Nonsense. Quads are ideal for turning one person into a center of a decent radius search at a rate much higher than can be done alone. Duration is as long as you have a pocket full of batteries and a vehicle (anything... a 4x4 or a dirt bike will do) available to charge them, which could be days at a time. My quad can hit just under a hundred, so it's way faster than it needs to be for any sensible perception of what you (or it) is looking at. You have no idea what you're talking about. I've been out on hunts for people many times here in Montana, and I can tell you if I'd had the quad then, I'd have a much better idea of what was around me, a lot sooner. Many searches are of relatively small areas, and often by small groups. Anything that helps... helps!

You're still making conclusions that aren't based on the data. There's nothing in their project that identifies why individuals, or the group, might be better than the experts, and my question is about whether the individuals they've identified ARE even better than the experts or if they've simply discovered the right side of a Bell curve (a la Niven).

There have been studies that have shown that crowds, under certain circumstances, can be somewhat resistant to bias. In other circumstances this is obviously not the case. Examples include antivaxers, the number of Americans who believe the moon landings were hoaxes and anything featured on Oprah, Dr Oz or Dr Phil. "The wisdom of crowds" is a catchy name for a special case of the observation that the signal to noise ratio increases by the square root of the number of measurements that are averaged. It doesn't have anything to do with bias.

Would you really, though? You want to lose your home, your job, perhaps your family, your freedom, your ability to be further employed, have your credit rating destroyed, end up on various lists like no fly, felon, etc... do you really?

It's pretty easy to be upset about this, but the reality of putting your head into the gears of legal process -- even when you demonstrably and obviously on the side of sanity and righteousness -- is that your head gets squashed and the gears are only further lubricated by your juices. I speak from experience.

If you'd really sacrifice pretty much everything on such matters of principle, my hat is off to you. Truly. But when people go in all bright eyed and bushy tailed to do battle with the abject moron we collectively call the justice system, they invariably come out much sadder, wiser, poorer, lower class, jobless, and without having accomplished a damn thing WRT their original intent. So you might want to give that another serious think. You can do more good out here, with resources intact, than you can speaking to a lawyer through bars and learning that your "way out" is, at best, a plea bargain that compromises you for the rest of your life. Even if they promise you it won't.

Three years is quick?

The author of the bug probably introduced it accidentally. It's easy to do. The author of the special wrapper code in openSSL that purposely prevents newer versions of malloc from doing memory checking that would have revealed this bug a little more suspicious.

curious: where is "over here"?

Because it's fucking stupid. And harmful. And inflexible. And consequently puts people at risk. Because it looks exactly like rules for the wrong reason, inability to deal with what the world actually is, entrenched reasoning for circumstances no longer extant...

You know, things like that. Stupid shite.

o We only made X categories because we're imagination-free government drones

o We can't imagine dealing with anything not in our predefined categories

o Yet your application doesn't fit a predefined category, so we put it where it doesn't fit

o So you can't fly

o And little Mary Jane will die of exposure.

o Now, about next year: We'd like a budget increase for our yearly Vegas party, yeah?

Well, with respect to r/c search flyers, one of 'em is "gravity." :)

You don't want an rc plane anyway. You want an rc quadcopter or hexcopter. Able to hover perfectly stable at any assigned altitude, able to carry cameras and sensors that aren't streamlined without seriously affecting the flight profile, still have decent OTG speeds for this kind of application, able to go down *between* trees if there's just a little room and it has a decent camera system, good complement of nav/running lamps, etc.

The *last* thing I'd want to go hunting for something would be an rc plane or unstabilized heli.

Expert forecasters also average their perceived probabilities from lots of different sources. There's nothing magic about a small town pharmacist doing it. The summary and a lot of Slashdotters seem to like to play up the anti-expert angle, but it's certainly not relevant to my OP, and I doubt the project has produced any evidence for your conclusion.

Or does it mean the experts were correct 55% of the time and the top guessers, I mean, super-predictors, were right 56.5% of the time? That would be the normal meaning of a percent difference.

Imagine everything you see is projected onto a hemispherical dome

Everything *we* see is put on our retina upside down and with a hole in it, and gets really crappy at the edges. Brainz. No wonder zombies like 'em. :)

You should read the article. There's a little section about "wisdom of crowds" and then the balance of it is about particular people they've selected as being super accurate, such as the pharmacist they use as an example. If you take enough people and ask them to guess randomly, some of their guesses will line up very nicely with the answers to any questions. Purely by luck. If you cherry pick these randomly lucky guessers and don't properly allow for your cherry picking in your calculation of expected performance, you will be misled badly.

A different version of the same phenomenon confuses people who try to write classifiers. I have a friend who was trying to classify patients who did or did not have a disease. He put a bunch of measurements into the classifier, trained it, and look, it was 100% accurate! He was suspicious, so he put in a bunch of randomly generated numbers, trained it, and look, it was 100% accurate! Of course, neither version did any better than chance on data it hadn't been trained on.

In statistics it's called an unbiased estimator. Most people know it as an average. It doesn't have any particular link to crowds and the behaviour is very well defined. It does, however, require that the individual estimates be wrong in a random way.

You managed to pick exactly the same example I did.