Book Reviews
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Friday, March 28, 2003
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Shuttle loss and death by PowerPoint: "Here is a disastrous twist to the expression Death by PowerPoint. Edward Tufte: 'The 3 reports concerning the possible tile damage on the Columbia prepared by the Boeing engineers have become increasingly important as the investigation has developed. The reports provided the rationale for NASA officials to curtail further research (such as photographing the Columbia with spy cameras) on the tiles during the flight. Here is a close analysis of an important slide from a Boeing report. [...] On this single slide, in a PowerPoint festival of bureaucratic hyper-rationalism, fully 6 different levels of hierarchy are used to classify, prioritize, and display 11 simple sentence...'" [Signal vs Noise > Jinn of Quality and Risk]
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Software bug may cause Patriot missile errors: "U.S. military is investigating the possibility that a software problem in the Patriot Missile defense system may be responsible for targeting two friendly aircraft, but that other scenarios could just as likely be responsible for the mishaps." [InfoWorld: Top News] This is interesting, but perhaps not true. In the Gulf war in 1991 there was a software problem with Patriots, which resulted in "friendly" casualties. I wrote about this in an essay titled What are the results computer errors? (The article is available in Finnish.) Because of truncating the time counter to 24 bits, the missile lost all of its accuracy when kept online for a long time. Thus, Patriots missed the incoming targets. The solution was to boot the software in the missiles regularly. The Patriot software problem is explained in detail in a GAO report.
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Windows 2000 Security Flaw Worse Than First Thought: "A Microsoft security flaw announced last week is much more serious than initially thought, several security companies have said." [Google Technology News]
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More on scientific self-censorship: "The staff of The Why Files has written a balanced and detailed article, Perils of Publication, on the risks of censoring, and not censoring, scientific journal articles in an age of terrorism." (Thanks to LII.org.) [FOS News]
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