>Despite the widespread use of Bayesian methods in searches, not every airline or government uses them — there’s no evidence the Malaysian government nor Malaysia Airlines has in the current search, though they are getting help from a team of French government investigators who worked on the Air France hunt. (The Malaysian embassy in Washington, D.C., didn’t immediately respond to an emailed request for comment, and calls to the embassy on Monday yielded an automated reply that the office was closed because of snow.)

>“I suspect that they just guess, like professional baseball managers used to do before ‘Moneyball,’” said Peter Thall, a biostatistician at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.