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Saving Lives with Design
valdean writes "Last year, the White House declassified an August 2001 intelligence brief entitled: 'Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.' Among other things, the brief mentions that Bin Ladin 'wanted to hijack a US aircraft.' So why was it ignored? Graphic designer Greg Storey thinks part of the reason is poor design. He set out to modify the format of the original document into a more legible one."
Hindsight is always 20/20
The problem is, that there are soooooo many theats that its impossible to take all of them seriously. If we did, then people would bitch more about having their liberties taken away, yada yada yada. Hindsight is 20 20. I don't think one intellegience briefing is enough to mandate massive security changes.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
Design or not, it should have been read... and probably was.
:(
What should have the government done? Put the whole country under martial law? Shut down all commerical businesses and transportation and unroll millions of miles of razor wire?
It was a lose-lose situation. Too bad they didn't replace the 85 year old baggage scanners earler.
All a threat matrix does is encourage people to create their own filtering systems.
...which instantly puts all of the blame onto the poor sap who allocated it as a 9!
"Oh, that Bin Laden warning? Nah, I didn't take it seriously... I only read Threat Matrix 15 and above"
Better that these kind of documents all look the same, and *force* people to read every word. Those that don't read every word aren't doing their jobs properly.
SOMEWHERE in the bureaucracy is a document covering every imaginable possibility. That an event was predicted by a document in no way means anyone had any idea it was coming.
Whenever anything happens, you can always find SOMEONE who predicted it, that doesn't mean they knew it was coming. It just makes it easy to pick the signal out of the noise when you know what you're looking for.
UI design is most definitely NfN. There are plenty of examples in engineering of bad UI design or information presentation costing lives; this is yet another. If you can't name at least 3 examples, then I truly hope you don't call yourself an engineer, computer programmer, or anything related.
Proper design makes things useful and informative. Design permeates everything. Bad design can actually undermine or even negate the information being presented, as Edward Tufte and other have demonstrated.
When dealing with the presentation of information, clear design is essential. Those who write software, and especially those who work with UIs should always be mindful of it.
That said, this guy prettied up a document and filled it with gibberish. He has some interesting ideas and some solid concepts, but his demonstration of it is lacking. A control number because he thinks it looks cool, etc. He does not present a solid case for why the information in the original document would have been acted on had it been presented in his way. In fact, the issues surrounding this document go more to the nature of intelligence information and the ability to assess it than to the typeface that was used. I know some people think this memo is a smoking gun of incompetence, but hindsight makes everyone a genius.
In any case see Tutfe's examination of the way in which engineers tried to convince NASA not to launch the Challenger for a better deconstruction of improperly formatted information leading to a catastrophe.
It's fashionable on Slashdot these days to criticize the US. I'd say more but I fear mod retaliation.
Considering that a large portion, and probably the majority of Slashdotters are American, I wouldn't say it's a case of being fashionable. Instead, I'd argue it's a fight against fallacy and illogic. Much of the action of the US government is driven by fear, greed, and emotion, which runs counter to the typical geek way of analysing and responding to a situation. To us, the actions and methodologies of the US government are at best unreasonable and at worst insane. There is no fashion to flame the US here -- it's just the collective psyche of Slashdotters rejecting the counter-intuitive mannerisms of the powers that be.
Be relentless!
This is the goddamn stupidest thing I have ever seen on Slashdot, and that's saying a lot. The idea that memo design led to the 9/11 attacks doesn't deserve a response, except for possibly making armpit noises. Designers are notorious for emphasizing form over content and overrating their minimal importance in the scheme of things, but for fuck's sake, it would be nice to believe -- all evidence to the contrary -- that the National Security Advisor and the President of the United States don't need spiffy document layouts to underscore the seriousness of international terrorist organizations flying jumbo jets into buildings.
If it's clear, simple design that's at issue, why not just have a crude drawing of a 747 flying into the White House with a 24-point header reading LOOK OUT, GEORGE!
Fuck. I'm going to have to wash my fucking brain after being around this much stupidity.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
This whole thing is a red herring. Read up on the PNAC and you'll learn that the Bush Administration is filled with people who have been DYING for a war of this kind you have with Iraq right now. Put aside your hatred of Michael Moore for a few minutes to figure out that OTHER PEOPLE have also shown links between the Bush's and the Bin Ladens and Saudi Royals, and you'll see why the Bush Administration wants to conveniently ignore those connections.
It's all moot anyway. They wanted a war to legally embezzle $300 Billion from Americans in contracts, and wanted to fool everybody about it so they could get a second term in the white house. Mission Accomplished.
It's now well-known that Hussein didn't have the weapons, was never a threat, and yet the war was started anyway. They've played it down pretending that they're learning about Hussein's lack of weapons at the same time we are, but that's not true. They knew it all along. Ask yourself about the sort of ethics somebody would need to have to do what they've done.
Now ask yourself if those ethics are consistent with seeing a memo and disregarding it.
Anybody who buys into the idea that the attacks were the result of poor design is a FOOL. The system may be imperfect, but it worked. The memo got to the top of the chain in time for Bush to do something about it. He did nothing.
If Americans, particularly their political leaders were less stupid, there would be fewer losses at WTC
If political leaders everywhere including the wannabes were put in the fields to do hard labor, there would be no death and destruction in the world at all, except for natural causes.
Sadly the plants would suffer.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I know this is offtopic but does anyone have any statistics about the geographical location of Slashdotters?
"I fail to see how this has anything to do with Slashdot."
It's fashionable on Slashdot these days to criticize the US.
I don't understand this response at all. The original article examined a process, saw something that was suboptimal, and suggested an improvement. And that's considered criticizing the US?
If we've reached the point where we are unable to improve our internal processes because doing so would admit an imperfection, then we are truly fucked.
My question is this: Some rich, powerful members of the Saud and bin Laden family, some Saudi agents, and some Pakistani agents must have had wind of the attack, and yet they feared the wrath of America so little that they never tried to stop it or tip off American intelligence. Why is that?
Part of Operation Bojinka involved a similar attack in the US:
A report from the Philippines to the United States on January 20, 1995 stated, "What the subject has in his mind is that he will board any American commercial aircraft pretending to be an ordinary passenger. Then he will hijack [the] said aircraft, control its cockpit and dive it at the CIA headquarters."
There were plenty of warnings during the Bush and Clinton administrations. The warnings were not really ignored either. The FAA would issue warnings and airports would go to a heightened state of alert. (This happened during the summer of 2001, but the heightened state of alert was over before September.)
The problem is that there was no support for anything that would actually make a difference.
e.g., drastically tougher screenings, attacking Afghanistan, rounding up people with expired or suspicious visas, FBI investigations into foreign students in US flight schools...
Politically, there was no way Clinton or Bush would have gone for any of those things. Clinton already caught enough shit from the Republicans + left-wingers after his cruise missile attack on a terrorist training camp.
After studying a number of video clips of Dubya making ad hoc quips/speeches (as opposed to the "canned" party line), I am inclined to agree with the submitter. The PDB's should have been redesigned to match the "My Pet Goat" format, including graphics.
The ridiculous bias is one of the things I can't stand about Slashdot, and it is perpetuated by the [meta]moderation system. It's not that there aren't valid points among the anti-American sentiment, it's that the counter-points which are often equally valid and often more cogent get moderated into oblivion.
Slashdot is NOT the place for any politically heated talk because it does not provide a proper forum for discussion. If you read over a thread after the dust has settled, all you see is the groupthink modded up, and anything opposing groupthink modded down to -1. It's interesting when you think about it: there is a form of mass censorship on Slashdot, in which people who speak out against the groupthink are silenced (in that they are modded down), and those who tote the party line cruise high at +5. The ironic part is that these heated discussions often center around complaints about the same sort of censorship by the government. Double-standards and hypocrisy abound.
Years ago Edward R. Tufte said the same thing about the space shuttle challenger failure. Tufte's big thing is clarity in visual representations of data and he spends more than a dozen pages in "Visual Explanations" ripping on the failure of the engineers to communicate in 13 faxed documents the evidence they had that launching in the cold temperatures forecast for the next day would likely result in failure of the rubber o-rings. Sounds very familiar.
You miss the significance of the redesign: in the original memo, it is difficult to tell at a glance what the key details; of course, the title summarizes these, but only roughly. These design flaws are reduced (if not removed) by the revised design.
Of course, we can't tell which memo will be important, and as a result we don't know which data should be paid attention to. The reason? Because the current design is inefficient, it is more difficult to spot and correlate trends and patterns. With this proposed design, it is easier to highlight potential threats, simply because its design is both clear and simple.
Karma: Oldschool
You are wrong that only groupthink posts get +5 moderation. Wait half a day, and read at +5. Then you'll see a balanced reaction at most articles, with many critical posts modded up. Bad mods most often happen at the start of a comment phase; in the end most get quite OK.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
Of course, that just means that instead of King George we'll have his idiot brother occupying the White House in 2008, with the same old crooks pulling the strings behind the scenes.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Or would this be the same Richard Clarke who permitted Bin Laden family members to leave the US after 9/11?
He approved the request, but who made it? Clarke has come clean, why did the rest of the administration cover it up?
Would this be the same Richard Clarke who was head of US counterterrorism for eight years under Bill Clinton
Yes, and you left out the foiled Millenium bombings. I'm not a big fan of Clarke's, but he's been right about the threat posed from bin Laden for a long time now.
Or the same Richard Clarke who blamed Bill Clinton for not destroying terrorist training camps after the USS Cole bombing?
Do you think Clarke was wrong here?
If Clarke is right about anything, it's only because he's like a stopped clock.
He seems to be a lot better bet than either Clinton or Bush when it comes to assessing terrorist threats, don't you agree?
Play Command HQ online
But who would have known at the time he would turn on us? ( other then him )
Sometimes you have to take risks to get things done.. Sometimes you win, other times you loose.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
i guess you never have been to prison. your tounge is enouhg to sharped and harded a plastic spoon to the point of razer sharp. It will also be hard enough stich somehign several times. Ask any guard and they will tell you that it is a no-no to let a prisoner suck on a plastic spoon like a kid would do.
It seems inocent enough but can cause alot of problems. Sharpened (metal) spoons are somethign that would definatly bypassed the security at the airport. It is also somethign that could have been planted on the plane without looking out of place.
As for bold type and stuff the article mentions, It probably wouldn't be too goo of an idea. Once the president starts just looking for bold type instead of scanning the entire document, he is likley to miss things that some lower level official didn't deem important. Maybe we need to hire another cabinate member whos job is to read the reports entirely after the president and attempt to place the inteligence data into a more percice perspective and then verbaly express any concerns. This would double check the existing inteligence agencies opinion and ensure that at minimum, somethign is known byt the president.
This is classis psychopathic libertarian reasoning. A psychopath is someone who only cares about themselves, and has no concern for anyone else. So things look great for you? Wonderful! who cares about anyone else?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Tufte's well-known critique of the Columbia presentation, and his famous critique of the Challenger data, centered on the use of visual evidence (idiotic charts, statistically incompetant graphs) and, in the former case, on the manner in which the medium (PowerPoint) butchered the message by making chopping it up into incomprehensible hamster pellets of information.
The author here seems to be making the case that ugly typeface and a poor use of color are to blame; that if we just added a few horizontal rules, maybe put the PDB on nice stationary, it would have been more effective.
When facing a dearth of actionable, analyzable data (like a chart with 4 data points), Tufte is likely as not to advocate doing exactly what the original PDB did, which is to stuff it into prose paragraphs.
Tufte's design criticism work is serious, if perhaps overrated. This new one is just an advertisement for a web designer.
This would also have the disadvantage for the president that the paper trail showing his blatant disregard facts or prudence would be quickly and easily readable. He needs *more* obscurity, not less, to pull this off.
I say: write 'em in ROT13.
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H.L. Mencken