structures in the Kurram region
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurram_Agency>) if you look for only 5 out of
the 6 criteria. (Page 4 of PDF.)

As for your specific criticism; you're quite right. The OP has misstated his
link, which says:

> 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.

That's much more sensible, and does follow directly from their geographical
theory - if you think of animals as random particles moving in Brownian
motion, there is an exponential dropoff. Random walks don't go very far.

On a side-note, they were largely right about the room characteristics. The
compound bin Laden _was_ in was in fact, a tall building with multiple
structures with more than 3 rooms and walls over 3 meters tall
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Osama_bin_Laden_hideout.jp...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Osama_bin_Laden_hideout.jpg)).

In fact, the only characteristic I see missing is 'trees for cover when
outside' (few trees in
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Osama_bin_Laden_hideout.jp...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Osama_bin_Laden_hideout.jpg)
) and arguably, the need for aerial cover was met by being so near the
military academy. (I've seen reports and speculation that the helicopters had
to spoof Pakistani transponders to avoid triggering air defenses.)

~~~
hugh3
Y'see, that's much more sensible... an 89% chance that he was within 300km of
his last known location, given that he can't exactly get on a plane, sounds
way more plausible than an 89% chance that he was in one particular medium-
sized Pakistani town.

(Of course it's also unfalsifiable to say that he has a 90% chance of being
somewhere...)

And yet the nature of the internet news cycle is such that I'll be reading for
weeks to come that a group of geographers correctly predicted two years ago
that he was in Abbottabad and that anyone with google maps could have found
him ages ago. Sigh.

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marshray
It looks like a nice little research project that didn't take itself too
seriously, but the article reads to me like "he's probably a few tens of km
inside Pakistan because it's not too far from where he was last seen 10 years
ago, go look in these three buildings".

Of course, the prevailing view was that he was somewhere in the border region
and he turned out not to be in any of those buildings.

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bdhe
Here's Terry Tao's Buzz post about this:
[https://profiles.google.com/114134834346472219368/posts/2Lwv...](https://profiles.google.com/114134834346472219368/posts/2Lwv5FnHWMd)

Largely along the lines of a couple of comments that were already mentioned
here.

~~~
hugh3
An excellent exploration of the art of understatement:

 _The derivation of the model also seems rather ad hoc in nature (fitting a
power law to the assumption of a 99% intensity at Tora Bora and a 1% intensity
at Washington DC)._

Yep, that sounds pretty arbitrary! (I'd also be amazed if it was only 99 times
less likely for him to be in Washington DC than Tora Bora...)

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joejohnson
I thought Osama was confirmed dead by Prime Minister Bhutto three years ago?

~~~
hugh3
Do you have a link to go with that? Because... well, apparently not.

~~~
joejohnson
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnychOXj9Tg>

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th0ma5
duplicate of <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2510757>

