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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."
In related news, the declassified document now shows Laden originally planned to use spoons isntead of box cutters to hijack the planes...
/who came up with that anyway? I've never picked up a spoon and thought, "wow that's a pretty input device.."?
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. (> <)
Hindsight is always 20/20
If a brain-dead vegetable in Florida is about to be taken off life support, Bush drops everything and flies up to Washington. If a known terrorist is "determined" to strike the US, why, it's time for another vacation.
While a better designed document might not save the world, I believe it would help the President (Bush or otherwise) to quickly and more effectively discard the facts and act the way he would have otherwise.
This was all over in the summer of '01. I think the problem was that the focus was on the Genoa summit, they thought the hit was going to be there, so then after nothing happened there was a lull. I remeber Drudge carrying this report on his big font banner in middle to late August for a few days.
wheres the ads?
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!
...Michael Moore was right? At least in part?
-Palal
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.
No wonder no one paid any attention to the report! Judging by the new document, the whole thing was just full of gibberish beyond the headline!
I fail to see how this has anything to do with Slashdot. It's not tech, it's not Linux/F/OSS, and not anything else that I would consider Slashdot material. Since when has this place become a repository of whatever stupid "news" there happens to float around online?
A blog like any other.
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.
Several desktop pubishing applications can generate "latin jibberish" to fill in text areas. It looks silly at first, but it helpful for layout. "Pages", part of Apple's iWork package, is one app that I know does this.
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.
MIHOP/LIHOP. They (neocons) made/wanted it to happen. The Bush regime needed a "catalysing event" to wage war and institute repressive measures in the name of "fighting terrorism". (think Pearl Harbor) It didn't take long for them to then conquer Iraq and establish their 14 military bases at a cost of $300 Billion. Now they are beating the war drums against Iran and threatening the judiciary. Why was it ignored indeed.
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Remember these are busy politicians. A simple one page graphic of a plane exploding, people on fire, politicians getting blamed, etc. might have better conveyed the message, since apparently the headline "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US" didn't instill the proper amount of concern.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I've always wondered why the classified and confidential stuff is always in black and white - never in any other color.
The department that declassifies material is probably still using their first gerataion PaperPort and Mac Plus.
It's called "Lorem Ipsum" and is purposely gibberish. It's used by designers so that one focuses on layout rather than content.
That's why they had to attack him personally, because they couldn't factually disagree with anything in F911. He had Bush pegged.
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The president's response at the time, to either style of report: "Oh, it's just some crazy named Bin Laden. As if terrorists could attack the USA."
Have you already forgotten the mindset of the US government before the tower-plane collisions?
Presidential memos don't support the BLINK tag.
Classified and confidential stuff isn't always in black and white. How many datapoints are you basing your conclusion on?
Just because it looks like a blog doesn't mean anybody will give it more attention. I ignore millions of blogs everyday, with that kitschy, cliched 'minimalist' design. Whatever. Responsible government officials should be paying attention to anything like that when it crosses their desk. This is a corporate culture problem, not a usability problem. This guy is treating a symptom but it won't remove the cause.
I have read that government officials thought that Osama wanted to force prisoner release by commercial aircraft highjacking; perhaps of the mullah behind the original World Trade Center bombing.
On the other hand, I was aware of a Norad exercise that was to address using hijacked planes as missiles. Right after the release of the 9/11 Commision Report, some bright, informed soul at the Arizona Republic ran a brief story about the planned Norad exercise which it turned out had never actually been carried out.
If the Norad exercise had been carried out, the lines of authority that were completely lacking 9/11/2001 and caused so much confusion and wasted time would have been documented and perhaps thousands of lives could have been saved.
I figure that if I, a retired citsen could have been aware of the concept of using high-jacked commercial aircraft as missiles, there was no excuse for high government officials to have been unaware of the concept.
Lots of high-ranking heads spent too much time in posterior dark places.
Further information is available at http://www.lipsum.com/
with English.
I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
Nor is it a Hardware post, despite showing up in that section. But that's ok, because the person who posted it isn't really an editor, either.
Welcome to Slashdot!
One might note the more "legible" version is in Latin.
Ironical if I do say so myself.
It's an al Qaeda memo that was originally in Arabic. This was the transliterated version.
It was ignored because, well, they wanted it to happen. An excuse to deepy entrench the US in the Gulf region was needed.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
...what happened at the pentagon on 9/11? The photographic evidence seems to contradict the the official story... Look
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
Also known as Greeking, ironically resembling Latin.
Fifteen minutes after this was posted, it was red-flagged by Carnivore. The President has approved $1 billion for a Lorem Ipsum task force. Monday morning Congress will pass the Lorem Ipsum Homeland Patriotism Act, which will impose a $100,000 fine and 10-year federal prison sentence for distribution or use of p2p software. Entertainment industry spokesmen hailed the new legislation as a step forward in the fight against terrorism.
I've always wondered why the classified and confidential stuff is always in black and white - never in any other color.
Because most photocopiers don't support color? When a document is redacted, the original is first photocopied, then a big black felt is used to redact the sensitive information, then it gets photocopied again before being distributed so that you can't see the original text under the ink. That's also why the declassified documents look so terrible -- the document that results after being degraded by multiple photocopies is the one which gets printed.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
methinks this graphic designer puts waaaaay too much importance on his job. No offense Mr. Designer, but your little document is not going to change the world. If the people in charge of examining these documents cannot be bothered two read two fucking paragraphs then we have problems deeper than a cutsey layout.
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.
When we've got a government that doesn't cater to its own survival, and politicians that are held accountable for their actions and inactions, those in charge will desire good design, as that will make serving the public easier, more transparent, and more efficient.
Until then, it will just call attention to the fact that the American people are getting screwed.
Kind of like the snake eating it's own tail - there's just no room for anything but itself.
Those things have nothing to do with stopping terrorism really. They knew who bin Laden was at that point and they knew the people he associated with. Several of the hijackers were on watch lists. They also knew where bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan were, and they knew quite a bit about his economic network. They knew where his family members and associates were in the U.S. No they should not have shut down all commercial businesses or put us under martial law. They should have used the intelligence they had about the people they knew were involved and made arrests, conducted interviews, shut down economic channels, put pressure on Pakistan and Saudi Arabia for support in unraveling the network, found out what Mossad knew about people they were following in the U.S., used that intelligence to make more arrests, etc. Perhaps even ordered preemptive military strikes on bin Laden's training camps. Maybe they wouldn't have stopped 9-11 but they certainly could then have said they did everything they could to prevent it. This memo certainly should have triggered some action.
So Tufte was right. The slides probably had a graph like the one he has for the Gettysburg Address, with "Number of Towers to be Destroyed by Airplanes" on one dimension and "2" on the other.
so the spy cameras can photograph them properly
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
This memo was obviously written by someone trying to get Bush's attention to actually give a shit about going after terrorism. Instead Bush went on vacation that month (August 2001).
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
What about standards? I'm amazed that in 2005 people are lauding this as good design when it's a bloody GIF file that doesnt, by definition, use CSS, and cannot be displayed usefully on a whole range of devices and browsers.
what is most importand is the big red number 9 on the design. Now we know that this should ahve been a big red number 9. If somebody of Al Quada tells now that they are planning a huge attack on a harbour in the US, how serious would you take that? What are you going to do about it?
If I were a terroris, I would cry wolf all the time and perhaps once every 10.000 cries I would strike.
Remeber, a terrorist does only have to hit once and the defence can NEVER miss.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
hard intelligence is extremely difficult to get hold of... and if you do have it, using it can give away the fact that you have it to the enemy, who will then conduct a witch-hunt to find the mole (and because of the nature of the hard intelligence it's not very difficult to find him/her) or else change their methods of operation to plug the hole.
Churchill was pilloried after the war when it was discovered that they had hard intelligence that the Luftwaffe were going to attack Coventry on a specific night... He had to keep that knowledge hidden and couldn't act upon it because it would have tipped off the Germans to the fact that we were able to read their coded messages as if they were plain text... and they would have tightened up their code procedures and we would then have lost the means to read them.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
No where in TFA does it say that "Design could have prevented 9/11".
Usability is something which can help. Think about hospital steps. If there is a ramp there, it helps people with wheelchairs get up there. Sure, ramps don't go around saving lives by throwing themselves over bombs or anything, but they do help by helping people use the facility.
Now - look at the two different documents. What is lost by using the second one? All the information stays the same. What one does is to visually cue a person, providing easy ways to categorise the document without even reading it.
You disagree?
Try reading the same post as above, with a slight modification. Spacing doesn't save lives. Does it?
NowIdon'texpecteveryoneon/.tobestupid,butIdon't
The problem, very simply, is a president who doesn't read, and who listens only to his hand-picked yes-men.
(Yes, I do understand that this is over-simplification. But it is nonetheless an important issue. It explains more than this individual problem. The never-ending effort in this administration to stop the buck anywhere but at the president's desk makes me tired.)
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
iPod.
Remember the infamous comment? No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame. If you look at the raw specs, the iPod didn't offer much if anything over competitors, even with competitors to follow. Yet it still sold and is now virtually synonymous with MP3 player. Why do you suppose?
It sounds like he's trying to one-up Edward Tufte, who had published a well-read report on the slide presentation that led to the Columbia Disaster. I guess we could use a few more such public analyses before people will begin to realize the reach of what falls under "Interface Design" and how critical it is our functioning in the complex system we've created.
THE INTERFACE IS THE INFORMATION. If you don't have an interface, you don't have any information. Period.
Incidentally, I can think of a few reasons not to implement some of the changes that Storey suggests:
- Bolded and highlighted text may draw the eye toward material that was incorrectly analyzed; or the burdern of analysis may fall upon the reader of that (original) memo.
- The threat level may not be something that is established, but rather something that is established through decisions that come from this document
Whether these kinds of metrics are appropriate in the case of the President is unknown to me. My main here is to illustrate that Storey's ideas, though thoughtful, are perhaps a bit sensational.
.
-shpoffo
kNOw Research
It is what I have been saying all along. Note the threat level of nine. That is where the author's logical reasoning goes wrong. In hindsight, the threat was a nine, or even a ten. But in foresight, it was just another needle in a very big haystack. Would it have caught the president's attention if the box was green and was rated a 4?
This is a really good demonstration of the inherent danger in design. The revamped design, pretty though it is, forces the author, rather than the recipient, to reduce the content into a numerical risk assessment and three key facts, exactly the sort of activity that takes time and is almost impossible to get anyone to agree on. Furthermore, as the designer says, 'Nothing in the text is emphasised (presumably ignoring the italics), making it difficult to scan'. Well, that's fine if you don't want people to read your document. It's how press releases are designed. But it's a really, really bad idea to allow documents that need to be read to be 'easy to scan'. And highlighting the author's idea of what the 'key words' is worse, as it's likely to distort the apparent meaning of the document. Colour still doesn't work well in fax machines.
Who benefitted from 9/11?
ANSWER: BUSH AND HIS NEO-CON CRONIES. The American Military-Industrial Complex.
It was ignored, because it was advantageous for those morons to have such an activity occur in the midst of their failing, corrupt, reign of power.
The fact is, Americans were betrayed. Revolt, or change the channel!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
"Isn't that one of the Saudi ruling family? Must be that crazy idiot who ran in Afganistan."
Hi had prior knoledge of the Bin Laden either by state affaiers or by it's family relations.
Reminds me of that 2DTV sketch with Bush and his general:
General: "Its time for your 3 o'clock briefing Mr President"
Bush: "Err? Huh?"
General (sigh) *pulls out big novelty Mickey Mouse clock with pictures on it* "What time is it sir?"
Bush: (excited) "Its mousy time!!"
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
While it does seem there was plenty of incompetance to spread around, along with an alergy to following up on any work Clinton had in progress, you can't really know if the WTC attack would have happened or not if Clinton was in office, although I'd tend to at least guess that the odds would have been reduced 10% or so.
I do fault the Bush administration for incompetence and corruption, but I do it more so since 9/11 than before it. There is a large section of the population that is easily led and manipulated. You tell a lie often enough and with a convincing enough voice and lots of people will believe it, either because they want it to be true or fear it will be. People are much faster to believe the worst about about another than the best.
If you watch FOX news you have pretend balance, with such an obvious slant anyone could recognize it, yet it is effective. CNN is better, but not by a great deal. This complete and utter idiocy where you throw two sides out that do nothing but attacks and call that news is damaging and certainly not helping to inform the populace. Yes hearing both sides of the argument can be informative, but when they just do cheap attacks and arguments with the thinnest or no logic whatsover it is quite sad.
Frankly I wish they would replay Jon Stewarts Crossfire program a few more times, since for once someone told the truth.
I really gotta stop ranting about American politics. I'm stuck here, and will be for awhile. I just pray that some people with some sense get into power and, more importantly, the populace gets more informed somehow. Democracy is no better, and sometimes perhaps worse than other forms of goverment if those that chose the leaders are easy to manipulate.
We were thinking we were scared of the terrorists and gays, so we re-elected a corrupt closeted dimwit who didn't stop the terrorists the last time and decided the best way to stop the terrorists this time is to invade a non-terrorist country and turn them all in to terrorists.
So to answer your question, I don't know what we were thinking.
Play Command HQ online
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.
No. No. No.
Smart people especially geeks on this site believe stupid things as well. Just because you guys are geeks doesn't make you any more intellectually better than ANYONE else. Consider the actors that make up this site:
The editors. Our /. overlords who regularly post dupes without utilizing their 'typical geek analysing' to see whether or not an article has been posted.
The posters. Survey this site at -1 some time. It's no wonder the slashdot subculture article on Wikipedia gives our community such a bad rap. IMO, in any subculture there are only a few smart individuals all the rest are just guys/gals who ride the meme wave mid-coitus because they like being part of a group. It gives them an identity or the groupthink that many people espouse of here.
The mods. Well, like the GP stated you can't piss these guys off. Considering the mods have modded up in this thread a post that reeks of conspiracy and tin foil hat FUD I have my doubts about these actors as well considering they are the posters who also make up the rabble here.
So why are there so many stupid people here that seem smart? Because geeks believe stupid things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-intelligent reasons. How many people here still hold beliefs they received before they got the magical geek skill of analysis and intellectual brilliance?
I'll leave you guys to found out yourself. Heres a start though there are some biases found in psychology that might be of use. They are called intellectual attribution bias and confirmation bias.
"When men wish to construct or support a theory, how they torture facts into their service." John Mackay, Extraordinary Popular delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
There is no spoon?
PS. Also not that this redesign is A YEAR old.
Linkage: Edward Tufte's The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. Full of good information for anyone that must present some sort of data, not just those using PowerPoint.
In any case, you blame the Democrats for various crazies who are regularly disowned by the mainstream party. When was the last time your guys disowned, say, Ann Coulter?
You crack me up. You picked Bush over Kerry because Kerry was a dillettante? Or are layabout sons of monarchs, er, presidents, OK for Republicans?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Document design? DOCUMENT DESIGN! Catch goddamn trip on the clue train here, you people. Clinton told the secret services to go gently on Saudi Arabia, but Bush specifically told them to DROP all investigations that looked like they were going to finger anyone important. Like, for example, any members of that nice Bin Laden family that the Bushes have always got on so well with that they were allowed to leave the country while all other flights were grounded.
Document design! Christ, talk about wanting to believe the lies.
TWW2
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
So a more legible document is one IN LATIN???
Is it just me or WTF?
-Nano.
Some of these "designers" should look at what nearly destroyed the BBC
a couple years back, concerning "design" of important documents to make
them stand out to officials and/or the public.
Maybe some effort should be made in explaining terrorist threats to
politicians, rather than writing 1000-page dossiers, short-feed snippets
like you'd get in a magazine. Having people talk to people is much more
likely to get the point home than a bit of paper which can be whisked
from INBOX to TRASHCAN.
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.
Making the information look pretty is the easy part. The hard part was realizing that this particular briefing amongst all of the other threat information that he receives is the important one.
Spread out 100 documents with this pretty formatting with information about China's increased militarization, Kim Jung Il being a nut case and selling weapons everywhere, the Pakistani's selling nuclear technology, former Soviet nuclear weapons being unaccounted for, Aryan Nation yoyo's wanting to bomb buildings, and every other threat that he hears about everyday and tell me which one is the threat that is going to bite you in the ass next. It isn't that easy.
If you knew before hand, which one was the really important one, you could write it on a napkin with a crayon and it would still work. I guess if I was a graphic designer though I would be trying to save all of the world's problems might making their descriptions look pretty too.
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
I have had to enter the US around 5 times in the last 10 years or so. Every time I visit I cannot fail to believe they still use this form for entry - I-94 . This form looks like something typeset in the 50's. When I compare this to the type of forms we have used in Australia since at least the late 80's (ie post Mac and Windows) I can't imagine why they still use such archaic designs. On every flight I made there were many people making the same mistake as I did. With a short surname , you almost feel compelled to write your date of birth on the top line. And you don't want to present an incorrectly completed form to the US customs dudes!! Compare this with the Aussie form - Incoming Passenger Card. It is clear, readable and unlikely to cause errors due to comprehension or legibility. (And I won't mention the US paper currency) There is a clear conservatism in the US when it comes to form design - apart from the angst it causes US visitors - it may have cost lives on 9/11
Flight attendant activated warning
Wireless remote control of systems for countering hostile activity aboard an airplane.
For the second one especially, check out the illustrations! I've been looking into patenting something, and the amount of bogus safety patents after 11/9 is amazing.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
Monday morning Congress will pass the Lorem Ipsum Homeland Patriotism Act
Dude, you seriously need to work on coming up with names for legislation. Lorem Ipsum Homeland Patriotism Act doesn't even have a cool acronym (LIHP Act? Huh?), and that's just plain un-American. We've learned from the PATRIOT Act and INDUCE Act that it's much better to go with something like "Lorem Ipsum Federal Emergency Act (LIFE Act)"--protecting the lives of Americans everywhere!
Be a PATRIOT--because the only thing we have to fear is the lack thereof.
Also, it's stupid that it's in Latin. Almost no one understands Latin these days.
;-)
(That was a joke.
A simple "PRIORITY: " line on the top of the page would have sufficed. It didn't have to be red.
But yeah, the point is that some information was missing on the reports.
Here are some possible descriptions for priorities:
"PRIORITY 9: CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER". Hey, If we're talking about design, why not use some "threat control" software a-la sourceforge?
Just fill the blanks, enter the priority level, and it'll be highlighted in red.
Perhaps we need a Secretary of Grammar?
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
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
It might have helped a novice like the author who isn't used to reading internal government documents but I don't think that was the real problem. Remember government reports are probably formatted and have been formatted in a certain way for specific purpose. Government officials are probably used to the format so it's not a matter of comprehension. I don't think it was a matter of threat assessment either.
Several government officials did recognize the threat. Members of the FBI anti-terrorism groups were alerted that an attack was imminent but due to poor communication between the intelligence agencies no one person had all the details of where, who, how, etc. The problem was, for whatever reason, those in charge at the highest levels did think an attack was imminent.
Frontline carried a story of former FBI agent John O'Neil a year after 9/11. "The Man Who Knew" chronicles his time at the FBI where he became the FBI's foremost expert on Al Qaeda and Bin Laden. Due to some personal problems and professional problems with his superiors, he left the FBI after his superiors stopped listening to his warnings. Ironically, he took a job as head of security of the WTC in the August 2001 and was among those killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
No matter how you present it, he won't know how to read it anyway, so what's the point? If you really really but really want him to do it, you can try turning it upside down and placing it inside "My Pet Goat", but results are not guaranteed.
Are US politicians (or whoever was supposed to look at that document) so dumb that they can't grasp critical information if it's not provided in big shiny colours like in hollywood movies? I'm guessing not. I remember seeing something like this about NASA, the Columbia shuttle disaster and powerpoint presentations. People (especially people who make it to NASA) aren't that dumb. I hope.
I don't mean to burst anyone's bubble, but I remember Airbag posting this, like, TWO YEARS ago.
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 ----
Granted good design does improve the message delivery but at this level they are supposed to read. And at the very least they have enough people around them who can read that design should not come into play.
As a graphic designer I agree that we could help people, organizations and governments communicate better but I think we should concentrate our efforts on communicating with people - taxpayers - not government agency to government agency.
There aren't enough pictures
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
As a designer, I have to say that there is no value in making important documents look "designed". He simply applied all the mediocre designer's tools to making this document look like all the other pharmaceutical handouts, job quotes or resumes on the planet. He's succeeded in making it look nice and average, safe and bland which completely saps any urgency to actually read it.
The key to designing something that needs to be read is to make it stand out from all the other things you read all day. The problem with the original is simply that there was too much text and not enough white space. As well, the text should have been written with the main concern as the first sentence, i.e. not as a vague assessment of fact but as a personal affirmation that "We believe Bin Laden will attack."
For the design, just print it on a purple piece of paper and use white for everything else. When someone gets a purple memo, they know it's rare and a must-read.
-- America Pearl Harbored
There's a large contingent of Slashdotters who believe that design is something you do with drapes, and that it is a girly activity that has no place in the manly world of information. You see this reaction in the knee-jerk hatred of Flash, as though the technology itself were responsible for its misuse by uneducated morons. Fact is, design is as serious and complex a discipline as programming, or physics, or just about anything else you can think of. Moreover, people have been at it longer than almost anything else, judging by those drawings on the cave walls in France. We live in a world in which *everything* is designed (try spending a little time looking around you to see what hasn't been designed. From where I sit, there isn't much that falls into this category -- even the bunch of bananas sitting to my left has a little sticker on them with a logo. In a world where information is in such great quantity, design is crucial. And when you are constantly competing with other designers, amateur design doesn't cut it -- it's got to be *good* design. It's good to see an article emphasizing this point of view.
// This is not a sig.
Are you sure it wasn't just a made-up concept with a pseudo-funky name that the new designer invented to sound "cool"?
Half of that redesign wasn't a change in graphic design, it was a complete change in content and implied a complete change in process. Chances are the designer had absolutely no idea what processes this document actually fits into in reality, and has equally little idea whether the changes in content he made would offer any value, or even whether they'd actually make the document less useful.
We should have just gone to red alert, switched on the force fields, and tractor-beamed the planes into the docking bay, Captain.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
And how many memos do you think the most powerful man in the world gets every day, trying to draw his attention to some concern that the author thinks is the most important thing in the world?
Some groups had been advocating a tsunami warning system for years, which would have saved orders of magnitude more lives than foreseeing 9/11, at a fraction of the cost of clearing up the damage the tsunami caused when it hit.
There are enough resources in the world to feed every human alive a good diet, yet many thousands die through malnutrition every year in third world countries, because the rest of the world doesn't do enough to help them.
If a polar ice cap melts next year, causing millions of deaths as coastal cities are flooded all over the world, the critics will be saying that the environmentalists had been warning of this for years.
If the super-volcanic eruption happens and blacks out the whole US, also killing millions, someone will point out that there was a documentary on TV a few months ago warning about the possibility.
If an unpredicted asteroid hits the earth tomorrow and wipes out half the population of the planet, someone will be saying that the warnings were there and billions should have been invested in a super-defence-network-satellite-system-thing.
I don't know whether Bush really missed something he should have seen, or indeed if the intelligence community collectively did. Maybe so, in which case that's a problem that needs fixing. But, while I'm no fan of GWB, I do have realistic expectations, and I recognise that there are limits to what one man -- however powerful -- can see and do.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Further:
In other words, it's not that they didn't realize what the memos said, but at the time, the memos did not amount to compelling evidence of the threat we now know was coming.
Now, you can feel free to disagree with the 9/11 Commission. But to say as a statement of fact that it was ignored is, well, ignoring the evidence (and inventing new evidence).
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.
The problem with the memo wasn't that it was poorly presented. Everyone understood what the memo said and that it represented a threat. The memo said nothing really new; Bin Laden had publically declared war against us years earlier.
The problem was that, at that time, the US had institutional inertia that said we should just go about our business and hope nothing happened and respond when it did. The general belief was any terrorist attack that actually managed to succeed would still be small in scale; on the order of 10s or 100s of deaths, not 1000s. Few actually thought they would actually be able to carry out a plan like 9/11, although it was certainly a possibility in many scenarios.
But, as I said, this meant nothing new. It was true when Clinton was in office and it was true when Bush was in office. Neither did enough to be "proactive" and treat this threat with the seriousness it deseerved. After 9/11, a lot of people woke up to the truth, Bush included. Before 9/11, he's no more to blame than anyone else.
Bruce
So why was it ignored?
Probably for the same reason that the USAF was off playing wargames with, coincidentally, a fake airplane hijacking, and for the same reason that Dick Cheney stopped flying on airplanes right around the same time.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!
Looking at the before and after designs, I don't see anything spectacular. It simply looks more designed. I don't have anything against highly designed documents - after all, as I mentioned, I am a member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts - but equating more designed with more usable is a mistake.
I wonder what the designer in question (Greg Storey) thinks of that most linear of documents, the novel. How might his tremendous design skills be brought to bear on the problem of more effectively presenting the information in A Tale of Two Cities than Dickens did?
At some point this obsession with presentation begins to look like the problem it's trying to solve. Compare Storey's modified presidential daily briefing to Peter Norvig's PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address. Not quite as bad, but moving in the same direction.
While the second looked pretty, for some reason I couldn't understand anything past the Risk level 9 line. I know my vocabular doesn't stretch that far, but I don't think I understood a single word!
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
In some cases, it's rebels.
But you've identified the core problem: it's not getting the food to the country, but the distribution once there. Last I checked, there weren't any countries, not even the ones with famine, that weren't getting enough food. Getting it to those that need it is the problem--and there seems to be little support for using foreign military power to do get it there.
hawk
hawk
hawk
(Score:5, Insightful), Bashing the slashdot moderation system is also groupthink.
When resistance is a fashion, a badge you wear on your sleeve, they have total control.
Happy Noodle Boy says "F###ing doughnut! Mock me? You fried cyclops!!"
Erm, allowing family members to leave the country:
The only legal thing you can do to a foreign diplomat is expel them from the country. Detention is illigal, and an act of war.
Monday morning Congress will pass the Lorem Ipsum Homeland Patriotism Act,
No no, it has to be an easily-pronounceable acronym, e.g. the Lorem Ipsum National Defense Act, or... I dunno, that one's not very good, but you get the idea. If at all possible, the acronym should be a word related to the idea you want people to think when they head the name of the bill. Remember the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools
Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act".
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I wasn't arguing that the "geek way" is somehow superior -- it is merely different. It is this difference that creates the conflict.
Be relentless!
I've never read anything that suggested they were all or even most diplomats.
Play Command HQ online
And most other times we typo.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
When all you have is a hammer, evertyhing looks like a nail, so the saying goes.
This designer is ridiculous. The problems surrounding this intelligence failure are far too complex to be ameliorated by redesigning a document.
Insert witty sig here.
Stop watching FOX news propaganda and find out what's really going on. Sheep like you are killing America.
Visit the best Liberal Blog: DU
Now, where's that interface to mark a whole story as flame-bait again? Can't seem to find it...
Some things I noted watching the new design...
;-)
its nice looking and all, but if you send it by FAX it looses quite a lot of its fancyness...
you can't write threat level 10 into the threat matrix box... the design doesn't handle multiple pages.
BUt after all it's still a good aproach/idea!
Web design, huh? and where are the anim gifs/flash anims?
.sigh
Or, maybe people like to hire people they know and trust for the more obvious reason. They know and trust them! Think about it, if you know someone who could get the job done, that you could trust, and who you know would be a good employee, why would you bother to look for other "more qualified" applicants. It would be an idiotic waste of time, and a very poor decision. That's the reason the best way to get a job is to know someone who already works there.
I'd say that just about sums up the situation around here. I can't believe how many people will openly say that the people on slascdot think what they do because they are smarter than everyone else. What a bunch of crap.
Osama Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US
Osama bin Laden is a bad man with a rifle and a beard. Osama is not America's friend. Osama and his friends are bad men that want to hurt America.
Osama and his friend are saying bad things. They are saying very bad things. The things Osama and his friends are saying are bad, very bad.
Osama is trying to send bad people with bombs to America. He and his bad friends want to make the bombs explode near Americans, so that the bombs will hurt or kill Americans.
These are bad things to do. Somebody must stop them. The President of the United States of America may need to send people to stop Osama and his bad friends.
Americans will be happy when they find that Osama and his bad friends have been stopped. They would be very angry and very sad if Osama and his bad friends send bombs to America and explode them near Americans to hurt or kill them.
Some of Osama's bad friends say they will get on airplanes full of people in the United States and crash them into tall buildings. If this happens the people in the planes and in the buildings may be hurt or killed. The buildings may be damaged, or may even fall down. Big buildings like these are very expensive, and are often poorly insured. This would be very, very bad.
The President should probably give orders to people to make sure these things do not happen, for they are bad things. It may be worth doing things to avoid having Osama and his bad friends attack us in those bad ways. Even if many people have to do extra work, they might need to be asked to do this extra work.
In conclusion:
If the President takes too long to stop them, and Osama and his bad friends do these evil and terrible things, the President may need to send soldiers, spies, and airplanes to attack Osama and his friends. This may cause oil prices to go up, way up. The President may need to spend a lot of extra money on soldiers, airplanes, bombs and other war supplies. A lot more.
The people who buy and sell oil, or make, buy, or sell war supplies may need to make extra profits for a little while, but that is a sacrifice Americans will be glad to make in order to stop Osama and his bad friends. They will be even more glad, if other bad men in the general area where Osama and his bad friends are can also be attacked. At least one additional bad man should be found there and attacked, so that Americans can be even more glad. This will require even more profits for the oil and war supplies men, but they are good American Patriots, and Americans will be pleased to make even more sacrifices like that in order to attack the bad men.
Many American soldiers, spies, police, and firemen will be hurt or killed. Many others will also be hurt or killed by Osama and his bad friends, as well as by our spies and soldiers as they try to kill the bad men. These are also sacrifices Americans will be happy to make in order to attack the bad men.
If Americans are glad enough, they will reward the President and vote for him again, so that he will be President one more time. Americans will be gladdest when there is most excitement about the great deeds being done by their President.
This is the end of this very important warning about Osama and his bad friends. The President should think about all of words and ideas in it. He should think very carefully. He should decide very carefully. The President should think about what needs to be done, and then do it. Sometimes the obvious thing to do is not the best thing. Sometimes another thing might be better, in the end.
It was taken about as seriously as something like that could have been taken, without the hindsight that we now have. I grew up in the seventies and eighties, the infancy of Islamic hijacking. These guys were largely crybabies who made a stink and usually didn't get what they wanted, and were usually captured and/or killed after a standoff on the ground after the flight landed. Occassionaly a crew member or passenger would get injured or killed, always a tragedy but always of extremely limited scale. And these hijackings were really, really rare.
So, Osama wants to hijack a US aircraft. Interesting. Let me know when we know more. Let me know when he has guys living all over the US and taking flight lessons in preparation for a major attack on a beautiful September day when they'll do something we never friggin' dreamed of. Let me know something then.
Well then folks will say we should have dreamed of it, that's what we get paid for or something like that. Well, OK. Tell you what. We'll restrict airports. We'll close down the first 8 rows or so of parking at airport terminals, we'll eliminate non-passengers from getting through security, we'll confiscate boxcutters, check shoes, take your cigarette lighters, profile those paying with cash and buying one-way tickets. Heck, we might even do the really smart thing and racially profile, since the liklihood of the attackers being of a certain race is extremely likely.
Oh wait, we can't do that. Yeah, that's right, silly me. They'll nail us to a cross if we do all that. "Why the heck are you doing this? What's the threat?" We'll tell them that another Islamic Fundamentalist wacko that they can't even pick out of a line-up wants to hijack and airliner. Then they'll understand.
On September 12th, the job of handling National Security on September 11th became a lot easier, with the only remaining required skill being time travel. If you have that skill, the job is yours. Otherwise shut up about how easy it is to figure out what's going on in the terrorist's minds and to keep them from doing every single thing we never imagined.
RP
I'd say this is a far better example of good design being put to use for the good of society:
A School of Visual Arts Grad Remakes the Pill Bottle
I'm sure it would have been read if it had pretty pictures like The Pet Goat.
Here's a fact: That report was heavily low grade. It had no real information.
If a grading system had been used, the writer would have used a low number. It really reads like a list of current musings, possibles to improbables.
The last line seemed to be included against the writer's better judgement: As we read it, it is heavily qualified. He certainly would not have emphasised it.