Jinn of Quality and Risk

Systemizing is the drive to analyse and explore a system, to extract underlying rules that govern the behaviour of a system; and the drive to construct systems. Oy. My Systemizing Quotient is 60 (on a 0-80 scale): You have a very high ability for analysing and exploring a system. On average women score about 24 and men score about 30. Three times as many people with Asperger Syndrome score in this range, compared to typical men, and almost no women score this high. (is there an implication that lovers of system are autistic? only concrete-bound hippies could be this low!)

Oy again. My Empathy Quotient is supposedly 27: You have a lower than average ability for understanding how other people feel and responding appropriately. On average, women score 47 and men 42, meaning that they know how to treat people with care and sensitivity. (I find people who score higher than me offensive, and insensitive! How uncaring of them!)

Note: both tests requires Flash [found via NSLog();] 

SARS Watch follows Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome around the globe. A natural question is what are the chances you will die of SARS if you get it? Answer: We don't know. Nobody knows. But it seems to be bigger than was first thought (read the whole thing). Apparently, the death rate is somewhere between 5% and 10%, most victims are older than 40, and many had pre-existing ailments. 

APOD: No sudden, sharp boundary marks the passage of day into night in this gorgeous view of ocean and clouds over our fair planet Earth. Instead, the shadow line or terminator is diffuse and shows the gradual transition to darkness we experience as twilight. With the Sun illuminating the scene from the right, the cloud tops reflect gently reddened sunlight filtered through the dusty troposphere, the lowest layer of the planet's nurturing atmosphere. A clear high altitude stratospheric layer, visible along the dayside's upper edge, scatters blue sunlight and fades into the backness of space.

This photograph was taken 2001-Jun-17 from the International Space Station. Image courtesy of Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center. 

WSJ: Contrary to what some believe, trade in ancient objects is not the enemy of preservation. The great contribution the art market makes to this cause is to endow works of art with value. When objects have no value they are inevitably at grave risk of destruction because preserving them is a costly enterprise. 

In my experience with risk management and learning organisations, it is extremely difficult to get people to assess risk realistically unless forced to do so by external pressure (e.g. audits) and even more difficult to get people to review their experience and extract lessons learnt (in e.g. project debriefs, whether for their own benefit or for sharing purposes). Since NASA is in the business of dealing with high-risk, never-done-before space ventures, mistakes unfortunately can and will be accepted or forgotten, thus repeatedly leading to costly failures. A private, commercial space program would not avoid the risks and failures, but would avoid the perception that each failure is somehow a national disgrace.

Washington Post: NASA will continue to make the same mistakes that have led to two space shuttle catastrophes in 17 years until the agency changes its fundamental culture, witnesses said at a hearing today of shuttle accident investigators. Problems that existed at the time of [the 1986 Challenger accident] have not been fixed despite extensive resources and efforts to do so, said sociologist Diane Vaughn of Boston College, author of a 1996 book on the factors that led to the earlier tragedy.

Houston Chronicle: The founders of the space shuttle program told the Columbia Accident Investigation Board on Wednesday that the leading edges of the wings of the spacecraft had not been designed to withstand the impact of flying debris. They also said they were troubled that program managers did not suspend flights after a large chunk of insulating foam peeled away from the fuel tank of the shuttle Atlantis in October and harmlessly struck a solid rocket booster.

See also: Shuttle loss and death by PowerPoint (Mar-27)
Faulty epistemology and the loss of the Columbia (Mar-13)
Did environmentalist dogma lead to the Columbia disaster? (Feb-05)