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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.
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.
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
Presidential memos don't support the BLINK tag.
That would make sense if this was the first they had ever heard of bin Ladin. By the time of this memo, he had been openly at war with the U.S. for over five years, and had been slaughtering people in ever-more spectacular attacks designed for maximum civilian damage for even longer. He had demonstrated his deadliness and determination to destroy American interests around the world; they goddamn better have taken a memo like this seriously. I don't give a shit what font it is in, this is an important memo. That they missed it -- and ignored the bin Laden threat completely during most of 2001 -- is not excusable.
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.
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!
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
Not only did they know....they trained him! Aren't we great?
"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.
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-shpoffo
kNOw Research
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.
Well, I remember when I started using internet, I wandered over to FBI web server and found there a web page simmilar to this. It was something like 1998 ... and yes, it did mention Bin Ladin in top ten most wanted people. I expect that a report delivered to White House having this name in, should ring a bell no matter what the rest of the report says.
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?
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