The US Department of Defense isn't sure where Damascus is: statistical proof

The US Department of Defense isn't sure where Damascus is: statistical proof(usvsth3m.com)

46 points by verve 12 years ago | 12 comments

curveship 12 years ago |

I knew exactly where Damascus was, but they put me down as barely making it inside their 200 mile cutoff, at 163 miles away. I think this is more about bad UI design. I got a hand cursor rather than a pointer, making it difficult to be precise, and I never noticed the zoom logo in the upper left.

Plus, with only 65 DOD responses, how significant is a deviation of only 4.5% from the norm?

Tloewald 12 years ago | |

I cheated and still got it wrong -- it's too hard to click on their map (I doubt I was any more accurate at clicking on Arlington, VA where I live).

The Linux users doing so well against Mac users thing was interesting. I wonder if it has to do with how it displays in browsers. Also -- did the measure the delay in responses (e.g. how many people went and googled it before clicking?)

lhc- 12 years ago | | |

I used the mousewheel to zoom in, making it much easier. I still was 140miles away though.

ddebernardy 12 years ago |

Their app sucks. A geographical map without the political boundaries makes little sense, and their zooming blows to a point that I'm surprised anyone bothers with it.

Show me how many US citizens can place Kansas City or Atlanta on the same map.

eli 12 years ago |

I know it's tongue in cheek, but that's a pretty unfair headline.

incision 12 years ago |

This reminds of a situation years ago where a friend of mine downloaded a bunch of archive material from a certain security disclosure site while at work.

Within a day the site had proudly proclaimed that they were being "investigated" by his agency.

tingletech 12 years ago |

"Texans were slightly worse than everyone else - 49.3% got it correct compared to the world average of 52.5%." Let's see the baysean credible intervals... sounds like that might not be statistically significant.

chatman 12 years ago |

> Mac users are much worse than Linux users .

I guess GNU/Linux users are smarter than everyone else across the world :-)

Millennium 12 years ago |

Within 100 miles: not as great as I'd like, but I do take some pride in the fact that I got inside Syria (my guess turned out to be right around Homs).

That said, is it really appropriate to be using a physical map to find political entities?

aet 12 years ago | |

No, I couldn't even locate where I live on that map. :)

kerpal 12 years ago |

This seems kind of absurd. What are they doing, looking at an IP block belonging to the DoD and then laying claim that the DoD doesn't know their geography because a couple of people on their network did their quiz incorrectly? Give me a break.

VLM 12 years ago |

The unanswered meta question is why it should matter.

They went into the game knowing they were doing a meaningless internet quiz, so its going to be hard to abstract how intensely groups goof off when they're goofing off (or propensity to cheat in a meaningless internet quiz using an adjacent google maps tab), vs actual knowledge.

Oh well, result were reported to 3 sig figs using a whopping dozens of samples, so it must be meaningful, LOL. When you know the denominator is extremely small, you can play a math game trying to find small integer fractions that divide out to about .493 and so on.