What Arne Duncan was (maybe) thinking in his letter to teachers
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My guest is Aaron Pallas, professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He writes the Sociological Eye on Education blog—where this post first appeared—for The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, non-partisan education-news outlet affiliated with the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media.
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UCLA students came close to finding bin Laden
Five students at the University of California at Los Angeles and two geography professors actually came close to figuring out where Osama bin Laden was hiding more than two years before he was killed by U.S. special forces.
How did they do it? According to the university’s website, students taking a class called “Rmote Sensing in the Environment” used remote sensing data, high-resolution satellite imagery and an analysis of life characteristics to figure out where he was most likely to be hiding.
Professors Thomas Gillespie and John Agnes developed a probability model that pointed to to a Pakistani city 230 miles from Abbottabad, the place where bin Laden was actually located on Sunday. The model nevertheless predicted that “there was an 88.6 percent chance that Bin Laden would be found in the area where Abbottabad is located,” the website said.
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