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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
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.
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.
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!
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.
Visit the best Liberal Blog: DU
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
It's called "Lorem Ipsum" and is purposely gibberish. It's used by designers so that one focuses on layout rather than content.
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.
I fail to see how this has anything to do with Slashdot.
Obviously, it has everything to do with Slashdot! As you pointed out, the articles posted here aren't interesting, relevant, or timely, ergo geeks pay attention to Slashdot for the design and wise colour choice!
That, or I'm smoking crack!
Be relentless!
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/
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!
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.
"I fail to see how this has anything to do with Slashdot."
It's fashionable on Slashdot these days to criticize the US. I'd say more but I fear mod retaliation.
"Derp de derp."
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.
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!
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.
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?
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
This is an article about a computer nerd (okay web designer or something, but still) who thinks his particular not-that-important skills hold the key to saving the world.
Thus, it's supremely relevant to slashdot, where a large proportion of the readership share this delusion.
"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.
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
erm... if that were all it was... just a conspiracy thoery... then it would be easy to dispell just by releasing the footage from all the surveillance cameras that was seized shortly after the event... after all, if there was nothing to it, then the camera footage would show a 757 hoot footing it on a collision course with the Pentagon... but then again, the conspiracy theorists would be claiming that the authorities had had plenty of time by now to doctor the footage...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
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.
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.
There is no spoon?
PS. Also not that this redesign is A YEAR old.
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]
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
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.
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 ----
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.
hawk
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.