Tuesday, May 3, 2011

UCLA - Better At Geography Than Football


From Politicalwire.com

A UCLA geography class predicted in 2009 that there was an 88.9% chance that Osama bin Laden was hiding out in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was killed on Sunday, Science Insider reports.


"Based on information from satellites and other remote sensing systems, and reports on his movements since his last known location, the students created a probabilistic model of where he was likely to be. Their prediction of a town was based on a geographical theory called 'island biogeography': basically, 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."

Harvard, MIT, Cal Tech and Stanford...what were they teaching in their geography departments?