'USA IQ Train Wrecks' Category
Flight booking boo boos
So, I’m booking my flights to the IDQ 2008 conference in San Antonio. I’m flying with Continental.
As with most airlines I have to provide a contact telephone number for them to contact me before, during or after travel.Their website allows me to select the country that my phone number is in. My phone number is […]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 […]Super Tuesday - Gloomy e-voting Wednesday
The Register has highlighted not one but two potential information quality problems with the ballots being cast in the pre-Presidential primaries in the US.
Firstly, Democrats Abroad decided to support Democrats living overseas by letting them vote on-line. This sounds like an excellent idea, this ‘electronic voting’. However, there seem to have been some concerns with […]Home Removals - literally.
Fox News has this story from the AP Newswire today.
It seems a Russian woman returned from a visit to the country to find that her city home was gone, demolished by mistake by over-eager builders who were supposed to be tearing down a different building.
Ooops.
Of course, errors in demolition can only happen in Mother Russia. […]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 […]Another error from a wunch of bankers…
The Register has this interesting story… a man in Georgia USA received a letter from his bank shortly after he closed his account with them. He believed he had cleared any outstanding charges so was a little bit surprised when he received a letter from the bank insisting he owed them $211 trillion dollars. This […]
We all know toddlers are terrors…
… but this story (again culled from The Register.co.uk) shows the lengths the US government goes to to stop these known terrors from getting on planes via the Terrorist Screening lists maintained by the Dept Homeland Security.
“USA Today tells the story of a Disney World-loving 6-year-old who shares a name with someone on the “additional […]Nuclear warheads go AWOL on a B-52
Various media (see below for links) have reported the story of the Advanced Cruise Missiles (ACMs) that were flown from a base in North Dakota to a base in Louisiana, apparently by accident, and sat relatively unguarded at both bases for a number of hours before the error was noticed. The flight was supposed to […]
CalPERS apologizes for printing Social Security numbers on participant mailings
LA Times August 23, 2007The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the largest U.S. public pension program, said Wednesday it accidentally printed the Social Security numbers of almost half a million retirees on brochures mailed last week.A mail-processing computer inadvertently added recipients’ partial or full Social Security numbers to mailing labels attached to brochures sent to […]
An Enron Zombie rises from the grave
The IT Compliance Institute carries a story on their website as of 6th July that like the monster in all good horror movies, Enron has had one last spurt of scandalousness.
“After nearly $89 million was paid to former Enron employees to replace money they lost in employee stock ownership and 401(k) plans when the company […]
