I saw a geographer on TV in February of 2009 – I had made a note of it and searched for the file to get the date. He was talking about a method used to study endangered species by studying environments. As an exercise, he and a colleague had their students do a study to approximate the location of a certain most wanted person who was found last weekend. I remember him as much for how cool I thought his description of the processes involved in being a geographer were as for the ideas he had about where a particular person might be hiding.
This link is to a short article on the Science magazine site: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/05/geographers-had-calculated.html?ref=hp
I couldn’t remember where exactly he said the likely hiding place was, but apparently the analysis came up with a pretty good assessment. It wasn’t an exact prediction, and it was only done as a practical exercise for the students, but one that seemed to me to be worthy of further investigation.
I’m not really surprised there wasn’t much made of this at the time. It’s not a well known science and the existing methods have a proven track record, are better understood (so they’re more effectively used) and this was a system that was never designed to find an individual person. They could just as easily have been off by a thousand miles.
Still, I think it’s a pretty cool science.
