Are We Safer When We are Not Biased?

While Rush Limbaugh blows steam as the right's "Chicken Little", hoping that President Obama will fail in everything he does, so that the "Magic Negro" isn't, a little known mathematical formula was released that shows us just how unimpressive racial profiling is, in terms of picking out the "bad guys" at airports.

This might cause Jack Bauer and those who follow his moves as if he weren't a fictional character on "24" to pause.

According to yesterday's New York Times, "Too great a dependence on profiling passengers by ethnicity or nationality is an ineffective way to conduct airport screening to catch terrorists, according to a statistical model for examining rare events."

William H. Press from the University of Texas at Austin wrote about the phenomenon: "Called square root biased sampling, it is a way to identify significant events that can be recognized when they are noticed but are otherwise lost in a sea of data. He uses it to find specific snippets of DNA in vast seas of genomic information."

Profiling is not the most effective way to screen passengers at an airport, especially when deciding whether to subject a person to a secondary search, being pulled out of the line at the security screening for further examination and questioning.

A simple calculus found the right combination of limited profiling and efficacy in discovering a viable suspect.

A simple calculus. See there was a reason for all of that math in high school, besides figuring out how much money we actually owe, how much we lost in the recent stock market collapse, and how much we will need in order to retire with the ability to eat something other than cat food and rice.