“Kaiser Permanente violated the patient confidentiality of hundreds of members last week when e-mails containing sensitive medical information, names and home phone numbers were mistakenly sent
to the wrong people, Kaiser officials disclosed yesterday.”

“Kaiser Permanente violated the patient confidentiality of hundreds of members last week when e-mails containing sensitive medical information, names and home phone numbers were mistakenly sent
to the wrong people, Kaiser officials disclosed yesterday.”

“The knives are out for WAP technology. Following the huge hype of the last 12 months, it’s becoming apparent that it just isn’t delivering. Naturally, the naysayers have now become the “told-you-so-ers”. However, the disappointment of WAP technology needs some more careful analysis. The industry deserves a good wrap on the knuckles. Much of what has happened was avoidable. Will the lessons be learned?”

“The biggest single mistake was to take the view that an internet enabled phone is a general purpose device. It was an easy mistake to make. A computer with web browser was a general purpose device. You can use it to surf any web site. A phone is also a general purpose device. You can use it to call any number. However, when you put the two together, the combination is limited. To be completely general
purpose it would need to have a keyboard, a full size screen and a phone transceiver built in together. It would need to be both a computer and a phone, i.e. a laptop with a phone built in. Current WAP Phones are still phones, but they are NOT computers in the sense of a PC. This was the first mistake – marketing the device as if it was a computer.

A WAP Phone is an “invisible computer” or it ought to be. A WAP Phone thought of as an invisible computer, becomes an information appliance. Furthermore, each different form factor of WAP Phone is a different information appliance. The whole industry failed to realize this. Information appliances should be designed for a specific purpose or a limited set of purposes. In other words, with current technology,
the “walled garden” approach was correct providing what was inside the garden made sense for the specific information appliance, as a single product.

The purposes to which a WAP phone can be put is somewhat controlled by the modality of the device. For example, a 4 line display is very different from an 8 or 12 line display. A 2K deck size is very different from an 8K deck size. As the devices change and grow more powerful the range of tasks to which they are suitable grows larger. Identifying and developing such compelling uses for the small screens was
always going to be difficult.”

“They found that 39% of the premature babies had below normal IQs of 85 or less, compared with 13% of the babies carried to full term. The international average is only 16%.

Of the premature children, 61% had special needs or were “low achievers” in school, compared with 23% of the full term children.

And 28 of the 118 premature children were classified as having learning disabilities, compared with 11 of the full term children.”

“Not enough controversy on this list, so here goes.

Ready?

Tufte understands packing the data in. He lacks an understanding of people. Sometimes chart junk (his term) helps in the understanding of a chart by providing mnemonic aid to the symbols. Sometimes it helps motivate the reader. For most casual users of charts and graphs, less is better. For the professional statistician, such as Tufte, denser is better.

Tufte is often wrong about what constitutes good communication. Indeed, I am surprised he likes the Napoleon map so much because it has, in his terms, superfluous chart chunk – those drawings of soldiers. This is indeed an excellent graphic, but much of his work does not have this character.

Tufte is not the only statistician who has addressed the problems of representing graphical material. In my opinion, Bertin is the best.

Tufte preaches. I entered into a discussion with him about this once and tried to present some experimental data that one of my students had collected. he refused even to look at it. That is, it isn’t that he looked at the data and disagreed with the interpretation or even the collection– that would be permissible. No, he refused even to look.

Tufte is fun to read. Much of what he says is important and valuable. The problem is, you have to decide what to follow and what to ignore. Don’t follow all that he preaches — you will do your users a disservice.

Don”

“Well, I think he’s completely wrong. And he’s completely wrong because of who he is. First of all, his books are terrific. But they’re the books of an analytic historian. He is not a graphic designer. He is not an information architect. He doesn’t have any ideas about graphics and what’s going to happen in the future. He has documented the history of information design superbly and he’s done a very good analysis of it. But I think, since he doesn’t have creative ideas about the future, he can’t see how there will be amazing information displayed on the Internet, done by very creative people, in the very near future. Are we stumbling around now doing things? You bet. Because we’re finding our way. Much the same as when the movies first happened, when cinema first happened, they based it on old things, they made it look like stage plays. Well, we’re just getting over the point where we’re just putting diagrams on a screen. We’re not taking the appropriate way of using dynamic information. We’re using it to show off that we can spin things, and we’re showing off things because we can do it, and everybody is bragging to one another about some cute program. We are going to get over that show off stage very soon. We’re going to be able to show things, and will show things, accurately, clearly, and using the medium for what it is. I mean, if you or anybody else is going through the stage that many of us are of getting fast downloads and speeding up your equipment, it changes your whole relationship with what you can see and how you see it. And I think his reflection is on things as he’s looking backwards not forwards.”