John Allen Paulos has pointed out a problem with massive, untargeted wiretaps. To illustrate the problem, he sup-poses that one out of every million Americans has terrorist ties. Furthermore, he supposes that the terrorist profile is 99% accu-rate, so that if a person has terrorist ties, the profile will pick them up 99% of the time, and if the person does not have ter-rorist ties, the profile will accidentally pick them up only 1% of the time. Given that the profile has picked up a person, what is the probability that the person actually has terrorist ties? Dis-cuss how your answer affects your opinion on domestic wire-tapping. Source: Who’s Counting.
Compound Probability
Compound probability can be defined as the probability of the two events which are independent. It can be defined as the multiplication of the probability of two events that are not dependent.
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Probability theory is a branch of mathematics that deals with the subject of probability. Although there are many different concepts of probability, probability theory expresses the definition mathematically through a series of axioms. Usually, these axioms express probability in terms of a probability space, which assigns a measure with values ranging from 0 to 1 to a set of outcomes known as the sample space. An event is a subset of these outcomes that is described.
Conditional Probability
By definition, the term probability is expressed as a part of mathematics where the chance of an event that may either occur or not is evaluated and expressed in numerical terms. The range of the value within which probability can be expressed is between 0 and 1. The higher the chance of an event occurring, the closer is its value to be 1. If the probability of an event is 1, it means that the event will happen under all considered circumstances. Similarly, if the probability is exactly 0, then no matter the situation, the event will never occur.
John Allen Paulos has pointed out a problem with
massive, untargeted wiretaps. To illustrate the problem, he sup-
poses that one out of every million Americans has terrorist ties.
Furthermore, he supposes that the terrorist profile is 99% accu-
rate, so that if a person has terrorist ties, the profile will pick
them up 99% of the time, and if the person does not have ter-
rorist ties, the profile will accidentally pick them up only 1% of
the time. Given that the profile has picked up a person, what is
the probability that the person actually has terrorist ties? Dis-
cuss how your answer affects your opinion on domestic wire-
tapping. Source: Who’s Counting.
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