The NSA Should Use All That Data For More Accurate Airport Waiting Times

Monday, January 20, 2014 - 07:10 in Mathematics & Economics

Want a more accurate estimate of waiting time to get through security at airports? Obviously monitoring Bluetooth and Wi-Fi is one way to go, but often people shut those off in the airport to conserve energy. Monitoring cell phones and tablets doesn't work if only 30% of people have them on. As many of us know, queues at airports are arranged in mazes using retractable ribbon barriers. Security personnel adjust the barriers according to the size of the queue, and analysis also 'learns' how the flow of people moves over time. This is then used to give an estimate of how long it takes for the queue to pass through security. read more

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