Peer feedback on big idea #2 (Andrew Carlson)

Keep

The statistics presented here are a good addition, "9 out of 10 cases are false positives." The personal account of you missing your flight is a good opening, as we can relate to your frustration.

Cut

Although I do like the mention of you missing your flight, there are some details that I don't think help. Does it matter that is happened on Oct. 19? You ask, "How many times have you seen a traveler being called out for an additional search after the body scanner and a TSA agent find nothing?" I would avoid the reliance on people's own anecdotes. If they have had experiences like this, they will recall them when you're talking about the statistics.

Can you claim that there will be "no more long lines in the security check?" In my understanding, you're trying to reduce the rate of false positives for individual manual inspections. These inspections don't block other people from proceeding through security, so I don't see how this would affect the length of the lines. Rather, it reduces the number of outliers that end up taking much longer. But I don't think the median amount of time waited would change.

Rearrange

The cohesion is good. I wouldn't change any of the ordering.

Add

I think it would strengthen your proposal if there was some precedent for the assumption you're making—that people who fly more often are less likely to commit violent acts on airplanes. Is this a valid assumption? That is, if V_i is the event that flier i does something violent, and h_i is the number of times that they have flown, does it hold that P(V_1|h_1 > h_2) < P(V_2|h_1 > h_2)?

I think you could add some more explanation about what Never-Miss-Your-Flight is exactly. I get that is modulates the sensitivity of the body scanner. But is it a piece of software that runs in the scanner? Something in the passport scanner? Both? Or is it a separate device entirely?

Overall

I would appreciate if such an approach was implemented in airports. I myself was manually inspected—quite thoroughly I might add—because of a knee brace I had to wear following a sports injury. Its clear that there is potential benefit, but be cautious about overstating those benefits.

w201rdada / portfolio-NathanNam