Bayes’ Theorem and the The Search for Missing Planes
In 2009, when Air France Flight 447 disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean, mathematician Colleen Keller on Metron went to work using Bayes’ Theorem to develop a probabilistic framework that was aimed at identifying where the fallen plane might potentially be. The beauty of Bayes’ theorem is that “it is a very short, simple equation that […]
Leading Generators and Your Most Sensitive Queries
The link below leads to an article recently published by the Atlantic, detailing the ways in which “lead generators” are tracking people’s queries on search engines and using them against them. To further explain, many think of online search engines like google to be sites of anonymous queries. This is far from true – if […]
Google’s PageRank Algorithm
In class, we spent about a week discussing an algorithm for ranking the relevance of web pages to search terms. We found that to properly rank pages according to their relevance, it is necessary to examine the pages linking to search results, ranking these “hub” pages according and giving them a score related to how […]