Monday, June 20, 2016

Remembering Orlando

Orlando is reeling. Here it is in more tranquil times: Lake Eola Park downtown, the site of many vigils this past week.

Brian Resnick and Javier Zarracina from Vox have a cartoon explaining mathematically that predicting a mass shooting, like Pulse, is beyond our abilities. They consider a prediction that is 99% accurate in detecting a lone mass shooter. That shooter, hiding within a group of 1000 people, could be labeled by such a prediction, but that same prediction could label another 9 law abiding folks as potential threats.
If such a prediction scheme was used for the the 323 million people of the US, we could have a false positive group of over 3.2 million!

No comments: