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<\/p>\nSee, the problem with random searches of people in airports is that it’s wholly ineffective.\u00a0 What are the odds of finding someone carrying an explosive in a carry-on that is undetectable by a the x-ray machine using random searches?\u00a0 Well, if TSA searches 1 in 1000 people that come through security and a terrorist has cleverly disguised the explosive device as a laptop, cell phone, hair brush, camera, music box with a cute little dancing ballerina, or anything other than an easily recognizable tangled mess of wires and explosive putty, it’s practically 0.\u00a0 It could be as high as me winning the lottery (I don’t buy tickets).<\/p>\n
Even if you could search someone or something with a 100% chance of finding hidden objects, the odds of selecting the right person are minimal.\u00a0 Statistics are full of things like “risks of over-reliance” and “representative samples” and “expected error rates” and other phrases that all boil down to the simple truth: You can’t sample for pinpoint precision.<\/strong><\/em><\/span> Yeah, that’s bold, italic and underlined.<\/p>\n You can sample with a certain degree of precision when attempting to find out how people across a nation are planning on voting, and sometimes Dewey does win; but polls are only as reliable as the pollsters, the sampling methodology and the number of people polled.\u00a0\u00a0 You can often predict the outcome of a two-outcome vote by sampling only 1000 people of any large population.\u00a0 That is, if the poll shows that one is a clear winning beating the margin of error (+\/- 5% at that sample size (and people answer truthfully and actually vote, etc.)).<\/p>\n But to get a degree of certainty that you would need to find a single dangerous device in a population of 1.8M (that’s how many people flew through O’Hare this holiday season, according to some random TV show I was watching while getting a pedicure), you’d have to sample …. math is hard.\u00a0 But my understanding is that it’s most of them.<\/p>\n Yup, freedom gropes for million people.<\/p>\n What are we really looking for?\u00a0 Weapons?\u00a0 Can’t hijack a plane anymore; armor and locks on those cockpit doors solved that problem.\u00a0 That was a no-brainer, BTW.\u00a0 Hurrah for locks and armor on cockpit doors.\u00a0 Intelligent security features.\u00a0 Mythbusters has proven that a firearm won’t cause explosive decompression (someone used science!)\u00a0 So weapons doesn’t mean the plane comes down.<\/p>\n Explosives?\u00a0 Know what finds explosives?\u00a0 Dogs.\u00a0 Well trained dogs are far more amiable than an unwanted hand down your pants.\u00a0 Know what else does?\u00a0 Little white cotton swabs and some chemicals.\u00a0 Yeah baby.\u00a0 Explosives are smelly and dirty.\u00a0 You are more likely to find an explosive with a dog or a swab for an explosive than by searching a bag in a 30 second search where you never even opened the other pocket of my backpack, TSA agent.<\/p>\n Now I know no-one is listening to my advice.\u00a0 But in these days of concern over the economy and big-government, I have to ask, are these new measures cost effective?\u00a0 Tons more TSA agents standing around chatting with other TSA agents (They’re working?\u00a0 They look like they are just standing there chatting.)\u00a0 Machines that can see your junk.<\/p>\n I’m sure a well-trained dog is way cheaper than a backscatter machine.\u00a0 Heck, I’d pitch in for the white cotton swabs.<\/p>\n So, for those of you in charge of designing security for the TSA, how about a statistics class?\u00a0 I’ve only had two, and I can figure it out.\u00a0 And I wasn’t really paying attention in the first class.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" See, the problem with random searches of people in airports is that it’s wholly ineffective.\u00a0 What are the odds of finding someone carrying an explosive in a carry-on that is undetectable by a the x-ray machine using random searches?\u00a0 Well, if TSA searches 1 in 1000 people that come through security and a terrorist has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.justmichelle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.justmichelle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.justmichelle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.justmichelle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.justmichelle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/blog.justmichelle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76,"href":"https:\/\/blog.justmichelle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions\/76"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.justmichelle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.justmichelle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.justmichelle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Sampling is stupid.<\/span><\/h1>\n