Mo Farah got held by US customs on suspicion of being a terrorist

We can live in hope
Also - in all honesty most white americans would be unlikely to recognise Mo, partly because he is famous in Britain, not the US and partly because of the cross-race effect.



If 90% of robberies are committed by people wearing glasses, i expect 90% of arrests for robberies to be people wearing glasses.
If 95% of vandalism is committed by teenagers, i expect police to be vigilant against youths carrying spray cans.
If 70% of a certain heinous act are committed by a certain hitherto unmentioned religion, i expect 70% of the random spot checks to be on members of that certain unmentioned religion. Not a case of bias, just statistics. Now if the % of that certain unmentioned religion is much lower than the other 30%, surely it is merely a matter of good sense to focus even moreso on that portion of society as the % reward/effort is greatly increased.

If you're fixing your spot check system so that you're pulling up a specific proportion of one group... it can't be described a random spot check system anymore.

Just basic statistics.

Yes it can... it selects the person from that group randomly. We define the randomness generally by giving criteria, i.e. we only spot check people, not monkeys. Further specialisation does not remove randomness, merely dilute its effect.

Oh, and in case you are wondering, I couldn't care less what they call it, only that they conduct it in the most efficient way.

Suppose you have two people - passenger X and passenger Y - and your brilliant profiling suggests Mr X is 100 times more likely than Mr Y to be a terrorist.
Your stats tell you to pick out Mr X for additional security checks 100 times more often than Mr Y.
But William Press says that would be a mistake.
He says if you take the square root of their risk it narrows the gap between them - so you check Mr X only 10 times more often than Mr Y.
That means you do not expend all your resources checking only one tiny group of people every time they turn up at an airport - and hardly ever checking people who pose a lower risk, but still a risk.

step one - redefine random to mean non random

There's a case for random checking and there's a case for profiling - really you want to be using some of both doing both if you want the best chance of preventing terrorists.

Which has already been done whichever way you look at it.

urmm, Obviously..... the square root point is mute, its merely an opinion.

Maybe not just that, hispassport probably hashis fullname as ' mohammed farah' you know what customs are like

Gotta love the rednecks. You not like us so you terrorist.

The other question I have is that does he carry his medals with him everywhere just to whip out in said circumstances??

well to a person who doesn't understand what random means, it may seem to be ripe for redefinition I suppose.

It's non obvious to most people, evidently this includes you.

PS I think you mean moot rather than mute.

You seem to have the rather misconceived perception that randomness must be dependant on all other factors, i.e. once any criteria has been applied then randomness cannot exist. That is wrong If it wasn't, your random search would be questioning Bill who works in finance and has never been on a plane is his life, but the random search at the airport found him.



Interesting leap of logic.. from somewhere.. and actually, at a rate of 70% a criteria ratio of sq_root would not be likely to be applied, a 70-30 ratio would be more logical for searches and would have a higher incidence of success. Only when the figures are shifted much further would an adjustment need to be performed.



YES - FORUM NAZI! (i can witre hwoveer i wsih you wlil lkiley sitll unerdtsnad - its a froum) .