

Geography Students Pretty Accurately Predicted Osama Bin Laden's Location [pdf] - milestinsley
http://web.mit.edu/mitir/2009/online/finding-bin-laden.pdf

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makmanalp
[http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&client=safari&q=ab...](http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&client=safari&q=abbottabad+pakistan&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Abbott%C4%81bad,+Abbottabad,+Khyber+Pakhtunkhwa,+Pakistan&gl=us&ll=34.145446,73.221688&spn=0.033528,0.065875&z=15)

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.

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desigooner
Am 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.

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socillion
tl;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.

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camperman
But as they say, "these methods are repeatable and could easily be updated
with new information obtained from the US intelligence community on his last
known location."

If you add what we know now about Bin Laden's courier - obtained by the
intelligence community but naturally kept secret until now - their methodology
would have nailed it down to just a couple of buildings in Abbottabad. That's
very impressive IMHO.

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milestinsley
Here's the write up in Science Insider:
[http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/05/geographer...](http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/05/geographers-
had-calculated-81.html)

~~~
fluidcruft
Pfft. I could have predicted with 100% accuracy that OBL was on Earth. How
specific that prediction is, is a different matter entirely.

