After boarding a couple dozen flights in the last few months, I am an old hand at the opt-out and full body pat down. One doesn’t have to be a statistician or a mind-reader to figure out why underpaid TSA hands “randomly” pick me for the millimeter-wave scanner. These workers are so used to passengers robotically (and tiredly) doing exactly what TSA tells them to do that it’s an opportunity to remind that there is such a thing as “a right to opt out.” There’s also a certain humor in the government running its latex-gloved finger around my jeans waistband before I board a domestic flight when I’ve paid for and used the United States Global Entry program, “a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) program that allows expedited clearance for pre-approved, low-risk travelers upon arrival in the United States.” Government waste that’s a-ok with certain parties because it’s done in the name of national defense obviously. We are all safer from my pre-approved, low-risk behind being patted down for everyone to see when fake pilot IDs and uniforms are now enough to bypass airport security.

So, why the security theater?

A new study published by the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes shows that despite the ton of taxpayer dollars spent on decision analysis and modeling the likelihood of terror events, it’s all for naught because the [voting] “public will largely neglect normative likelihood considerations when judging the actions of policy makers.” In other words, because “people have particular difficulty dealing with probabilistic information for small likelihood events, like those for terrorist attacks” and politicians are more interested in the votes of these people than preventing terror, actual threats with higher likelihood of occurrence go ignored.

Schneier himself brings this back to the TSA and their airport practises: “Are they doing their best to mitigate terrorism, or are they doing their best to ensure that if there’s a terrorist attack the public doesn’t blame the TSA for missing it?”

When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir? – Thomas Bayes, British mathematician and Presbyterian minister

The New York Times reviews Sharon Bertsch McGrayne’s The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy.

Three topics I love to think about rolled into one: anything at all to do with Enigma, geophysical parameter estimation, and the craziness behind not changing your mind given the increasing likelihood of evidence to the contrary.

336 pages long, so I kinda expect it to be a quick Winchester-esque romp through probability estimation, but any book that shows how much we use Bayes’s theorem in almost all fields of science and engineering and everyday is alright by me. In fact, Bayes is one of the first things taught in any reservoir characterization class. Quantifying unknowns is tricky business and the subsurface is inherently unknown at best, so it is to every reservoir geophysicist’s advantage to use as many data sets as possible in parameter estimation and assign uncertainties to each input – seismic attribute volume, velocity model, core sample, log curve, etc. – as early and often as possible. (Paper: Bayesian reservoir characterization by Luiz Lucchesi Loures)

The reviewer states that “a serious problem arises, however, when you apply Bayes’s theorem to real life.” What exactly that is supposed to mean? As pointed out earlier, Bayes’s theorem is used in very real-life areas as nebulous as cryptography and the search for fossil fuels. Also, news flash: every undertaking has associated human agendas. So, why can Bayes not be implemented in studies of global climate change and autism? But on one thing we agree – the sad fact that there are many of us, scientists or not, who are “wedded to [our] priors.” So, and I guess this goes for everyone, absorb and digest as much information as possible, stop to think about or research the likelihood of what you learned and try not to let confirmation bias get in your way.

Good luck. (Get it? Good luck? Never mind.)

Door County, Wisconsin | July 2011

From Bloomberg:

President Barack Obama is proposing expanding tax credits and a reverse boot camp to help veterans find jobs and adjust to civilian life as part of an effort to curb veteran unemployment.

I hear “Reverse Boot Camp” and this recent Oatmeal graphic is all I see.

This image belongs to Matthew Inman a.k.a The Oatmeal who is awesome.

I’d make a great drill instructor.