Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Be Nice To Teachers--They May Know Where bin Laden is?

Long-time readers of this blog will remember my reference two years ago to the studies by UCLA geographers trying to determine the whereabouts of bin Laden using scientific methods. The team never heard from our intelligence agencies but now they are hearing from all the media outlets. Dr. Thomas Gillespie thought his students did such a great job in creating a probabilistic model that he submittted a write up of the project to the MIT International Review.

According to the 2009 study, the students figured there was a 88.9% chance that bin Laden was hiding out in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Thomas Gillespie and his colleague John Agnew assigned the project to undergraduate students as a way to teach the use of remote sensing data from satellites to study ecosystems. Based on this information and reports on bin Laden's last movements since his last known location, the students created a model of where he was likely to be. Their prediction of a town was based on a theory called "island biography". the idea is that a species on a large island is much less likely to go extinct following a catastrophic event than a species on a small one. The students figured that bin Laden would not be in a small town because people would eventually report on him.

The students then zeroed in on the Pakistani border town called Parachinar. They then predicted the exact building he would be in by making assumptions about his height, a fence, privacy and electricity. Then they developed their probabilistic model and came up with his final destination. And voila! Abbottabad.

Gillespie thinks bin Laden made a mistake in building an ostentatious house for the town. Or Maybe it was being next to the best golf course in Pakistan.

You can read about this in the latest Science Magazine and the MIT International Review.

The neat thing is that you can use their work to save endangered species, particularly birds.

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