'General Trainwrecks' Category
It’s the end of the world as we know it… or is it?
Yahoo is today carrying a story from AFP about a 13 year old German school boy who has corrected NASA’s calculations on the probability of ‘planet killer’ asteroid Apophis crashing into earth and causing a global catastrophe. The wunder-kind in question did his analysis as part of a regional science competition.
It seems that NASA forgot to factor […]Media trainwrecks (one of two)
Courtesy of Irish uber-blogger and technology journalist Damien Mulley come two excellent examples of poor quality information getting loose.
The first concerns an article published in the Irish Examiner Newspaper. They published a story this week which puported to show that Irish employers were losing millions of euro due to staff members using Social Networking sites like Bebo […]Dream host, Billing Nightmare
Courtesy (yet again) of The Register comes this case of poor Information Quality. It seems that US web hosting company DreamHost accidentally overbilled its customers for services due to what has been described as a “fat finger error”.
Full details of the good intentions that paved the path to this Information Quality Hell can be found […]Hidden data, hidden dangers
I have always been an advocate of speaking of “data” rather than of “databases”, and have always felt that hiding data within large integrated database systems is a danger not only to the quality of the data but to the owners of the data themselves: the customers.
A couple of recent events illustrate this very well.
My […]A timebomb or a trainwreck-in-waiting?
The BBC website carries this story today about a looming Information Quality problem. For information to be of ‘quality’ it needs to meet our expectations. One basic expectation is that you are able to get at the information. The British National Archives warns of a “digital dark age” as a result of obsolete file formats (does […]
