Wednesday, May 4, 2011

UCLA undergrads predicted where Osama bin Laden was hiding — 2 years ago

More than two years before President Obama declared “mission accomplished” on Osama Bin Laden, a class of UCLA geography undergraduate students accurately predicted the world’s former most-wanted terrorist hideout location.

Led by professors Thomas Gillespie and John Agnew, the students used satellite imagery and geographical theories to create a probabilistic model, which gave an 89.9 percent chance that Bin Laden was hiding out in Abbattabad, Pakistan — the exact location where US Navy SEAL operatives successfully found and killed the al-Qaeda leader on Sunday.

The students accomplished their work so well that their study was published in the prestigious MIT International Review under the title “Finding Osama bin Laden: An Application of Biogeographical Theories and Satellite Imagery.” (PDF)



Did Geographers Predict Where Bin Laden Would Be? Not Exactly


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